Sun, Feb 23, 2020 page16

• In US’ wealthiest town, an income of US$500k a year is now below average

  • By Shelly Hagan, Wei Lu and Sophie Alexander / Bloomberg
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  You could easily drive through the leafy Silicon Valley suburb without realizing you were in the US’ richest neighborhood. From the road, it is all high brick walls and opaque gates.

  It takes Google Maps to get a glimpse of what lies behind. Satellite images of Atherton, California — where the average household income just blew past US$500,000 — reveal the sprawling homes of tech billionaires and sports stars, studded with tennis courts and pools.

  For the fourth straight year, Atherton topped Bloomberg’s Richest Places annual index. With an average household income of more than US$525,000, it became the first and so far only community to top the half-million-dollar mark since Bloomberg started compiling the index in 2017.

  

  A house is pictured in Atherton, California, on Tuesday last week.

  Photo: Bloomberg

  At least some of the town’s Silicon Valley neighbors are more or less keeping up. Atherton is joined in the upper echelons of the Bloomberg list by Hillsborough (No. 3) and Los Altos Hills (No. 5), two more communities in the hi-tech corridor between San Francisco and San Jose.

  Both have average incomes upward of US$400,000.

  Elaine White, a real-estate agent and native of neighboring Redwood City, has watched the tech boom shape the region.

  “Because of how big Facebook has gotten, and Google, we’ve kind of become this concept of the company town, where so many people work for these Silicon Valley companies,” she said.

  In Atherton, the cheapest house on the market was listed for US$2.5 million, according to real-estate marketplace Zillow.com.

  Numerous tech billionaires have called the town home — including former Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt, Facebook Inc chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Microsoft Corp late cofounder Paul Allen, whose former residence there was last week sold for more than US$35 million.

  Golden State Warriors athlete Stephen Curry last year bought an Atherton estate for US$31 million.

  In second place for the second straight year was Scarsdale, New York, less than 40km outside Manhattan, with an average US$452,000 in annual household income.

  Also making the top 10 were a town near Denver, Colorado, two northern suburbs of Chicago and a wealthy enclave in Dallas, Texas.

  In general, the east and west coasts dominated the top 100 list. California took up 23 places, while the tri-state area of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey accounted for 32, although that was down from 36 last year.

  Middle America is slowly gaining some ground. States including Illinois and Minnesota added one new listing in this year’s index, while Texas gained two (Lucas at No. 73 and Alamo Heights at No. 75).

  Altogether, 16 states are represented on the list, the same number as in previous years — suggesting that the concentration of wealth in certain regions remains largely unchanged over time.

  Also, the richest communities continue to get richer. This year, to make the top 100, a neighborhood needed an average household income of US$220,000, up from US$209,000 last year.
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