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This small community in unincorporated Arapahoe County was named the best place to live in Colorado

The Holly Hills neighborhood near the southeast Denver border has 2,800 residents and its own Nextdoor page.
Credit: Erin Sylte, KUSA

ARAPAHOE COUNTY, Colo. — Look, lots of websites put out lists all the time that rank places, but they’re often filled with some of the usual suspects: Lone Tree, Centennial, Superior, Littleton, Washington Park.

That’s why it was interesting to see a neighborhood in Arapahoe County many people have not heard of on top of Niche.com’s list of the best places to live in Colorado.

For what it’s worth, Holly Hills does have its own Nextdoor page, and some 2,800 residents.

The neighborhood is located roughly between Interstate 25 and Monaco Parkway, which East Iliff Avenue to the north, and East Hampden Avenue to the south. It’s made up of mostly residential homes built in the 1960s, and Niche gave it an A+ for families.

It also gave it an A+ for nightlife, prompting this intrepid journalist to contact the ultimate source for confirmation: my mom, who grew up in Holly Hills (or roughly two houses from the border) and lives there now.

“It would be nice if there were more neighborhood restaurants,” was my mom Erin Sylte’s main criticism.

There aren’t technically any restaurants in the neighborhood’s boundaries, but it’s close to mainstays like Piccolo’s (where you get both chips and salsa AND bread as an appetizer), the Bagel Deli (which has gotten some mad street cred from the Food Network over the years), and La Fogata (which Westword just controversially proclaimed has the city’s best green chile).

Per Google Maps, it does not appear that there are any nightclubs in the quiet, suburban Holly Hills community, leading one to believe that the high nightlife rating was due to the neighborhood’s proximity to the Southmoor and Yale light rail stations, which connect to the rowdier places downtown and in the Denver Tech Center. 

The Holly Hills neighborhood is in the Cherry Creek School District, and according to Niche, it gets As for public schools and housing. Its only knock was for diversity, where it gets a B rating.

“I think people like Holly Hills because it’s close to I-25 – on Yale and Hampden – and then you’re close to shopping,” my mom said.

For what it’s worth, this longtime Holly Hills resident says not much has changed since the 1960s, but that the community’s maybe gotten a little bit more affluent over time as Denver itself has gotten more expensive.

According to Niche, the median home value in Holly Hills is $370,400, and 91 percent of residents in the neighborhood own their homes. The other nine percent pay an average rent of $1,750 a month.

“I hope that award doesn’t make it too crazy over here,” my mom cautioned.

In the Niche ratings, Boulder’s Pine Brook Hill neighborhood came in as the second best neighborhood in Colorado, followed by Denver’s South Park Hill, the Wellshire neighborhood, and Superior.

This story is part of our weekly 9Neighborhoods series. Have a place you think we should check out next? Drop us a line at webteam@9news.com

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