5 Places to Live Like the Wealthy for Less

Wealthy: Beverly Hills, Calif.

Cheaper: Hollywood

There was a time when they would let any hillbilly with poor marksmanship, a pickup truck piled high with personal belongings and a little oil money into Beverly Hills with a smile. Now anything less than the $1.9 million median home price wouldn't even secure you a spot in the local divorcee's Wilderness Girls troop.

Perhaps there's the stray "dingbat" apartment here or there, but the overwhelming majority of Beverly Hills and the area surrounding have prices that have been star-quality for a good, long time. Beverly Hills is ringed by the Hollywood Hills ($971,200 median home price), Bel Air ($1.74 million), Westwood ($655,700), Century City ($642,600), West Los Angeles ($760,300), Pico-Robertson ($667,600) and Mid-City West ($800,500) neighborhoods, which are all well above the city's $375,900 median.

The only neighborhood directly adjacent to Beverly Hills that even remotely meets that city's median is Hollywood, where a $417,200 price tag has led to increasing gentrification in West Hollywood and throughout the rest of the neighborhood in general. High-end restaurants, coffee shops and bars are open, celebrities and paparazzi are back and home prices were on the rise until the recent dip in the housing market. The lingering memories of drug dealers and 24-hour pizza places may buy a homebuyer some time in snatching up some rich-folk-adjacent property here, but considering it's the one piece of the Beverly Hills ring that isn't ridiculously high-priced as of yet, Hollywood's rebound shouldn't be bogged down much longer.