The good news: We beat LA and Chicago and New York and Washington DC and even SAN FRANCISCO. W00t!

The bad news: We lost to Connecticut. Connecticut? Haven’t they been in the news enough already?

The US Metropolitan Areas Packed With The Most Rich People

Rob Wile | Business Insider | Feb. 11, 2013, 8:24 PM

The U.S. Census has published its list of U.S. metropolitan areas with the highest concentrations of wealth in the country.

These are places where a large percentage of your neighbors earn incomes in the top 5th percentile.

Here are the top five.  For the full list, see the article at Business Insider.

We love real estate tools.  Maps are awesome.  Here’s a new one with the cute name Rich Blocks Poor Blocks that Burbed readers wahnny and Divasm both sent in this week when someone posted about it in Redfin Forums.  (No link, Redfin, until you resume trackbacks to our featured homes.  Neener neener.)

It’s a fairly good idea: take ACS income data for each official Census tract and show graphically how much they vary.  As they say on their main page, “See how much money people make in every neighborhood in every city in America.”  In theory you could use it to see how Special each part of the city is.  Here’s what it looks like when it’s working as the authors intended.

Each state uses its own scale, applying the color key to its own income range.  In the case of Illinois, above, the deep red, lowest income is under $23,120 and the deep green, highest income is over $106,503.  There appear to be 20 different segments in the color key, although we think there’s far too much green and not enough in the red, orange, and yellow. 

Since these are Google Map tools, you can zoom in and out to your heart’s delight, but you can only map one state at a time.As you can see in in the case of New Jersey, above, this tool isn’t that useful with metros that span multiple states.  Fortunately, that’s not an issue even in the furthest exurbs of the Bay Area.

No, the Bay area has different issues.  See what happens when we map the core RBA.

Too. Much. Dark. Green.

The California income scale ranges from $28,183.65 to $122,762.90.  We hope you’re beginning to see the problem: the top 5% income for all of California seems to apply to an awful lot of Census tracts in the RBA.  Or even places that are NOT in the RBA. Like this part of Santa Clara with the Oracle campus:

Contrast with an RBA tract we know is loaded: Los Altos Hills.

It’s the exact same shade of green, because the danged scale tops off far too early for the RBA.  According to this map, there is no difference between northeast Santa Clara and Los Altos Hills even though the latter’s median household income is 72% higher.

If a tract in the Triangle of Lost Equity can have median household income above 95% of California, Rich Blocks Poor Blocks in the Real Bay Area might as well be called Five Red Tracts of Suck Amidst A Sea of Deep Green Money.

We sure hope so.  You survived the end of the world yesterday, didn’t you? (Those not surviving the end of the world, please stop interrupting.)  Now we’ve found a piece on Trulia on the numerology of home sales. 

This means you can continue your lucky lifestyle, thanks to Trulia’s research.  It turns out that a lot of home sellers put their favorite “lucky numbers” in their asking prices.

So what’s wrong with this pie chart at right?  Too many nines and fives, yet not enough eights, that’s what.  Everyone knows that eights are lucky.  Well, everyone in the Real Bay Area knows that.  The lucky numbers in the rest of the country say otherwise.

This consolidated map suggests that there aren’t any particular lucky numbers in the Midwest, the Plains, the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific Northwest, just a countrywide avoidance of the number 13 in prices.  And here’s some more on 8 as a lucky number.

We took a spot-check of the asking prices in Cupertino, right now, over a million dollars (which is pretty much all of them).

We came up with one 1, one 2, one 6, three 9s, seven 5s, and a whopping ten 8s.    We just had to make a pie chart out of that.  Until today, we had no idea that donuts were a subset of pie.

If we then take the sub-million houses, we get an additional one 1, four 5s and two 8s.

We then compare with similarly sized cities (at least as to number of sales over a million) with rather different demographics.  San Rafael is majority white, and Oakland, while one of the most racially diverse cities, has a higher percentage of blacks than many other areas.

Whoa. There’s 4s in Oakland, which is a very unlucky number in Cupertino.  All three cities have a strongly marked preference for 5 over 9, while nationally it’s the other way by almost 2 to 1.

We welcome your reasoning on why this would be, or anything else you wish to bring up in this Weekend-after-the-end-of-the-world Open Thread.

Sometimes a real estate website will ask us to pass along some content they think might be of general interest.  Have a look at this “analysis” of home buyers from Movoto.

The Usual Suspects: Breakdown of American Home Buyers

Who is the typical home buyer? The answer isn’t surprising. According to National Association of Realtors, the largest category home buyers are married couples. After this it’s single females, single males, and unmarried couples.

But that doesn’t mean each group looks for the same thing. Below are the four largest groups of home buyers. How do you compare?

The infographic itself (the above image is just one item from it) appears in the Movoto blog entry before the introductory paragraphs we quoted above. That’s a pity.  In the graphic, we don’t learn until the very bottom that the information it’s based on comes from those brilliant housing geniuses from the National Association of Realtards.  NAR is the wellspring of unbiased, spin-free information from professional real estate agents who have your best interests as their number one priority, that is if by “your best interests” I actually mean “their maximum profit.”

See the full infographic when you click on through, plus a few more comments from us.  But there’s more inside that NAR report than what Movoto offered, so perhaps we’ll be cherry-picking our own observations from this “study” at some point.  And of course, we welcome your observations.  Catch you on the other side.

(more…)

Kiplinger’s chooses ten cities across the US that are the best places to raise kids.  The criteria are:

We took a two-step approach to come up with our list of the best cities to raise kids. First, we looked for metropolitan areas with high household incomes relative to living costs, a large percentage of families with children under 18, and low crime rates. We weren’t seeking the cheapest places to live, but rather places where earnings potential is more than adequate to cover a family’s expenses.
Then, we honed in on a specific city within each of our top 10 metro areas that’s well-suited to raising kids based on educational factors (spending per student and the quality of local school districts) as well as fun factors (availability of public parks, playgrounds and libraries). We also looked at each city’s average income for families — as opposed to median income for all households — to give a realistic sense of how much it can cost a family to live in a place with so many kid-centric benefits.

So, high incomes, lots of kids, low crime rates.  Sounds like just about anywhere in the RBA, doesn’t it?  And they said they would pick one representative place for each of their “top 10 metros” based on school funding and quality, as well as kid-friendly public services.  The latter might disqualify a number of high-income RBA towns, since they assume everyone has their own 10 acre private park in the backyard.

Yes, the Bay Area got a city on the Top Ten list, and they picked… Sunnyvale?

City population: 140,081
Average family income:$123,647
Percentage of families with children: 32.6%
Metro-area spending per student: $7,345
Public playgrounds: 25
Silicon Valley may not be the most intuitive place to raise kids, but the area has more going for it than shiny condos and trendy tech jobs. The average family income is well above the national average, as are living costs. But when it comes to raising families, those costs can be worth it: Sunnyvale has one of the lowest crime rates in the nation.
Two of the city’s elementary schools were named “Distinguished Schools” for 2012 by the California Department of Education, and the neighboring Cupertino Union and Fremont public school districts boast some of the best test scores in the state. When they’re not studying, kids in Sunnyvale enjoy 476 acres of neighborhood parks and playgrounds, and one of the country’s largest children’s museums is in nearby San Jose. San Francisco is less than an hour away by car.

Excuse me.  That’s “World-Famous Cupertino Union School District.”  Here’s the complete list of Kiplinger’s top family-friendly cities.  Watch them toss away one of their own rules:

10. Stamford, CT (NYC)
9. Corona, CA (LA/Riverside)
8. Middletown, NY (1.5 hrs to NYC)
7. Sunnyvale (San Jose/San Francisco)
6. Appleton, WI (no metro mentioned, assume Chicago/Milwaukee)
5. East Grand Rapids, MI (no metro mentioned, assume Detroit)
4. Thousand Oaks, CA (LA)
3. Suwanee, GA (Atlanta)
2. Richland, WA (Tri-Cities)
1. Omaha, NE (boredom)

Top ten metro areas, eh?  Why is LA in there twice but no San Diego?  On what planet are the Tri-Cities, in Southeast Washington, a “major metro”?  Where’s Philadelphia?  Where’s Boston?  Where’s Washington DC?  Seattle?  Portland?  Houston or Dallas?

Here are the top 10 metro areas in the US, per the Census Bureau, using 2011 population.

1. NY/Northern NJ/Long Island (NY/NJ/PA)
2. Los Angeles/Long Beach/Santa Ana
3. Chicago/Joliet/Naperville (IL/IN/WI)
4. Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington, TX
5. Houston/Sugar Land/Baytown, TX
6. Philadelphia/Camden/Wilmington (PA/NJ/DE/MD)
7. Washington/Arlington/Alexandria (DC/MD/VA)
8. Miami/Ft Lauderdale/Pompano Beach, FL
9. Atlanta/Sandy Springs/Marietta, GA
10. Boston/Cambridge/Quincy MA/NH

Note who is missing from the Top Ten.

11. San Francisco/Oakland/Fremont, CA
31. San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, CA

Adding the population of the two together would move that more obvious metro into 4th place, after Dallas and ahead of Houston.  And the Census recognizes this.  The “Combined Statistical Area” is called San Jose/San Francisco/Oakland.  Many of the MSAs are also CSAs, but most of the larger ones are part of bigger CSAs. 

If we use CSAs, the Bay Area moves to #6, behind NYC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, and Boston CSAs.  Rounding out the top 10 are Dallas, Philly, Houston, and Atlanta.

None of this explains Kiplinger’s bizarre picks for this list.  Some of the cities have 10,000 people and some are even bigger than Sunnyvale.  And any list that ranks Omaha, Nebraska first and isn’t called Places Warren Buffett Lives shows they’re just trolling us.

Sunnyvale was also seventh on the CNN/Money’s 2010 list of Best Places for the Rich & Single.

Santa Clara County’s fastest-growing population is over 85

By Julia Prodis Sulek and Leigh Poitinger, SJ Mercury News
Posted:   07/02/2011 04:11:05 PM PDT

Phyllis Harding is slowing down now that she’s 89. She’s a bit forgetful and can’t walk too far or too fast. But she’ll be line dancing with her walker at the “Old Fogies Follies” this month, thanks to organized activities at her senior housing community in Los Gatos that is doing its best to keep her healthy longer.

“I’m living forever!” she said with a plucky smile as she got ready to order a new swimming suit for her water aerobics class at The Terraces of Los Gatos.

For Harding and the over-85 set, it certainly seems that way. New census numbers show that Harding is part of the “oldest olds” — the fastest growing population in Santa Clara County as well as the country. The over-85 population increased a stunning 52.7 percent in Santa Clara County between 2000 and 2010, more than any other age group, including 55-to-64-year-old Baby Boomers, which grew 37.4 percent. In San Mateo County, the over-85 population increased 34.9 percent, slightly less than the Baby Boomer population, which grew by 40.4 percent.

In other words, Silicon Valley — a place known since the 1960s for luring millions of young workers and their families to launch the technology revolution — is graying. Over the next 10 years, the number of people over 60 is expected to nearly double, while the number of those 75 or older is expected to triple by 2030, according to a report from the Silicon Valley Council on Aging.  Over the next decade, the 20-to-39 age bracket will decrease the most, by about 2.4 percent, the report says.  [emphasis mine]

The Merc summarized this article as “The over 85 folks are mostly whites living in wealthy suburbs of Los Gatos and Los Altos, but Latino and Asian ‘oldest olds’ are growing quickly.”

Want a house in Los Gatos or Los Altos?  Just wait for these folks to slow down a little more.  Other “wealthy white communities” where you’ll find the growing community of the “oldest old” are “…Saratoga, Monte Sereno… Los Altos Hills and Palo Alto.”

And at some point those homes will change ownership.  According to Nancy Hikoyeda, associate director of the Stanford Geriatric Education Center, 85-plussers are hit with  ”compression of morbidity… multiple illnesses, often including some form of dementia, which make them more frail.”

That’s great news for all those idle kitchen and bath contractors, because the homes probably are as frail as their owners and could use about 40 years’ worth of updates.

This is an Open Thread.  Any homes in your neighborhood that could be up for sale soon due to a little morbidity compression?

http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/files/publications_reports/parkmerced/20101014_VisionPlan.pdf

Interesting reading for a lazy Sunday.

And now, some local news from one of our favorite location, location, locations.

Census: Big spike in Palo Alto’s Asian population

City’s Asian population increased by 73 percent over the past decade, fueling overall population growth of 9.9 percent

by Gennady Sheyner, Palo Alto Online Staff

Palo Alto’s population spiked by almost 10 percent over the past decade, fueled in large part by a growing Asian community, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau show.

The data, which the bureau released Tuesday afternoon, indicate that Palo Alto’s Asian population jumped from 10,090 in 2000 to 17,461 in 2010 — a 73 percent increase. While Asian Americans made up 17.2 percent of the city’s population 11 years ago, the proportion spiked to 27.1 percent last year, according to the census numbers.

Statewide, the Asian population went up by 31.5 percent over the past decade, census data indicate.
The new data confirm what many Palo Alto officials have publicly acknowledged in recent meetings: The city’s population is growing and become more diverse. The city’s listed total population grew from 58,598 in the 2000 census to 64,403 in the new one — an increase of 9.9 percent. At the same time, the city’s population of white residents dropped from 44,391 to 41,359 over the past decade — a 6.8 percent decline.

Well, isn’t that special?  Seems whatever made Palo Alto so different than its neighbors is less and less the case every day.  Yes, they knew they were rich, but they could also say they were white.  Oh, where are those restrictive covenants when you need them?

Time for a little history, then.

California used to have the Alien Land Law which prohibited non-citizens from purchasing land, but was used primarily to prevent Asians from purchasing property.  The law was found constitutional in 1923 and upheld in 1946, despite the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 (which grew out of wartime diplomacy rather than any concern for civil rights).

When the Supreme Court overruled themselves and barred restrictive covenants in 1948, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) quickly came to the aid of racial separatists with this delightful item added to their ethics code:

“A realtor should not be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or use which clearly will be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.”

California law also permitted school districts to set up different schools for Asian students, and if such a school was set up, all Asian students must attend that school.  San Francisco had such a school and triggered an international incident in 1906 when they required Japanese-American children to attend this hitherto Chinese-American school.  Yet California never specifically set up schools for black students, as was typical in the Southeast.  Racially segregated schooling, at least by statute, ended in 1954 after Brown v. Board of Education.

Also look out for the legal phrase “alien ineligible to citizenship” when reading these old laws and statutes.  That’s code for Asians again, and which Asians was spelled out in terms of longitude and latitude.  It sure didn’t apply to Russians and Middle Easterners.  It wasn’t until 1952 that racial restrictions to naturalization were done away with.

And now, in 2011, Palo Alto is getting a little bit more diverse than it has been.  Formerly a city for wealthy, high-achieving white people, Palo Alto will become a city of wealthy and upper-middle class high-achievers, of both European and Asian ancestry.  Diversity rocks!

Meanwhile, we can celebrate the return of de jure segregation, as the article mentions Hoover Elementary School has 78 percent of their students with Asian ancestry.  The photo at left shows what Hoover classes looked like back in 1951.

Check out the highly-charged comments in the online story, the editors of Palo Alto Online are yanking quite a number of them.  Seems there’s a few longtime (or not so longtime) residents who don’t appreciate any changes coming to Palo Alto, because, after all, It’s Special Here.

Blogger Economist Rob Pitingolo measured which metro area was the “smartest,” and used the density of higher education degrees as his metric.  His essay has gotten recent notice from USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, and my good buddy Greg Fielding.  Fielding asks if San Franciscans are so smart, then “why do they accept such painfully-high price-to-rent ratios?”  That’s pretty much the old “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich,” saw isn’t it?  I’m going to demonstrate that Fielding asked the wrong question.

On a per-large-city basis, San Francisco blew the rest away with a whopping 7,031 degrees per square mile.  San Jose, the supposed “Capital of Silicon Valley,” lags fifteen places behind with an unimpressive 1,259.

It’s becoming increasingly accepted that there is real economic value to bringing a lot of smart and entrepreneurial people together in the same place. This can be tough to measure, unfortunately.

Yup, Math class is hard.  Pitingolo wondered whether the surrounding areas benefit from a core city’s degree concentration, and repeated the same measurements on a county level.  But many of his comparison cities are either contiguous with their counties, or are strongly linked with unmentioned surrounding counties, resulting in a lovely display of apples and orangutans.  And for some reason, the City and County of San Francisco was merged with contiguous San Mateo in the county section, dropping to fifth place with an anemic 1,105.  San Jose’s results also collapsed when amalgamated with Santa Clara County (413).  Obviously counties with huge swaths of farmland will pull these numbers down no matter how many Ph.Ds are sipping lattes on University Avenue.  What the density metric implies, and whether the county data make anything clearer is still up for discussion in the blog’s comments.

Meanwhile, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina scored first on The Daily Beast’s completely arbitrary measure of Metro IQ.  This alternative intelligence ranking was based on each million plus metro area’s ratio of degrees, colleges in the region, nonfiction book sales, and percent of eligible voters voting.  San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose came in second, scoring first with education but losing out to Raleigh-Durham due to relative voter apathy.  I will leave it as an exercise to the Real Bay Area reader exactly how valuable a measure of regional IQ can be that equates Duke, UCNC, and Chapel Hill with Stanford, Cal, USF, SF, Hayward and SJ States, and (in your face, Tar Heels!) Foothill.

We can argue whether completing a college degree is any indication of intelligence.  We can debate whether Pitingolo’s study erred by emphasizing population density over percentage of degree-holders, thus boosting teeming multistory cities such as San Francisco over low-profile megaburbs such as San Jose.  We can present various ways to measure what is a city, what is a metro area, and what is a region.  We can ask to what degree “human capital sprawl” limits a city’s economic engine (as in Oklahoma City) as opposed to revving it in Silicon Valley.

But there is no escaping real estate.  And here’s a better article that also says we’re #1, by one of my favorite authors, Richard Florida.  Florida noticed Pitingolo’s study too, although he didn’t have much to add to it.

Florida began with the perennial question of whether to rent or buy.  He studied 133 metropolitan regions,  noted the places with high versus low housing price to rent ratios (HPRs), and found that areas with higher HPRs have higher housing prices and lower percentages of people who are homeowners.  As Florida put it, “the costs of owning are relatively lower in places where more people already own their own homes.”  When prices are relatively higher, fewer own because fewer can afford to.

Then Florida looked at economic data for the regions: output, income, and wages.  Those with higher HPRs tend to be more productive, have more wealth, and higher wages.  And he already showed earlier that week that high HPRs are correlated with lower unemployment rates.  Hmm, high housing cost, high wages, high income, high productivity… does that sound like anywhere you know?

Previously, we’ve seen how smart regions have higher levels of income, economic output, and overall well-being. It costs relatively more to own in smarter, more advanced regional economies. We measure smart regions in terms of the level of human capital; the percentage of the workforce in creative, knowledge-based, and professional occupations; and the level of technology-based industry. The HPR ratio is positively related to all three. The correlation between the HPR ratio and human capital (measured as the share of metro population with a bachelor’s degree or higher) is .4.

Ah, there’s that college degree metric again that made all the headlines, measured it in percentage instead of density.  Florida says San Francisco is a smart region, and therefore an expensive one.  So, San Franciscans don’t pay high rent ratios because they aren’t smart.  They pay high rent ratios because they are.  The smarter a region is, the higher those ratios should be.

Florida concludes that the conventional wisdom of buying at a low HPR (15 or even 20) isn’t that wise.  Instead, he suggests you buy where skilled people want to work, where there are good economic prospects, and where homeownership isn’t routine. Buy where there are plenty of people who want to buy but haven’t yet.  When it’s time to sell, you’ll have plenty of potential customers.

It’s counterintuitive, but rent in Pittsburgh, but buy in San Francisco.  That’s the smart thing to do.

Marin income No. 1 in state; population grows

Mark Prado

Posted: 04/30/2010 04:49:10 PM PDT

Marin has once again topped the state in median household income, according to figures released by the state this week.

Also, the county grew in population by .08 percent last year and is now at 260,651, the state reported.

Although Marin led the state with the highest median income for joint returns for the 2008 tax year at $118,704, that was a decrease of 3.85 percent from 2007.

San Mateo County ranked second with $100,165, Santa Clara County third at $100,077, Contra Costa County fourth with $90,956 and Alameda County fifth with $88,138.

Marin, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties have led California for 37 years in reported highest median incomes, according to the state Franchise Tax Board.

"That income level is important for our local economy," said Coy Smith, CEO of the Novato Chamber of Commerce. "If people are employed and earning a good salary it has a positive ripple effect on our local economy."

Congrats to Marin on this amazing accomplishment. The Bay Area is definitely on its way back to being at the top of all categories!