America's most expensive zip codes

Los Angeles has always been home to some of the world's most expensive real estate. But forget Beverly Hills, 90210: The new hot spot for multimillion-dollar mansions is Duarte, 91008.

Duarte, Calif., home to the 91008 ZIP code (which also includes the city of Bradbury - a fact that has stirred up a tempest in a teapot), is a small suburb northeast of downtown LA, near the Los Angeles national forest. The median cost of a house in this tony town is a whopping $4,276,462, making it the most expensive housing market in the country. It ranks No. 1 on Forbes' annual ranking of America's Most Expensive ZIP Codes.

A scant 1,391 people live in the 91008 ZIP code, and only 12 homes are currently on the market. So a single high-priced listing (like the mammoth nine-bedroom, built this year, that's selling for $19.8 million) may not adequately represent how everyone in the area lives.

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The ascent of Duarte - for which the 91008 ZIP was created since 2000, to accommodate a growing population - shows that wealth is still drawn to big cities, even if their postbubble housing prices have dropped.

"In the big California markets there is essentially a chronic shortage of homes," says Mike Simonsen, CEO of Altos Research, a Mountain View, Calif., firm that tracks housing market data. "For the number of people that might want homes, there's always an order of magnitude fewer homes available than there are in Midwest, for example." More than half the locations in our ranking of America's 500 most expensive ZIP codes are in California.

Image: No. 1: 91008

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