NEW YORK—So it looks like Atherton, Calif., is building quite a streak. For the fourth consecutive year, the Silicon Valley suburb holds the top spot on Bloomberg’s Richest Places annual index. According to this year’s ranking, Atherton has an average household income of more than $525,000. (This marked the first time a town or community has exceeded the half-million dollar mark for household income since Bloomberg started compiling the index in 2017.)

The second-place designation went to Scarsdale, N.Y., with household income averaging a couple bucks north of $452,000.

According to the Bloomberg ranking,  Atherton is joined in the highest-income neighborhoods by California neighbors Hillsborough (No. 3) and Los Altos Hills (No. 5). All of these communities are in the hi-tech corridor between San Francisco and San Jose, and they had average household incomes of more than $400,000 last year.

Bloomberg also notes that the least expensive house on the market in Atherton is priced at $2.5 million (according to Zillow.com).

Well-known tech executives who have called Atherton home include Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Microsoft’s late co-founder Paul Allen, whose former residence there was sold recently for more than $35 million, according to the Bloomberg report. Another home owner in the community is Golden State Warriors superstar Steph Curry.

After Scarsdale, which is less than 25 miles outside Manhattan, the Top 10 list includes a town near Denver, two northern suburbs of Chicago, and a wealthy community in Dallas, Texas.

The East and West Coasts dominate the ranking once again. California has 23 places among the Top 100, while the tri-state area of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey accounts for 32 (although that’s down from 36 last year), according to Bloomberg.

Overall, only 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, in order to make the top 100, a neighborhood needed an average household income of $220,000 -- up from $209,000 last year.
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