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The Bay Area, with one of the highest median incomes in the nation, has dozens of neighborhoods where poverty is nearly nonexistent. Many of those communities are on the Peninsula, where housing costs are among the region’s highest.
In these 10 wealthier ZIP codes, an average of just 5.8 percent of residents earn below 200 percent of the poverty threshold, the measure we chose as the basis for our analysis to account for the region’s high cost of living. In the broader Bay Area, 21 percent of residents fall below that mark.
The tony enclave of Atherton, the Bay Area’s most expensive ZIP code, has the lowest poverty rate. Just 4.7 percent of its population earns below 200 percent of the poverty line. For a family of four, that was $50,188 in 2017, the most recent data available by ZIP code.
Contra Costa County is home to three of the 10 least poor ZIP codes, which lie in Alamo, Orinda and the Danville area that includes Blackhawk. In Santa Clara County, the South San Jose neighborhoods near Almaden Quicksilver Park and Santa Teresa County Park also made the list of ZIP codes with the lowest poverty rates, along with Los Altos and Los Gatos. And in San Mateo County, Moss Beach made the list.
However, Moss Beach has a small population, so the margin of error for those living in poverty is high. It has a poverty rate of less than 5 percent. But its population — less than 4,000 people, the smallest on the list — means poverty estimates can vary from year to year.
Although many of the least poor ZIP codes have higher-than-average housing costs, even by Bay Area standards, mortgage payments in these neighborhoods increased less during the massive price run ups since 2012 than in the Bay Area as a whole.
Between 2012 and fall 2019, median mortgage payments increased on average 56 percent among all Bay Area ZIP codes. But in the 10 ZIP codes with the lowest poverty, they rose 39 percent.
The full Price We Pay series on the Bay Area’s housing crisis is available to subscribers here. Not a subscriber? For a special offer that includes unlimited access to the series and our websites, click here for The Mercury News or here for the East Bay Times.