Even wealthy Millennials are just like Baby Boomers

Zillow released research on where the richest Millennials live, and it happens to be in Arlington, Va., with a number of California locations right behind.

According to Zillow, 8.7 percent of Millennial households in Arlington are earning more than $350,000 per year ($350,000 is recognized as the 1 percent threshold of Millennial incomes).

Why Arlington? It’s a relatively close suburb of Washington D.C. (just across the Potomac River); D.C. has more Millennials than any city in America. San Francisco and other nearby tech areas are next on the list, showing that Millennial money is quite clearly in tech.

Zillow also looked at the Baby Boomer composition in those wealthy Millennial spots, and found that a higher share of wealthy Boomers live in Cambridge, Mass.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Anchorage, Alaska; along with Washington. One can easily explain Cambridge and Ann Arbor as college towns where the Millennial population is living cheap, and the Boomer population is either school administration (Harvard, MIT, Michigan) or simply rich folks living outside of a bigger city (Boston). Anchorage is an expensive place to live (27 percent higher cost of living than the national average), and Washington? Yeah, super expensive. Even the rich Millennials aren’t living there.

Meanwhile, wealthy Millennials are more often in Huntington Beach, Calif.; Sunnyvale, Calif.; and Jersey City, N.J.; over Baby Boomers. Reasons? Huntington Beach is a famous oceanside city bordering asset-management firms (Baby Boomers are probably in less bustling communities), Sunnyvale is a tech city, and Jersey City is on the rebound after years of Baby Boomers turning the other way to the New York City “suburb.” Jersey City is also right across from Lower Manhattan (access).

At the end of the day these findings don’t scream anything we didn’t know – wealthy Millennials are in tech, and if not, work and live near D.C. and New York. What’s more interesting about it is that even wealthy Millennials are opting against staying in the city, preferring instead to live just outside traffic, tourism and urban renewal.

For that, they’re just like the Baby Boomers.

Advertisement