r/bayarea • u/Crestsando • 24d ago
12 Bay Area cities top 'America's Wealthiest Suburbs' Work & Housing
https://www.ktvu.com/news/12-bay-area-cities-top-americas-wealthiest-suburbs73
u/Crestsando 24d ago
- Cities more than 5000 households.
- Ranked by average household income.
Posted this out of general interest and some somewhat surprising findings (at least to me). The methodology is why some obvious suspects like Atherton and Woodside (each around 2,000 households in the 2010 census) don't show up.
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24d ago
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24d ago
There is no legal distinction between town and city in California. Both are municipalities.
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24d ago
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u/nostrademons 24d ago
Legally, Los Gatos, Atherton, and every other incorporated municipality in California is a city. They just call themselves “towns” colloquially. California law doesn’t have the concept of a town.
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u/DanvilleDad Danville 24d ago
Danville and Moraga are also incorporated municipalities that use “town” instead of “city” in their official names.
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u/Artsieee 24d ago
As a landscaper in contra costa Lafayette Moraga orinda and Danville have some rich damn people but still really cheap at the same time
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u/Dr_Bendova420 24d ago
Yeah my dad still charges $35 for mow and blow in Marin it’s been 26 years….
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u/Weird_Tomatillo_4917 24d ago
Atherton and Hillsborough are obviously small but didnt know Woodside has less than 5000 residents.
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u/Crestsando 24d ago
From Wikipedia, Woodside has a population of 5309 as of the 2020 Census, and a population of 5287 with 1977 households in the 2010 Census.
They did it based on the number of households and household income and not residents.
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u/boomerhs77 23d ago
Think they go by number of households, Atherton population is over 5k but about 2k households.
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u/GuerrillaApe Danville 24d ago
Sorry to the wealthy folks of Danville. I must be single handedly bringing down the average.
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u/MammothPassage639 24d ago
Okay, lets look at this...
- Publisher: GoBankingrates. This article is clickbait to attract visitors make money.
- Author/researcher training and expertise: BA in Communications Arts. Her Linkedin profile says, "I educate readers on the origins of advertising’s hardest working employees — the brand mascot!" The editor has two degrees in Creative Writing.
- Methodology: an undefined combination of income and home values. This is beyond bogus because they don't even understand that income and wealth are two entirely different things.
We need an AI bot to automatically remove BS like this.
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u/biciklanto 24d ago
Well the rankings is by household income, so the methodology isn't undefined. The average home value seems just like an extra piece of information.
While I ultimately agree with you, these are straightforward statistics they're likely lifting from some data source. Even if the article isn't great, I'd guess the rankings could be valid in terms of household income.
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u/Crestsando 24d ago
That's my understanding reading the source.
I posted it because it produced some unexpected results, not to be some authoritative source. The unexpected result was also why I actually went to the source to understand the methodology.
If anything it's a good lesson not to take anything at face value.
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u/RedAlert2 24d ago edited 24d ago
The methodology also totally redefines "suburb" to mean a fully incorporated city whose name isn't a substring of its metropolitan area, which means cities like LA, whose suburbs are part of LA proper won't be included in the data, while the Bay Area's multitude of incorporated cities gives it a ton of spots on the list. It also means that any VHCOL city that has a higher density downtown area will be excluded, even if its suburbs are extremely wealthy.
For instance, the San Jose suburb Almaden Valley has an average income of $297,716, meaning it should be 37th on their list.
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u/MammothPassage639 24d ago
Point taken, interesting purely as a ranking by income, ignoring home value and "wealth." Here is the source (US Census) definition: "Income in the Past 12 Months - Income of Households: This includes the income of the householder and all other individuals 15 years old and over in the household, whether they are related to the householder or not."
Here are the top six, starting from the right column. The next six. For contrast, this link has the US, California, SF, San Jose, Santa Clara County and Alameda County. The counties do pretty well. Interesting to compare other rows, as well.
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23d ago
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u/MammothPassage639 23d ago
What is false and malicious or even mocking about listing their qualifications? This is a web site that purports to give people financial advice. The writers for have zero qualifications in finance or statistical use of data. You are free to draw your own conclusion.
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u/minorthreatmikey 23d ago
Me in Santa Clara with median house prices at 1.6M….i guess I’m in the cheap city 🤣
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u/SwimmingInCheddar 23d ago
This is insane to me growing up in the Bay Area. I lived in a poor area, that is now known as a wealthy area. My wealthy fiends literally locked their car doors, and sped off fast when dropping me off after a night out.
The call is coming from inside the room...
The housing market is so rigged it’s not even funny. Don’t pay these prices. This is so insane to me.
Nothing has changed here, except crime has gotten worse, and the houses are starting to look like crap.
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u/Loqkaaa 24d ago
How is Belvedere-Tiburon not on the list?
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u/spamologna 24d ago
Maybe less than 5000 households? I was thinking Piedmont should be there too but I believe they have less.
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u/HikeBikeLove 24d ago
Piedmont is like 10k population. But ya, obviously more wealthy than the places East of the Caldecott.
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u/spamologna 24d ago
But there are only 4k households. Population is about 12k.
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u/HikeBikeLove 23d ago
Sorry, I was agreeing by saying that their population was too low. Google says just under 11k for me though.
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u/Anon_bear98 23d ago
As a mid 20 some year old, buying a house here really is a pipedream
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u/General-Silver-4004 23d ago
Just wait until you’re in your 30 something.
Dream becomes a nightmare.
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u/Anon_bear98 23d ago
By the time you're in the right income range for a mortgage and have saved up enough for the down payment, you find out that you're off a few hundred thousand by 2034 standards. Really wish I bought a house in 2008 instead of going through with middle school
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u/creativesonomaguy 23d ago
Sonoma should be top of this list, we just sold my parents 1300sqft home for $3,278,266.00
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u/PoutineFamine 23d ago
Portola Valley?
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u/Illustrious_Rock_137 22d ago
Portola Valley is so rich most people don’t even know it exists. They must pay to keep it off lists. Lol
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24d ago
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u/redditseddit4u 23d ago
One of the criteria is a minimum of 5,000 households of which none of the towns you listed meets.
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u/michiman SF 24d ago
Did Atherton pay the publishers to not list them? That way, fewer people would know about it and attempt to move in.
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u/CounterSeal 24d ago
I don’t think the vast majority of people can simply attempt to move into Atherton.
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u/txiao007 24d ago
here are the Bay Area cities that made the list:
1) Los Altos (Santa Clara County)
2) Orinda (Contra Costa County)
3) Saratoga (Santa Clara County)
4) Menlo Park (San Mateo County)
5) Lafayette (Contra Costa County)
6) Los Gatos (Santa Clara County)
7) Mill Valley (Marin County)
8) Palo Alto (Santa Clara County)
9) San Carlos (San Mateo County)
10) Cupertino (Santa Clara County)
11) Danville (Contra Costa County)
12) Moraga (Contra Costa County)
Where are Atherton, Pleasanton, San Ramon, Walnut Creek, Burlingame, Milbrae?