• Arlington, Virginia – just outside of Washington, D.C. – is home to the country’s largest concentration of millennial and Baby Boomer households earning more than $350,000 per year.
• The city of Washington, D.C., hosts the nation’s third-largest share of wealthy Baby Boomer households and ninth-largest share of rich millennial households.
• The large college towns of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, each have relatively large shares of rich Baby Boomer households and comparatively small shares of wealthy millennial households.

The nation’s highest concentration of young and wealthy residents can be found in fabulous… Arlington, Virginia.

No, that’s not a typo. Arlington, a dense and fast-growing community just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., is home to the largest share of rich millennial households[1] earning more than $350,000 per year, according to a Zillow analysis of generational income in 73 U.S. cities.[2] Among all households headed by a millennial in Arlington, 8.7 percent earn more than $350,000 annually.

Other hotspots for America’s young and wealthy are more obvious than Arlington, which is arguably better known as a relatively quiet D.C. bedroom community for lawyers and lobbyists than as a magnet for new money. San Francisco, the epicenter of the nation’s red-hot and youth-driven tech industry, has the second-highest concentration of rich millennials, with 7.8 percent of millennial-headed households earning more than $350,000 per year.

Huntington Beach, California – a tony beach community of surfers and financial asset managers just south of Los Angeles in affluent Orange County – is next on the list, with 5.1 percent of millennial households earning more than $350,000 annually. The tech hubs of Sunnyvale, California, smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, and Seattle, home to large tech firms including Amazon and Zillow, round out the top five cities with the highest share of rich millennial households (both at 3.9 percent).

Beyond Arlington, there is a visible halo effect of major employment centers on neighboring communities. The bedroom community of Jersey City, New Jersey – with easy public transit access to Wall Street – as well as the San Francisco satellite city of Oakland also make the list of top 10 cities for rich millennials.

New vs. Old

When comparing “new” money hubs to “old” money centers – in this case, cities with high concentrations of millennial households earning more than $350,000 and cities with high concentrations of Baby Boomer households[3] earning the same – a few interesting trends emerge.

It’s clear, for example, that the nation’s capital and the surrounding area are home to large concentrations of wealth overall. Arlington was also home to the highest concentration of rich Baby Boomers, with 7.9 percent of all Boomer households in the city earning $350,000 per year or more. The city of Washington, D.C., itself was third on the list of cities with the highest concentration of wealthy Boomers (6.1 percent of Boomer households in the nation’s capital earn more than $350,000 per year). The District of Columbia ranked ninth on the list of cities with the highest share of rich millennial households (2.8 percent).

But age does have its privileges in a number of U.S. cities (figure 1). Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, has a much larger share of wealthy Boomers – 7.7 percent of Boomer households earn more than $350,000 – than rich millennials (2.8 percent of millennial households in Cambridge earn more than $350,000 annually). This is likely attributable to the large number of young students and recent graduates living in Cambridge, still working to fully capitalize on their valuable degrees from prestigious Cambridge universities including Harvard and MIT. The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the University of Michigan, likely faces a similar situation – 5.8 percent of Ann Arbor’s Boomer households earn more than $350,000 annually, compared to 1.6 percent of millennial households.

And some American cities are struggling to find wealthy residents of any age. Detroit, for example, was near the bottom of both old and young wealth enclaves. Just 0.1 percent of millennial households and 0.2 percent of Boomer households in Detroit earn more than $350,000 per year. Similarly, Los Angeles’ wealth has yet to spillover to the nearby cities of Ontario or Moreno Valley in Southern California’s Inland Empire, both of which have almost no households in either age group with an income in excess of $350,000 per year.

[1] In this analysis, millennial households are defined as those households with a head aged 34 or younger.

[2] Zillow analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey, made available by the University of Minnesota, IPUMS-USA.

[3] Baby Boomer households are defined as those households with a head aged 56 or older.