Jill and David DeForest Colvig spent six years plotting their retirement escape from Des Moines, Iowa. To be clear, they have nothing against the Hawkeye State­—they both grew up in Iowa and spent 30 years of married life together in Des Moines, where they raised two now-adult kids. But they imagined a retirement haven where they could hike and bike together, take their pick of cultural events, and enjoy different scenery. In Iowa, “it’s hours and hours of cornfields,” says Jill, 57. “We wanted cleaner water and a better environment.” This past spring, Jill retired from her job as a marketing director for Meredith Corp. and David from his position as a real estate specialist for the city of Des Moines. In June, they moved 1,800 miles west to Eugene, Oregon, a city of 178,000 that sits on the Willamette River near lots of lakes and the Cascade Mountains. The water was a particular draw for David, 62. “I like to kayak,’’ he says.

Eugene is one of three Oregon cities that earned a spot on Forbes’ new list of 25 Best Places To Enjoy Your Retirement. That’s the most wins for any state and demonstrates just how different our “enjoyment” picks are from those on our Best Places To Retire In 2024 list, a value-oriented roster that included no Oregon locales. The Oregon-free list, now in its 14th year, emphasizes high quality retirement living at a reasonable cost, thus excluding places with high housing costs or taxes, no matter how appealing they might otherwise be.

The enjoyment list, by definition, is all about the best spots for pursuing new or lifelong passions in the greater leisure hours that are at the heart of retirement. The six interest areas we consider: arts/culture, fine dining, lifelong learning, outdoor activities on water, outdoor activities on land, and in a category by itself, golf. Eugene, home of the University of Oregon, has all the pluses of a college town (lots of arts, free auditing of classes for seniors, good restaurants) and scores highly on everything but golf. Two of our picks, Austin, Texas, and Boston, Massachusetts, excel in all six categories, while three of our selections are single passion specialists—Annapolis, Maryland, for water activities; Flagstaff, Arizona, for land activities; and Pinehurst, North Carolina, for golf.

To select our passion picks, we started with a list of more than 800 places and then winnowed it down based on a number of quality-of-life measures that affect the prospects for a happy and healthy retirement. They include availability of primary care doctors, serious crime rates, air quality and a place’s walkability and bikeability. We also excluded locations with a very high susceptibility to natural hazard and climate change risk as calculated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Risk Index, which examines 18 natural hazard dangers, including heat, wildfires, hurricanes and flooding, along with local preparations to deal with them. (That helps explain why only one Florida town, Sarasota, is on this year’s list.) Then, after eliminating lots of places, we compare the fun stuff. Additional cultural meccas, including New York and Washington D.C., made the list this year in part because their crime rates, while still above the national average, have dropped dramatically.

Our 25 picks are listed below, in alphabetical order. They’re spread out across 16 states and all four continental time zones. Each entry includes information on housing and living costs. Since high costs aren’t disqualifying for this list, you’ll find some pretty pricey places, including San Francisco with a median house cost of $1.29 million, triple the national median of $423,000. Still, 10 of the 25 have median home prices that are no more than 15% above the national median, and five are less than the median, with two—Iowa City and Pittsfield, Massachusetts—30% or more below.

Eugene, with a median home price of $476,000 (13% above the national median) is a bargain compared to some of the other outdoor adult playgrounds we recommend, including Bend, Oregon ($748,000) and Boulder, Colorado ($995,000). When the Colvigs began thinking in 2018 about making a big retirement move, their desire for an outdoorsy lifestyle was key, but cost was a factor. One site they considered was Fort Collins, Colorado, where the younger of their two daughters was attending Colorado State University. It’s an inviting spot at the base of the Rocky Mountains that has been on previous Forbes lists. “A little out of our price range,” David recalls. (Median home price there is now $567,000.) They decided another candidate, Prescott, Arizona, a scenic 19th Century territorial capital 100 miles north of Phoenix with a lot of restored Victorian housing, was both too expensive and too dry. The potential of climate change-induced wildfires soured them on another candidate—Nevada City, California, a charming hamlet surrounded by forests 60 miles northeast of Sacramento in Gold Rush country.

Eventually, their attention turned to Eugene, where they had friends. They visited for the first time two years ago and were hooked. Since they planned to downsize from the paid-off two-story, three-bedroom home they had owned in Des Moines since 2003, Eugene prices were doable. David used his real estate experience to sell their Iowa home himself quickly, listing it on Zillow. They then rented a house in Eugene on a two-month lease and, along with their younger daughter, now a college grad, moved in June to look around for a home to buy. Using a buyer’s agent recommended by their Eugene friends, they looked at eight homes and found a 40-year-old one they liked, also three bedrooms but about 30% smaller in space, and needing a little fix-up, in the city’s South Hills. Well within their budget and without needing a mortgage, they were able to move fast. They bought it for cash, closing in mid-July, a month after hitting town.

Not everyone makes such a quick break with their old life. Rosetta Cohen, a 69-year-old retired Smith College education professor and her husband, Sam Scheer, a 72-year-old retired high school English teacher, have owned a four-bedroom house in Northampton, Massachusetts (Smith’s locale) since 1991. They raised their daughter there. But their cultural heart has always been in New York City. In 2016, while still working, they bought a small one-bedroom apartment in the comparatively affordable Riverdale section of New York City’s Bronx. It’s a seven-minute walk to the........

© Forbes