Yea, I’m not moving from where I am. Even though I live in the most “ghetto” street of Five Points, even the houses in front of me and down the street are awesome. Plus I can walk to UGA and to the exact Five Points light.
Bonus points: In general, people don’t go up in arms at my dog, and the place is so old that my pet fees are nonexistent. 
But I’m sure there must be ritzy(ier) places in this town/county.
Well I live in London, so am rather spoilt for choice if I have the odd $50m to spend. It’s often touted as the world’s most expensive city (although I think it’s probably lost its top spot with the credit crunch), and is much loved by russian and middle eastern billionaires who like to throw their monopoly money around in areas like Kensington, Chelsea, Knightsbridge and Hampstead.
Top billing for wealth goes to a street in Kensington called Kensington Palace Gardens. Average house prices here are in the region of £80m, with the best being in the region of $150m. Prices in this street are beyond the means of even most Hollywood film stars - local residents tend to be foreign oil/steel barons.
Commuter distance from the city, you’d have to venture out to the County of Surrey, much beloved of city bankers, with the small town of Virginia Water being the most affluent (average house price c.$5m). But many other Surrey towns hold similar honours.
Alamo Heights.
I was told (too lazy to research it but feel free if you’re feeling froggy) that it has the highest property taxes of any city in this state.
It’s a “town” in the heart of San Antonio. It hires cops just to keep out “undesirables.” It pays for said cops by dropping the speed limit an arbitrary 5 MPH with small signs nobody (who’s never been there before) notices. People get speeding tickets for going 32 in a 30 zone.
People who live in Alamo Heights are…well, let’s just say they’re “special.”
I don’t mean that kindly.
Killiney. Or ailsbury/Shewsbury road.
More money than sense.
Quick question, how does this work? Because here in the UK, police can’t be privately ‘hired’ - they’re all government employees. Do towns appoint their own police force and make up their own local laws? The best a town could do here would be to hire private security guards - unarmed (as are most police for that matter) and with no powers to issue fines or make arrests. Local town councils may have the powers to lower speed limits on roads, but not pressgang the police into heavily enforcing them.
Alamo Heights has its own zip code and it hires its own cops; they work for Alamo Heights PD, not San Antonio PD. Even though, as I said, this is a “town” with completely arbitrary city limits in the middle of San Antonio.
And Alamo Heights PD are absolutely legendary here locally about their zealous handing out of tickets; if you drive down Broadway, which is its “main street,” you will see 3 or 4 Alamo Heights PD cars pulling traffic at all times, day or night. Those fines are how they pay for the police force.
In the event that something SERIOUS happens in Alamo Heights–burglary, serious car accident, DWI, etc.–they call in San Antonio PD. From what I hear, they don’t even have a holding cell at their police station.
San Antonio PD have jurisdiction in Alamo Heights, but Alamo Heights PD have no jurisdiction outside of Alamo Heights. If that makes no sense to you, join the club. They are basically glorified security guards with guns and ticket-books. They keep out the “undesirables,” i.e., anyone they don’t think “belongs” there. It keeps the rich folks who live there happy.
If you don’t believe me, drive a POS car through Alamo Heights.
They WILL find a reason to pull you over and harass you.
In San Francisco it’s the Seacliff, which includes Robin Williams’ (former?) house.
St Francis Woods is pretty ritzy too, but lower-key.
These two neighborhoods are where kids from the middle-class Richmond and Sunset Districts went trick-or-treating.
This placeis right down the road by my house. I drive by it every day and even toured a Street of Dreams homes showcase a few years back.
Near Boston I would have to say Belmont. Mitt Romney’s house is something to behold. But Lexington, Newton, Acton, and Brookline are pretty swanky too. In fact, a few weeks ago it struck me that I see mansions everywhere I go.
For Ottawa, Ontario, it would have to be Rockcliffe Park
One semi-hilarious aspect of the “tony neighborhood” thing is that some of these places have names that acquired sleazy connotations elsewhere in the country.
For example “Five Points” was one of the legendarily awful slums in Manhattan, about which Charles Dickens said:
*"“This is the place: these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking every where with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruit here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?” *
Oh yeah, Five Points is where I wanna be. 
The ritzy suburb of Columbus, Ohio that I named (New Albany) wouldn’t sound so appealing to Northeasterners who associate Albany, N.Y. with a dingy small city whose main claim to fame is that it houses an unusually corrupt, quarrelsome legislature.
Mrs. J. adds that there is an upscale suburb of Houston called Bunker Hill (the best known neighborhood with that name, the Bunker Hill area of Boston has not been associated with the high life through much of its modern history).
On my side of Dublin there’s Malahide and Castleknock, both of which contain $million houses.
Down the southside there are several places, Killiney, and Dalkey amongst others.
Medina. Bill Gates lives there. It’s directly across the lake* from us.
*Lake Washington
Don’t forget Chestnut Hill and Weston. Or the Brattle St neighborhood of Cambridge.
There’s two styles of this type of enclave, there’s the suburban version and there’s the dense urban enclave. Beverly Hills is the premiere example of the suburban type and they tend to be easily definable and somewhat homogeneous. The Upper East Side of Manhattan would be the other side of the coin and tends to be much more loosely defined and less insulated.
In Chicago, the Gold Coast would be our answer to the Upper East Side. Rich, trendy and a tourist attraction in and of itself. The North Shore suburbs would be comparable to the “platinum triangle” but the wealth isn’t nearly as singularly contained.
Well, I live in Fairfax County, Virginia. That’s what Beverly Hills wants to be when it grows up! LOL!
McLean is the closest area that is really comparable to BH, It is quite densly populated, with ridiculously expensive homes on postage stamp lots. You can easily drop $1.5M on a townhouse there, but there are also some seriously yucky parts of town, where a 1BR condo goes for only $250,000. The cheapest SFH I found goes for $520,000, and is a knock-down startover.
The truly expensive area, where the older money lives would be Great Falls VA. Until about 5 years ago the smallest lots available there were 2 acres IIRC. Now you can build on a half-acre lot, but the properties still start around $650,000.
Then there’s a small area of Arlington County on Chain Bridge Road overlooking the Potomac just above the bridge. There are no “homes” there, only “Compounds” and “Estates”. I’d say these start around $15M, but there are no actual listings available. there are some other beautiful high-middle-class areas in Arlington, but the majority of Arlington is an armpit.
I live in none of these areas, my neighborhood is pure middle class all around.
Good points. I was in that section of Cambridge last Friday. I thought it would be nice to live in one of those apartments once I’ve finished building my vast financial empire.
For Orlando, the Winter Park area by Rollins College has to be one of the richest. There are others I’m sure, but I’m not really too familiar.
If I had to guess, I’d say the Cumberland Head area. That is the roughly horse-shoe shaped area on Lake Champlain. The houses are beautiful but even there, I doubt you’d be able to find one for over $1m.
I haven’t been up here very long though. There might be a hidden part of Plattsburgh that I haven’t heard about.
Everywhere is expensive, you can’t buy a house on the ocean for less than $1 million. Kahala is our version of Beverly Hills, although there are many pockets around the island (Sunset Beach, Hawaii Loa Ridge, Manoa Valley).