Mayor Tommy Battle woke up to a pleasant surprise on Tuesday morning: at 6:30 AM, he learned that the City of Huntsville has taken the crown as the 2022-2023 best place to live in the United States according to a recent ranking by U.S. News & World Report.

A U.S. News analysis of 150 large metropolitan areas in the U.S. ranked cities based on factors including job market, housing affordability, quality of life, desirability, and net migration. Huntsville’s recent rise to the top has been rapid, leapfrogging the city over last year’s first and second-place winners Boulder, CO and Raleigh-Durham, NC.

In addition to being the No. 1 Best Place to Live, Huntsville is also ranked No. 54 Best Place to Retire; No. 1 Best Place to Live in Alabama; No. 3 Most Affordable Place to Live; and No. 16 Fastest-Growing Place.

In a last-minute press conference held in City Hall, Mayor Battle and Huntsville Chamber of Commerce Executive Committee member and past chair Jeff Gronberg made the official announcement. Battle stated that this accomplishment was the result of “a group effort of a lot of people working hard year after year to get us to this place where we are the number one city in the United States of America according to U.S. News & World Report, and it’s something that we’re very proud of.”

Battle said that this achievement is the validation of the plans and strategies put into place by all of the groups working together over the past 10-14 years. “Each area had their role to play and everybody played their role very, very well. The culmination of it is today.”

“We are the Star of Alabama for a reason,” Battle stated. “As more people discover what makes us the South’s best-kept secret, we take pride in our diverse community’s strength and authenticity. Rankings like these affirm our commitment to continuing to provide a healthy, thriving economy without losing our identity, while also welcoming new citizens and businesses with open arms. Great things are happening in Huntsville!”

“On behalf of the members and the staff of the Chamber of Commerce, we are incredibly excited about what this means to us from the economic development standpoint and from the workforce development standpoint…it’s been a very long road that we’ve traveled and it’s been a very strategic one in which we positioned Huntsville to be a center of excellence and to make sure that we had everything covered from a work-live-play standpoint,” Gronberg said.

Gronberg credited not only Mayor Battle, but also the local and regional governments for their role in propelling Huntsville to the top and having the vision to put the elements in place that enabled this achievement.

“As the mayor has said many times before, we are now the largest city in Alabama but that’s never what we’ve strived to be. What we’ve strived to be is the best city that we can be, and I think that this recognition really kind of points to that,” he continued. “As we continue to look forward and we continue to grow, this type of recognition is going to be a tremendous asset as we continue to retain and to recruit workers into Huntsville.”

Gronberg stated that the City is underpinned by the work done at Redstone Arsenal, which he referred to as “the jewel of what we have here.”

“From an aerospace and defense standpoint, we continue to try to bring great talent into the city and things like this are going to help tremendously,” he added. In addition, he said that the Chamber and the local governments have been working continuously to ensure that the city has a “full and robust economy,” not just in the military-aerospace sector but also in advanced manufacturing, the life sciences, big data, and more that allow the region to have a broad base of support across the entire economic spectrum.

Gronberg noted that “it’s kind of neat that it actually was announced basically the same week that the Orion Amphitheater was opened…the investments that we’ve made in infrastructure, in work and play environments, all of these things contribute to this.”

In his closing remarks, Battle acknowledged Huntsville’s community-mindedness as another contributing factor: “That’s the magic of Huntsville, is that we have people who care about others, who care about others on a big scale and work every day to make sure that we have a better community tomorrow than we have today.”