American River Parkway, Sacramento, CA

This one is not a neighborhood at all. The American River Parkway is the ribbon of protected open space that follows the river across the metro, and nobody lives inside its boundary. Its value is entirely in what it does for the neighborhoods that border it, which is hard to overstate. The corridor runs more than twenty miles, with the paved Jedediah Smith Memorial Trail, the American River Bike Trail, threading its full length and linking Old Sacramento and Discovery Park upstream toward Folsom. Inside the greenway you get cottonwood forest, fishing access, rafting put-ins, and one of the better urban salmon runs anywhere in the country. It is a genuine piece of wild river held inside a growing city, which is rare. The flip side is that it is also a flood corridor and, in places, an ongoing encampment-management challenge, so the experience varies stretch to stretch rather than holding one steady standard. For the houses that back directly onto it, that parkway frontage is precisely the thing people pay a premium to get. As an address in its own right, though, there is nothing here but trail, river, and trees.