A drone view of the Greenbrook neighborhood in Danville, Calif., on Thursday, June 20, 2024. Mount Diablo can be seen in the background. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
The list of Bay Area cities where the typical home value tops $1 million is no longer remarkable — most towns qualify. The real badge of honor these days? Joining the 2-million-dollar home club.
That status has been reached by 33 cities in the nine-county Bay Area. Beyond the usual suspects like bucolic Atherton and Woodside, the list includes a number of towns on the edges of the Bay Area that have seen home values climb as remote work has made them a more attractive option.
One of the newcomers to the list is Danville, a town of 43,000 south of Mount Diablo where the median price has nearly doubled in the last eight years to $2 million from $1.2 million in 2016.
Jennifer Youngblood’s parents bought a home in Danville in 1970. The price then? $37,500.
It’s in that same home where, 30 years later, Youngblood and her husband, John, raised their two children, now 18 and 21.
Plenty in the town has changed — the schools have been torn down and renovated as the population has nearly doubled. The hills where high schoolers would go cow tipping are now home to multi-million dollar mansions. The active train tracks Youngblood would walk along on her way to school have since been decommissioned and transformed into a 30-mile-long paved trail for hikers and bikers extending from Pleasanton to Martinez.
“I feel lucky that my parents made that investment so many years ago,” Youngblood said. “We’ve just watched the property values increase.”
Without her parents’ house, Youngblood isn’t sure she would have been able to afford the same quality of life in Danville. “If you’re not a dual-income household making at least $300,000, it’s off the table to live here,” she said.
Real estate agent Kevin Cox said prices skyrocketed during the pandemic as buyers sought out communities like Danville with larger lots, and paid less attention to commute times. (To downtown San Francisco or San Jose from Danville, it’s a 45-minute drive without traffic.) Among the cities on the list, Danville had one of the highest growth rates, with values jumping 7% in a year.
Though the city has added about 20,000 residents since the 70s, it retains a small-town feel.
“My kids can walk to two schools, or ride their bike to the high school,” Cox said. “It’s quiet, peaceful, safe. People want to raise their kids here.”
Another factor pushing up home values?
“There’s not really any more places to build here,” Cox said.
Many of the towns in the two-million-dollar club have retained their status as wealthy enclaves by making it nearly impossible to build there. Woodside, where the typical home is valued at $3.8 million, famously declared itself a mountain lion habitat to try to get out of a new state law that allows developers to build up to four units on single-family lots. In Lafayette, with a typical home value of $2 million, residents went to battle with a developer for 12 years over a 315-unit development that had to clear two lawsuits, a ballot referendum and over 100 public hearings to move forward. And in Atherton, tech executives and venture capitalists and basketball star Steph Curry banded together to fight the city’s plan to add 348 new units.
The number of cities with values over $2 million could soon get longer, too. The median price for single-family homes sold across the nine-county Bay Area was $1.46 million in May 2024 — the fourth straight month of price increases. In April, the median home price across Santa Clara County exceeded $2 million for the first time.
