Open ended question. We love college towns, We don’t really care to be in California, although my genetic make up says I’ve been a NorCal person for as long as I can remember. We need medical care. And I would like to indulge in some of hobbies, fly fishing, playing tunes with people, riding my road bike.
anyone, Anyone, Buehler, Buelhler…
We plan to retire right where we are: We’ve got elbow room; mountains and deserts to roam; better than average fly fishing; relatively few tourists and a minimum of pretension; unpleasant but manageable cold winters and hot summers; dramatically beautiful, long springs and autumns. And, of course, our house will be paid off by that time. 
Tom
Everyone retires to Florida. Everyone. ;p
Seriously, though, where I am (Pensacola, FL, in case you don’t feel like looking about 12 inches to the left) is a pretty popular retirement town. This place is basically just a military and retirement town. We’ve got an awesome Irish pub (McGuire’s) with its own bagpipe band, regular pub singers, and a microbrewery. We’ve got some of the finest beaches in the states with pristine white sand and nice, warm Gulf water, not like the freezing cold, polluted water of CA beaches (I just moved back here from LA, and every time I set foot on Venice Beach I feared I would come away with some form of mutation). We’ve got some of the finest food east of the Mississippi (some great Cajun places in town, lots of great seafood, etc.).
I am, of course, rather biased, in much the same way that Tom’s biased about his own town. 
I thought Panama City was kinda cool
Yeah, and they have those cool hats there, too.
Well..I’m not looking to retire in the US (ahem), but if I were and had ample means to do it, I would do it in the Seattle area. That was, by far, the coolest place I’ve ever lived. I loved the weather (yes, I really did…although I don’t think I’d have loved all of the stuff that’s been going on as of late), loved the people, loved the city (and that’s saying something for me, since I typically despise cities), and loved the fact that I could grab a latte at the Piccolo’s stand outside of the grocery store, and drink it as I shopped (I wonder…is Piccolo’s even still in operation?) 
Approaching the question as a theoretical one, I’d be looking for the following:
Lots of times factors on the list have a push and shove kind of relationship, so all may need to be
juggled a bit in weighing any particular place.
Simply based on places I’ve been, I like Asheville NC, Boulder CO ($$!), Seattle WA (maybe a smaller town around there.)
Dropping theory in favor of reality for the moment, I’m intrigued by the idea of being in the position of saying “where should we retire? Let’s pick a place,” because so often the factors that entrench you somewhere are not an idealized listing of a town’s attributes, but rather the network of your life.
Luckily, the area in which I live is not bad on items 1,2,3 and 6 above. #4 is shifting disagreeably to the pricier, and the horse is out of the gate on #5.
But…we have a long history of people we know here, family nearby on both my and el esposo’s side, an established business (now run by brother-in-law.) So it seems that it’s choices we made earlier in life, and the current statuses of family members, which are now forming the parameters (although they aren’t intractable parameters) that we use to answer the “retire where?” question, as opposed to the continental dartboard method.
Riverton NJ…just trust me on this…
I’m staying right where I am or I wouldn’t be here in the first place. In the event that the brain worms do decide to make their move then I’ll be strapping my two canoes together and making a catamaran and drifting to new orleans and beyond. It’ll be the more southern version of the aging Eskimo ice floe.
If we had our “druthers” - it would be in the mountains of KY, TN or NC, or the mountains of WA. Land, no neighbors, and peace. The one thing I would insist on is an area that will likely never be “built up”. I went through a town boom from rural to residential, and never ever want to do so again.
Since Tom is already retired, and since I don’t see us leaving this house anytime in the near future, we’ll probably just stay right here. If my kids wind up somewhere together and completely away from here, we might rethink that, but for now we are content to be here.
Wisconsin, southern Minnesota. Pros: Cheese, Cheese curds, Great fly fishing all over, great medical care, great cycling with the very best graded trails(good enough for road bikes) in the US and good roads, great boating; kayaks, canoes, flatwater, whitewater, motor boating, sailing, great hunting, great music, great winter sports and Muskies, many Muskies, the Upper Peninsula of Wisconsin(mistakenly called the UP of Michigan.) Cons: FIBs during the summer with boats and ATVs, FIBs during the winter with snowmobiles.
DO NOT COME TO UTAH. It seems like everybody is retiring to southern Utah these days. It’s growing w-a-y too fast. I’d vote for Florida–they’re used to it.
Susan
Focused Ion Beams?
I have only been to a few places in the US. From what I’ve seen on tv, the mountains in the Pacific NW look nice, the temps in NorCal look good. Nothing too hot, though, so that rules out places like the Gulf states or Hawaii (anything over 70°F is too hot).
djm
I’m already retired.
My grandmother lived with me before she got bad enough that she needed to move to “the home”, then we spent a decade visiting her there.
Dad has passed but we recently had an adventure with mom and she’s bought herself into a near by retirement condo.
Over a decade back my parent-in-laws should had sold the homestead in up state New York and moved someplace close to any one of their four sons (Chicago, Dallas, Houston, or San Francisco) but no.
They thought they were immortals.
They painfully aren’t and have both been in and out of the hospital more than a few times the past several years.
Their sons take turns using their vacation time to help their parents out and worry about them the rest of the time.
What’s going to happen is they’ll eventually become ill enough that they’ll both be hospitalized (stuck in up state New York with no family close by) and the house will probably sit empty until the state takes it over for funds.
Just as soon as the economy flips our plans are to put our house on the market and move closer to my daughter and her family, hopefully within walking distance.
If they move, we’ll move along close with them.
The plan is to live close but independent as long as we can.
Family loves ya but if you make it too much of an ordeal for them to play their part there’s bound to be some sort of resentment.
If you wanted to retire in the U.S. where would you go?
here 
I need to get a tripod…
Portland Oregon.
I want to be someplace where the winters aren’t so darn LONG! And close to salt water, either the ocean or someplace akin to Puget Sound. I like the west side of Washington state, I can breathe much better over there and there’s more to do. The Oregon coast is nice too.
We live in Spokane because that’s where my husband has his store and my mother-in-law is settled here, and I know he won’t move as long as she’s alive.
I’d like to check out Florida or Hawaii. My husband thinks Arizona would be better for his asthma, since he gets sick every time we go to the coast.
We’ll probably just be stuck in Spokane forever.
Well, I’m another one of those boring people who is exactly where I want to be. If it happened that I couldn’t live in my mountains anymore, I’d move just a short distance down the coast to one of the prettiest, nicest, towns in America: Pacific Grove (preferrably in the Morse St. neighborhood, so we could be part of Candycane Lane every year). If it had to be someplace other than California, though, I would say Arizona. We both love the desert, and neither of us particularly likes rain or snow.
Redwolf
Somewhere warm with good public transportation, since I can’t drive.
I don’t think such a place exists, though.
Home. Seriously, I can’t imagine living anywhere but here- well maybe in a different, smaller house, but it would have to be an old craftsman with lots of built-ins and no neighbors close by.
I always find it odd that folks want to “retire” to somewhere else. I guess we are just so close knit family-wise that I’d never want to leave my “kin folks” and be far away. Plenty of music, four seasons, low crime, yeah, I’ll stay here-the country life for me. Not that I’ll ever have the luxury of retirement.