What comes to mind is Quechee, VT; Woodstock, VT; Hanover, NH; and Norwich, VT. The highest-priced house I could find in a cursory search was $9.6M in Woodstock, and Woodstock seems to have the top five or so most expensive listings. The next of Quechee at $3M.
They also come with a lot of land, so it’s not like it’s one huge mansion after another in a small area.
http://www.beangroup.com/property/search.php?status=1&_areas[]=Woodstock_VT&pp=20&order=1
I’m not as familiar with neither Five Points neighborhood in Atlanta.
Now, in Athens, in my part of the neighborhood is either old rental houses (NOT crackhouses) or awesome beautifully maintained brick houses.
Don’t forget Mercer Island lots of fancy houses out there
In the SF Bay Area there is Belvedere, Ross, Piedmont, Hillsborough, Atherton and Los Gatos. In SF itself, there is Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Pacific Heights, Seacliff and St. Francis Woods
Yup, I’d agree with that. Another Virginia Water type area I’d add is Weybridge.
I’d think of Virginia Water and Weybridge as being more like Beverley Hills, because they have proper mansions with stone lions at the gates, swimming pools and so on. Kensingston is a different kind of expensive. Like this post says:
Kensington does also have quite a few council estates (literal) within spitting distance of the multi-million-quid bedsits and billion-dollar houses. In Weybridge and Virginia Water, they’re further away. I’ve known poor people who’ve lived in Kensington, four to a bedroom. The only poor people I’m likely to meet who live in Weybridge will be servants.
Well, “Bubbles” is a pet shop/pet grooming service in my hometown, Altoona, PA.
Now, the Beverly Hills of Altoona when I was a kid was called Sylvan Hills. Now, I have no idea. Might still be.
In my humble town of Toronto, you’ve got a few options:
The Bridle Path: home to snobby nouveau-riche who revel in their McMansions, winding roads and terribly annoying cobblestone speedbumps that make me never want to drive around there, even if I am just gawking at the rich folks’ houses. The Artist Currently Known As The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince owns a house there! So does Celine Dion, God help us. Apparently, the movie Mean Girls was filmed here according to Wikipedia, which is information your teenage niece would be interested in.
Rosedale: Home of the old money in the city. To live here, your last name has to appear on at least a few corporations, public spaces or book covers.
Those are the big two for within the city. There’s also a wide smathering of Rich Uncle Pennybags-types living out in the urban sprawl, but if it’s in a different area code and they don’t pronounce “Toronto” as “Trawna”, we generally see these people as laughably foreign wanna-bes.
Sidenote: While these may be the “Beverly Hills” of Toronto, the “Beverly Hillbillies” of Toronto would be either neighbouring Hamilton or Oshawa.
There are those who would say all of Bærum is the Beverly Hills of the Greater Oslo region, but that’s because they don’t actually know Bærum. There’s plenty of us normal folk living here, trust me.
The highest housing prices are along the fjord, and most particularly on Snarøya, the peninsula out past where the airport used to be. Waterfront areas of Lysaker are probably the second most expensive, then I’m guessing waterfront areas of Høvik or the older areas of Jar.
I’m in southeastern Nassau County, Long Island. BusinessWeek magazine apparently recently listed 25 wealthiest communities in the United States - fully nine of them are within a half hour’s drive:
Brookville; Roslyn Estates; Oyster Bay Cove; Old Westbury; Munsey Park & Muttontown (tied for lucky #13); Lloyd Harbor; Sands Point, & North Hills are all home to great wealth. Most are what’re thought of as “Gold Coast” communities - situated on the North Shore in Nassau. Lloyd Harbor is in Suffolk.
Then, of course, you have the Hamptons & assorted other towns on the East End, about 1.5 hours east of here; many celebrities & non-famous, yet wealthy people spend summers there, but median income for year-rounders is much more modest (in the $50,000s for a typical family).
Well, practically anywhere in coastal Del Mar or La Jolla. In San Diego proper, I’d guess the harbor side of Point Loma.
Capetown is one of the most gorgeous towns on the planet. The funny thing is that when I was there in 2002, I was on a tour bus, and the guide was saying, this is one on the nicest neighborhoods in Capetown, and houses go for upwards of XXX Rand. I smiled to think that my shitty 2BR/1Bath shack was worth more than most of the houses in that neighborhood. Hell, I almost bought a house in St. Lucia for $43,000 just because it was such a damn beautiful place.
Now, here in Santa Barbara, we have Montecito (Hi Oprah!) and Hope Ranch.
In San Antonio, Texas - As stated before, the Alamo Heights area is one of the weathiest in the city. It is a completely separate and incorporated city that is surrounded by San Antonio. I doubt they have the San Antonio police come in for something serious. They probably handle it themselves or call in the county sheriff.
Alamo Heights is the 78209 zip code, so people who live there refer to themselves as “09’ers”. This is where the old money lives. The most famous person I can think of right off that lives there is Tommy Lee Jones.
The new money lives out Interstate 10 at the northwest side of town. It is called “The Dominion”. This is where George Strait and a lot of the Spurs basketball players live. It is build partially on two hills that where previously part of a military reserve. The reserve is still active, and though I live a couple of miles away on the other side of the highway, I can often hear explosions and machine gun fire from their war games. I imagine that sounds real nice when you are just on the other side of the hill from all that. All the lighting in The Dominion and surrounding area has to be specially shielded so that it doesn’t interfer with night-time helicopter training.
Me, I would much rather have a house a little bigger than what I have now on as big of a piece of land as I could afford. Having an expensive house on an acre or two of land seems silly to me.
Construction has messed up the traffic on I-10 in front of The Dominion for over a year now as they build a multi-million dollar bridge and ramp system just for the Dominion folk. Can’t have them driving down the road an extra mile or so just to get on and off the highway, now can we?
mmm…I’d have to argue the best high school is Upper St. Clair, because of the only the IB program in the region. It’s where most Pitt professors send their kids. Fox Chapel is definitely richer, IMHO, and home to Shadyside Academy.
In Buffalo proper, Nye Park (the former site of the Pan-American Exposition, north of Hoyt Lake in Delaware Park) and Central Park (the area north of Parkside and south of North Buffalo) are extremely well-off; much wealthier than Parkside, which is really middle-class to upper-middle-class.
The thing about Buffalo is that anyone who is middle-class can afford to live in any part of the region. There’s really no area that is equivalent to the Chagrin Valley 'burbs of Cleveland, or the eastern suburbs of Rochester, where it’s solidly high upper-middle-class and up. East Amherst and Clarence are seen as wealthy by Buffalonians, but there’s still plenty of decent houses in those areas that will sell for under $200K. My parents are solidly middle-class, but they have a prestigious 14221 ZIP code. An uncle was a middle-class engineer, and he housed his family in 14226.; a ZIP code that carries the same cachet among Buffalonians as 90210.
Among the monied Amherst crowd, Snyder is seen as a bit more established, while East Amherst and Clarence are considered new money.
Buffalo’s REAL Beverly Hills is in Fort Erie, Ontario on the Lake Erie shoreline. Buffalo’s old, smelly money will still have an address in the Delaware District, but they’ll spend most of their time at their lakefront estate in Fort Erie. East Aurora, in the Southtowns, has the polo club and 10-acre gentleman’s estate crowd, but for the most part Buffalo’s wealth is concentrated in the city and the northeastern 'burbs.