Living in Beverly Hills, CA

Beverly Hills is a small, self-governed city (its own police and fire departments, its own school district) embedded within LA’s Westside, built around the "Golden Triangle" retail core of Rodeo Drive, Wilshire, and Santa Monica Boulevard. The Beverly Hills Flats offer a walkable grid of tree-lined streets; the Hills — Trousdale Estates and the Beverly Hills Post Office area — offer gated hillside privacy and some of the city’s most architecturally significant homes.

The population is small (around 31,000), skews older (median age 48) and affluent (median household income near $133,000), and draws heavily from entertainment and business elites, international buyers from the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, and increasingly finance and tech-adjacent high earners drawn by Westside proximity.

For a relocating executive or high earner, the pitch is straightforward: the 90210 zip code carries genuine brand recognition, Beverly Hills Unified School District is independently run and well regarded (its high school rates 9/10 on GreatSchools), and the Flats are unusually walkable for LA — a real point of familiarity for someone coming from a walkable Bay Area suburb.

The neighborhood is also on the leading edge of a major transit shift: the D Line (Purple Line) subway extension opened its first new stations in May 2026, with a second phase adding stops in Beverly Hills proper and Century City expected in 2027 — the city’s first rail service since 1954, and a genuine change to how residents will commute to Century City, Westwood, and Downtown.