Smart Assets + Home Affordabilty: Suburban or Exurban > Commuting

A company called Smart Asset has assembled a list of the best places in America for those who want to live outside the city proper and commute in for work.
To find the best places in America where it pays off to commute, they compared metro areas to their main cities across five different factors:
differences in housing costs
commute times
property taxes
home value change
the odds of a long commute.
Reference: https://finance.yahoo.com/news
Here's how Metro Phoenix MSA ranked  

7. Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ (tie)

Median Housing Cost

Home Value Change

Average Commute Time (minutes)

Percentage With a Severe Commute

Effective Property Tax Rate

Phoenix $1,060 8.30% 26.3 6.20% 0.60%

Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ $1,110 6.88% 26.8 7.30% 0.60%

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The Data and Methodology section shows how Smart Asset gathered data and analyzed it.

To find the most affordable metro areas for commuters, we compared data for 50 of the largest  metro areas and their principal cities across the following five metrics:

• Housing cost. This shows the difference in median housing cost for residents living in the metro area compared to those living in the principal city of the metro area.
• Average commute times. This metric shows the difference in the time it takes to travel to work, on average, for residents living in the metro area compared to those living in the principal city.
• Property tax rate. The difference between the average effective property tax rates for the metro area compared to the principal city.
• Home value change. This metric shows the difference between the percentage change in home values from 2016 to 2017 in the metro area compared to the principal city.
• Severe commute times. This shows the difference between the percentage of residents living in the metro area who spend more than 60 minutes travelling to work compared to residents living in the principal city.

All the metro areas were ranked in each metric.

Next, they found the average ranking for each metro area, weighting all metrics equally. Using this average, we created the final rankings. The metro area with the best average ranking got an index score of 100, while the metro area with the worst average ranking received a 0.

(All data comes from the Census Bureau’s 2017 1-year American Community Survey)

Places Where It Pays Off to Commute in 2019
SmartAsset June 3, 2019
Deciding where the best place is for you to live involves balancing a number of factors, including the ease of your commute. Not only does getting to and from work take up a lot of time, but it can also heavily affect your budget. Proximity to the city center, where many people work, is often a major consideration. Sometimes you’ll want to live extremely close to the downtown area so that you don’t have a long commute. Other times, though, it will make sense to commute a farther distance and live in a more affordable suburban or exurban area where it is possible to save more money to pay off your mortgage. You’ll need to compare things like cost of living, commuting cost and the difficulty of the commute. . .