The Ridge

You're driving along Grand River Drive when the road opens up—suddenly there's acreage, breathing room, the kind of land that makes you realize how tired you are of looking at your neighbor's garage. That's the Ridge, 145 acres of condo lots averaging 2.72 acres each, the sort of place where you're not buying a postage stamp with a mailbox. Homes here run around $1.3M, and the trade-off is distance: the nearest grocery and restaurants sit about two miles out, which means you're committed to the car for coffee (2.2 miles) and everything else. That said, downtown Grand Rapids is only 16.4 minutes away when you want it, and Gerald R. Ford airport is 21 minutes if you're traveling—close enough to matter, far enough that you don't hear the noise.