Woburn.

Few addresses north of Boston work harder than Woburn's. The city sits at the intersection of I-93 and Route 128/I-95, so a drive can head into the city, up to New Hampshire, or west along the belt to Burlington and Waltham without ever fighting a back road. Commuters who would rather read than drive use Anderson/Woburn on the MBTA's Lowell Line, a full high-level platform with a 1,200-space park-and-ride lot and a straight run into North Station. The same building — the Anderson Regional Transportation Center on Atlantic Avenue — is also an Amtrak Downeaster stop for Portland and Brunswick and one of only five Logan Express terminals, with its own 880-space garage lot for airport trips. Add MBTA bus 134 from North Woburn down to Wellington on the Orange Line, and you have a city where nearly every kind of trip has an option that isn't your own car.

Woburn rewards buyers who like variety. Streets near Woburn Center and Common Street hold generous late-1800s Victorians and mansard-roofed homes from the city's tannery years, while the outer neighborhoods — North Woburn, East Woburn, and the hills on the west side — run heavier to postwar capes, ranches, split-levels, and the sturdy two-families that make this one of the better places in the 128 corridor to buy a small income property. New construction and redevelopment have added a different kind of inventory: Woburn Village replaced the old Woburn Mall with apartments over shops, and The Vale brought housing to the former Kraft Foods site. The practical upshot for buyers is price. Woburn shares a border with Winchester and Lexington, where medians run roughly twice as high, and it remains one of the most attainable ways into this stretch of Middlesex County.

The heart of the city is Horn Pond, where residents walk, bike, and fish a shoreline loop that feels a long way from the highway ramps a few minutes north; Clapp Park sits on its edge. Woburn's other landmark is one of the finest small buildings in New England: the Woburn Public Library, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and opened in 1879 under its 78-foot tower, a National Historic Landmark paid for by a bequest from Charles Bowers Winn in memory of his father. Beyond that, the amenity list is deep for a city this size — 216 acres of fields and woodland trails at Mary Cummings Park on the Burlington line, the O'Brien Ice Rink, two municipal summer pools, and a working daytime economy of office parks and life-science labs that has drawn companies like Boston Metal and Guardian Agriculture.

Woburn Public Schools enrolls more than 4,500 students from preschool through grade 12. Seven neighborhood elementary schools — Altavesta, Goodyear, Hurld Wyman, Linscott, Malcolm White, Reeves, and Shamrock — plus a district Early Childhood Program feed two middle schools, Joyce and Kennedy, and everyone finishes at Woburn Memorial High School, which fields the Tanners in a nod to the industry that built the city. Because elementary assignments follow neighborhood boundaries that the district periodically redraws, it is worth checking the current street list before you fall in love with a house for its school.

Woburn covers a little under 13 square miles about ten miles north-northwest of downtown Boston, sitting in the low hills between the Mystic and Shawsheen watersheds. Wilmington is its neighbor to the north and Reading to the northeast, Stoneham lies east across the ridge toward the Middlesex Fells, Winchester adjoins to the south, and Lexington and Burlington form the southwestern and western lines. That position — one town off the ocean-side commuter routes and one interchange from everything else — is why so many buyers who start out looking on the North Shore or in Metrowest end up touring here.