2025 Compare Cities Rankings:
Champaign, IL vs Carbondale, IL

#10 Best Green Cities

#33 2005 Best Places to Live

#44 Most Competitive Public Colleges

#58 America's Best and Worst Cities for Crime (Smallest Metro Areas)

#109 America's Most (and Least) Stressful Cities (117 Smallest Metro Areas)

Pros - close to Chicago, has Parkland community college and lots of places to eat. There is a train station downtown that is really good. Beautiful deciduous trees and  More

I wonderful city with great  More

Actually it's barely a nice place to live. The pros: Not terribly expensive - at one point the least expensive place to live in the country among modest sized  More

I've lived in C'dale for over 30 years. I got an excellent education here - Giant City School was great, though fairly insular and not very diverse (among its drawbacks  More

I like Carbondale. It is relaxing and an easy way to go about getting a college degree. It has its ups and downs, mainly with the people in the town not recognizing the  More

All of the comments are negative here and seem to me to be misleading. The idea that you have to have a lot of money in Carbondale is ridiculous. The price of cultural  More