Reading.

Reading sits a dozen or so miles north of Boston, and it has quietly become one of the most sought-after family towns inside the Route 128 belt. The appeal is a combination that is hard to replicate: a walkable downtown centered on Haven Street, a well-run town government with a long habit of planning ahead, and a school district that families move here specifically to join. Add a genuine town common, a busy calendar of festivals and parades, and neighborhoods where kids still bike to practice, and you get a community that holds its value in every sense.

Commuters are covered in every direction. Interstate 93 and Interstate 95/Route 128 meet at the town's edge, putting both highway corridors minutes from most driveways, while the MBTA's Haverhill Line stops at Reading station in the heart of downtown for a direct ride to North Station. MBTA bus route 137 links Reading Depot with the Orange Line at Malden Center. For anyone splitting the week between a Boston office and a home office, this is one of the easier commutes on the north side of the city.

The housing stock reads like a timeline of New England suburbia: antique colonials and Victorians on the streets around the common, capes, ranches, and split-levels from the postwar decades, and newer condominiums and townhomes downtown and along the Walkers Brook corridor. Weekends fill in easily here — trails through the roughly 300-acre Town Forest along the Ipswich River, skating at Burbank Ice Arena, the September Fall Street Faire that takes over downtown, and a public library so handsome it doubles as a local landmark.

Reading Public Schools runs nine buildings: the RISE Preschool, five neighborhood elementary schools — Alice M. Barrows, Birch Meadow, Joshua Eaton, J. Warren Killam, and Wood End — Coolidge and Parker middle schools, and Reading Memorial High School. The district's reputation is one of the main reasons buyers target the town, and elementary assignments are neighborhood-based, so it is worth talking through school zones early in a home search. Reading is also home to Austin Preparatory School, an independent Catholic day school in the Augustinian tradition serving grades 6–12 from its campus on Willow Street.

Reading occupies the northeast corner of Middlesex County, roughly twelve miles north of downtown Boston. The town borders North Reading across the Ipswich River to the north, Lynnfield to the east, Wakefield to the southeast, Stoneham to the south, Woburn to the southwest, and Wilmington to the west.