Housing

The City With the Most Million-Dollar Homes

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: August 12, 2023 9:50 am

In June, 8.2% of residences in the United States boasted a value surpassing $1 million. This statistic is derived from the report “Nearly 1 in 10 U.S. Homes Are Worth at Least $1 Million, Close to All-Time High,” published by the real estate sales firm Redfin. Notably, one city greatly exceeds this figure: San Francisco, where an impressive 81.2% of all domiciles hold a value exceeding the million-dollar mark.

The high end of the housing market has not had many sales transactions recently. According to Redfin, this is because homeowners who bought their houses when mortgage rates were 3% do not want to offload them, to move to properties where rates are above 6%. These high rates have also priced many buyers out of the market. Redfin Economics Research Lead Chen Zhao commented, “Still, there’s no rush to offload high-value homes.” (Here are America’s 25 least affordable housing markets.)

San Francisco is part of a cluster of cities with unusually high home prices. They are in or near what has been known as “Silicon Valley,” where many of the largest tech companies in the world have their headquarters. Some of these are corporations with a market valuation of over $100 billion and, in a few cases, over $1 trillion. Thousands of employees at these companies have become rich in the last three decades.

Many of the balance of cities with a higher percentage of million homes are clustered around the San Francisco Bay Area. These include San Jose, where the percentage of million homes is 79.6%, Oakland, where the figure is 49%, and Anaheim, where the figure is 55.4%. (These are all American cities with million-dollar homes.)

On the opposite end of the spectrum lie impoverished cities or those with notably low living costs. Among them is Detroit, where the figure is 0.4%, mirroring the statistics for Akron and Buffalo.