Frisco, Texas just landed at the top of a national ranking of the best cities in America to buy a home, and the number driving that finish is almost hard to believe: 47 percent of the homes in Frisco were built between 2010 and 2024, according to WalletHub’s analysis, the highest share of any city the firm studied. This isn’t a legacy neighborhood people are fighting over. It’s a place where nearly half the housing stock is younger than most of the buyers shopping for it.
WalletHub graded 300 U.S. cities across 17 metrics covering real estate conditions and the broader economic environment, from home-price appreciation and affordability to building activity and job growth, then compared cities within their own population tier. Frisco topped the large-city category. McKinney, another Dallas-Fort Worth suburb where 40 percent of homes were built in that same 2010-2024 window, came in second. Murfreesboro, Tennessee, rounded out the top three.
What’s actually pulling people to Frisco
The construction number tells only part of the story. Frisco also ranked 7th nationally for job growth and landed among the cheapest cities studied for utilities and phone service, according to WalletHub’s data reported by Fox 4 Dallas-Fort Worth. That combination, steady construction plus a growing job base plus a lower cost of living, is a different formula than what’s driven housing booms in the past. It isn’t scarcity pricing land out of reach. It’s supply that has actually kept building.
The city’s population backs that up. Frisco has grown to roughly 245,000 residents, up more than 20 percent since the last census, with an annual growth rate near 3.4 percent, according to data compiled by World Population Review. That’s the kind of sustained influx that would price most cities out of “affordable” within a few years. Frisco has mostly avoided that by not running out of places to build.
The coastal comparison is stark
Set Frisco’s numbers next to the cities most young families are leaving, and the gap explains itself. In WalletHub’s same 300-city ranking, New York placed 231st, Los Angeles 237th, and San Francisco 273rd, dragged down by housing-market challenges and affordability that hasn’t kept pace with demand. Those cities aren’t short on jobs or amenities. They’re short on new homes, and that scarcity shows up directly in what a family can actually afford to buy.
That’s the trade families are increasingly willing to make: give up the coastline and the name recognition for a newer house, a shorter commute to a growing job market, and a mortgage payment that doesn’t require two incomes just to clear the down payment. Texas suburbs like Frisco and McKinney aren’t winning because they’re glamorous. They’re winning because they kept permitting new subdivisions while denser, older metros largely stopped.
What it means for buyers weighing a move
None of this means Frisco is cheap in absolute terms. Building activity and job growth don’t erase the fact that Texas suburbs have gotten pricier over the past several years right along with everywhere else. But relative to the coasts, and relative to cities where new construction has slowed to a crawl, Frisco’s math still works in a way that’s gotten rare. A young family priced out of a starter home near either coast can look at a metro where new construction still defines the market, not the exception to it, and find a mortgage that doesn’t require a six-figure household income just to qualify.
Frisco’s median resident is also relatively young for a city its size, with a median age of 38.3, according to World Population Review, roughly a decade younger than the national median. That skews toward exactly the demographic doing the comparison shopping between a cramped starter home near a coast and a larger, newer house a thousand miles inland. For a young couple weighing those two paths, the calculus increasingly isn’t close, and cities like Frisco are the ones absorbing that decision at scale.
Rankings like WalletHub’s come out every year, and cities shuffle in and out of the top ten depending on which metrics get weighted more heavily. What’s notable about this one is how consistent the underlying pattern has become: Sun Belt suburbs building their way toward affordability while coastal metros stay locked in place. Frisco’s number one finish isn’t a fluke of methodology so much as a snapshot of where the country’s housing supply has actually shown up.
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