The richest town in Alabama is probably an easy guess for most people who live in the state, but you may not know that it is the second-wealthiest area in the South and has one of the lowest poverty rates in the country.
Mountain Brook, a suburb of Birmingham, is the wealthiest town in Alabama. According to 24/7 Wall Street, Mountain Brook has a median household income of $130,259 and a poverty rate of 2.6%. The town’s median household income is over three times the state’s average income of $42,830 and its poverty rate is the 17th lowest of towns included on the list.
24/7 Wall Street listed the richest town in each state based on data gathered from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which included median household income, poverty rate, workforce composition, and percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree. The website only studied towns with populations less than 25,000 and excluded college towns (defined by having 40% of the population enrolled in undergraduate or graduate school). Mountain Brook had the tenth highest population of the towns that were studied with 20,484 residents. The towns’ populations ranged from 1,650 residents (Edgeworth, Pennsylvania) to 24,871 (Madison, Mississippi).
Of the wealthiest towns in each state of the south, Mountain Brook came in second, surpassed only by Belle Meade, Tennessee. Belle Meade’s median household income is $202,061 – almost four times the national median income of $53,482. But Belle Meade isn’t even the wealthiest town in the U.S. That title belongs to Scarsdale, New York. The town of 17,471 has a median income of $241,453 and a 2.1% poverty rate.
Scarsdale’s median income is well over four times the national average, but Saco, the wealthiest town in Maine, has a median household income that is $871 less than the national average. Saco also has the highest poverty rate (11.6%) of any town included on the list, while Dry Run, Ohio claims the lowest town poverty rate at just 0.5%.
Check out the full list to learn more about the richest town in each state.
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