This Is the American City With the Most Million-Dollar Homes

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 17, 11:30AM EST

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This Is the American City With the Most Million-Dollar Homes — © Sundry Photography / iStock via Getty Images

Residential real estate prices have risen at an astonishing pace. Data from the first part of this year supports the forecast that 2022 could be another year of sharp home price jumps. One of the byproducts of this is that the median value of a home in 2021 was $350,000, up almost 15% from 2020.

Prices increases have been driven by several factors. One is low mortgage rates, which have started to disappear. Another is a migration from America’s expensive coastal cities, such as New York and San Francisco, to less expensive cities and towns inland. Ironically, the demand for homes in the smaller places has caused home prices there to rise by mid-tier double-digit percentages. However, home prices in places like San Francisco have stayed at two to three times the national number.

Another reason for the migration is that millions of Americans can work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some companies have said that the option for their workers is permanent.

One of the byproducts of home price increases is a very large increase in the number of places where the median home value is $1 million or more. A new Zillow report titled 146 New U.S. Cities Gained Million-Dollar Status in 2021, the Most Ever in a Single Year says that “A record 146 new U.S. cities became ‘million-dollar cities’ in 2021, the highest number of new entrants in a single year, bringing the total to 481 cities nationwide in which the typical home value is at least $1 million.”
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In the study, a city is measured as part of a larger metro area. So, in Los Angeles, for example, there are 57 million-dollar cities.

Two metros are tied for most million-dollar cities. Both New York and San Francisco have 76. Based on a large number of expensive homes in the city centers and expensive towns close by, this should not come as any surprise.

These are the 10 metros with the most million-dollar cities:

San Francisco (76)
New York (76)
Los Angeles (57)
San Jose (22)
Boston (18)
Seattle (16)
Miami (14)
Washington (11)
Santa Rosa (9)
Santa Maria-Santa Barbara (9)

Click here to see which are the most expensive cities in which to buy a home.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.