The entire Bay Area is notorious for its exorbitant cost of living, but the Peninsula blows away the competition when it comes to the region’s most expensive ZIP codes.
ZIP codes in Atherton, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Portola Valley and Stanford are the six least affordable communities in terms of housing costs in the nine-county Bay Area and Santa Cruz County.
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Even in the cheapest of these ZIP codes, you’d need an annual income of more than $500,000 to buy the median priced home last year, assuming that you spend no more than 30 percent of your income on housing. In the most expensive, Atherton’s 94027, you’d need to bring in more than $1 million a year.
Here are the Bay Area’s six priciest communities for buyers in 2018:
6) Stanford’s 94305 surrounds Stanford University and includes the Stanford Golf Course and the popular hiking area near the Stanford Dish. The real estate around the West Coast’s most elite university is accessible only to a few. Here, a median mortgage payment runs $13,690 a month and requires an annual income of $547,400, assuming you spend no more than 30 percent of your income on housing, according to our analysis. That’s unaffordable to all but the top 1.9 percent of earners in the Bay Area.
5) and 4) Los Altos and Los Altos Hills share two of the most expensive ZIP codes in the Bay Area. Zips 94024 and 94022, which together encompass virtually the entire city of Los Altos and the neighboring town of Los Altos Hills, require median annual incomes of $557,800 and $665,900 to afford the median monthly mortgage payments of $13,940 and $16,650, respectively. Although Los Altos includes a bustling downtown district, its neighbor Los Altos Hills, which sits west of Foothill Expressway, consists almost exclusively of residences since the town banned commercial zones.
3) Tucked away between Woodside and Los Altos Hills, 94028 in the small town of Portola Valley comes in third on the list. Here, in the wooded hills on the eastern slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking Stanford and Palo Alto, the median monthly mortgage is $14,990, which requires an income of $599,600.
2) Seven miles to the east in Palo Alto, ZIP code 94301, which stretches from north of the city’s downtown area to south of Oregon Expressway and includes Old Palo Alto and the city’s downtown shopping district, is home to tech luminaries like Google’s Larry Page and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Here, households must earn $676,600 annually to afford the median monthly payment of $16,910. That means just 0.8 percent of Bay Area residents can afford to live there.
1)The Bay Area’s most expensive ZIP code, 94027 in Atherton, has a median monthly mortgage of $26,930. Atherton is not only the most expensive ZIP code in California, but in the entire country, according to Zillow.
Read our special report: The Price We Pay: How Rising Housing Costs Are Transforming the Bay Area
