As part of our ongoing search for demographic and economic outliers, we wanted to find the place in each state with the most expensive houses.
The Minnesota Population Center’s 2012 American Community Survey IPUMS is a collection of slightly modified (for statistical and privacy purposes) individual responses to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, an annual project to better understand the population of the US.
Using this data, Business Insider estimated the median house value for each of the Census Bureau’s Public Use Microdata Areas. These are a way of slicing up the country into areas that contain about 100,000 people. For densely populated cities, these correspond to neighborhoods, or groups of neighborhoods. For less densely populated areas, like in the Mountain West, they can be entire groups of counties.
Here’s the area with the highest median house value in every state:
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Unsurprisingly, the coastal states include towns and neighborhoods that are extremely pricey. The two places with the highest house values in our list are the heart of Silicon Valley in California and Lower Manhattan in New York.
Meanwhile, houses are much less expensive in the middle of the country. The lowest values on our list were in Benton County, Arkansas and the easternmost part of West Virginia.
Here’s a table showing the places, ranked by median house value:
Click to enlarge.