Dive Brief:
- The largest concentration of the wealthiest millennials (8.7%) and baby boomers (7.9%), or those making more than $350,000 per year, is in Washington, DC’s backyard — Arlington, VA. The District itself is third in wealthiest boomers (6.1%) and ninth in wealthiest millennials (2.8%), according to Zillow.
- San Francisco has the second-highest concentration of wealthy millennials (7.8%), followed by Huntington Beach, CA, (5.1%), Sunnyvale, CA, (3.9%) and Seattle (3.9%).
- Zillow found that around major cities with high employment there is also a "halo effect" that has seen millennials moving to traditional bedroom communities and satellite cities — such as Arlington; Jersey City, NJ; and Oakland, CA — driving up the percentage of younger wealthy residents.
Dive Insight:
Zillow found that boomers are also forging new trends in the residential space. For instance, the wealthy boomers in Cambridge, MA, outnumber the well-to-do millennials by almost 5%. The same trend can be found in other cities with prestigious universities, like Ann Arbor, MI (University of Michigan), where wealthy boomers outnumber their wealthy millennial counterparts by slightly more than 4%. Recent graduates of schools like UM, MIT and Harvard are not yet paid a high salary, so wealthier boomers still come out on top, according to Zillow.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are also American cities without rich boomers or millennials. For example, only 0.1% of millennial households in Detroit, and 0.2% of boomers, earn more than $350,000. This phenomenon, is also occurring in the California Inland Empire cities of Ontario and Moreno Valley, just a stone’s throw from pricey Los Angeles, have similarly low numbers of both young and older high earners.
According to an October Washington Post report, the love of urban living is not limited only to millennials. Boomers are downsizing in record numbers, selling off their larger suburban houses and snatching up so many rental properties, they’re pricing millennials out of the market.
And when it comes to purchasing homes, millennials and boomers find themselves with something else in common these days. A National Association of Realtors Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends study found that although millennials are gung-ho urban renters, when it comes to buying a home, contrary to conventional wisdom, they're looking to the suburbs, just like most of the homebuyers in all other generational groups.