Urban legend holds that every backyard in Marin County has a hot tub, and you’ve got to be a millionaire to live there.
We haven’t counted hot tubs lately, but a glance at the statistics quickly debunks the everyone’s-a-millionaire story.
In fact, Marin County ranks squarely in the middle for individual median income among the nine Bay Area counties, according to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 1011 American Community Survey.
The Marin Independent Journal recently compared Census Bureau income data across the Bay Area and discovered that its residents had a positively middle-class median income of $42,211 last year, trailing Santa Clara ($47,382), San Mateo ($45,810), San Francisco ($45,543), and Contra Costa ($43,562) counties. Marin ranked ahead of Alameda ($41,492), Solano ($36,582), Sonoma ($36,468), and Napa ($36,035) counties.
Marin County does, however, have the second-highest percentage of workers who earn top salaries — $75,000 or higher — among Bay Area counties: 31.5 percent. Santa Clara County came in No. 1, with 33.8 percent of its workers making $75,000 or more.
“Marin is a suburban county so you will have a lot of lower-wage professional service and retail jobs for local residents, but also the high-wage earning families who work in urban areas,” Robert Eyler, CEO of the Marin Economic Forum, told the newspaper.
(Tiburon photo courtesy of Royterp, via Flickr.)