The idea of a city for the rich is tantalizing. Like a Richard Scarry book, but instead of the town baker being a lion or the local carpenter being a bear, that guy pushing a stroller is Tim Cook and the woman in line behind you at the grocery store is Kelly Ripa.
There are plenty of little enclaves for the obscenely well-off scattered around the country. Rich people have to sleep somewhere, even if that somewhere is a super-cool $50,000 bed. Every city has its toney bedroom community, but some are wealthier than others.
For example, Chicago has Kenilworth, a town where the average family income is close to $350,000 and development is so tightly controlled that there are no restaurants. New York has the Hamptons, formerly home to the most expensive zip code in the country, and the Bay Area has Atherton, currently the most expensive zip code, chock-a-block with Silicon Valley’s wealthiest executives. Atherton is so rich that it’s where the actual Charles Schwab lives.
There is something alluring about finding a backdoor into one of these places: inheriting some small, overlooked fixer-upper in Malibu or lucking into a little bungalow in Beverly Hills. Presumably, the property taxes on the mansions of the very rich fund fantastic public amenities, like libraries that look like Barnes and Noble bookstores, or community theaters…
