Lotta folks in Mountain Brook paying my bills and building my business. Hope they keep all the money in the world to spend. Rich people are going to live somewhere folks.

No way!

Iplan on moving there if my IP has a good year. Why wouldnt you want to live in a nice place with nice folk. I dont see nothing wrtong with it

I don't begrudge anyone for living in Mtn Brooke or any other upscale neighborhood take Buckhead in Atlanta for example, but it would not be for me. If I could afford to live in a place like that I could afford to buy a few hundred acres and live on it. That would be much more to my liking and more enjoyable to me. They are good people everywhere including Mtn Brooke and three miles down a dirt road out in the country.

"Driving on 280 is akin to playing Russian roulette.
..
Nobody has a yard. Some houses have a small putting green on one or two sides, but no yards.

Where do you park your tractors?
.
I'm pretty sure, if I could afford to live in mountain brook I could certainly afford someplace better."


Not quite sure where some of that comes from.

Driving on 280 is what the people in Greystone, Meadow Brook, and Highland Lakes do.....until they figure out that Mountain Brook is 10 minutes from the Downtown law and medical offices and you go AROUND Highway 280.

The yards in the flat part of Crestline are about nonexistent, but Old Mountain Brook, Cherokee Bend, and Brookwood Forest are either 1930s spacious, or typical 70s suburbia. Same yards you find all over the country.

Uh, you park your tractor at your hunting place, where you use it.

If you want to live in a suburb of Birmingham, you can live in several of the cities with nationally ranked school systems, or you can live where you want, and pay for private schools. The money comes out about even.

I have some friends in the Brook who are great folks, but I wouldn't want to live there. I have no kids in school, and for what houses there cost, I would be living out Corridor X or up I-65 where I could have 150-200 acres.

Cities, even small ones, hold no charm for me.

I work in Alpharetta, and live almost as far toward the woods as I can and still make myself go to work every day. Farm is a little further out, and we will move there this year.

Some great deer hunting in my cousin's back yard there. But it's bow only and it can be challenging to recover one before he gets in a swimming pool and dies.

Really be a challenge to try to avoid all those cameras and get it out of the pool before you got caught. I bet they think bambi is really cute until they start eating all those expensive plants and shrubs then it's open season.

They used to have horses there and ride them all over the place. My father-in-law and his brother used to squirrel hunt behind the house before 280 and Brookwood Mall were there.

Most people there are great. However, they can be awful too. I have a good friend that I made while accompanying my wife to her debut balls in college. He was from Trussville and I was from Hoover. We didn't mingle well as poor white trash. We both ended up hanging at the bar at Bham Country Club talking to the bar tenders. Still good friends to this day. He married a doctor's daughter too.

I’m trying to think how best to explain my position on this. I’m just not a big fan of Birmingham living. That said, if I had to live in Bham and could afford it I would pick Mtn Brook or Mt Laurel. I had the best of both worlds growing up in Arab. I lived in a neighborhood near a golf course but had grandparents who lived out in Union Grove and Ruth. It was also nothing to run over to Huntsville for anything I wanted to do when I was bored. So, I had city and country living. I wouldn’t want to give up the convenience of a town/city, but I wouldn’t want to have to live in Bham to have that. I know there are a lot of folks who love Bham and I definitely understand why they love it there…I’m just not one of those dying to live there.

Yea, I don't think you are being honest at all. Where did you get your statistics on Trust Funds? How many of your farmer or logger or mechanic friends work for their Daddy? I bet less than 10% of the people I know from MB have a trust fund but the ones I do know have probably (I guess) given more money to charities and the poor than the rest of the county and surrounding counties combined. Jealousy will cloud ones vision quicker than anything; other than being completely uneducated.

The wagons have been circled!

And how many hard working folks with land in the country inherited it?? I know quite a few; and good for them.
Just different versions of the lucky sperm club.

If you are talking about Brookies.... Most inherited it. I'm not hating on anyone I'm just being factual. It is the richest Zip in the State by far, 2 of the top in the country.

If I were to rank the cities in Alabama as far as new business, job opportunity, etc. Birmingham would be lower than expected on that list. I'm talking about NEW Wealth Generated. Birmingham is pretty stagnant and a lot of the Over the Mountain communities are getting kinda run down. I've lived here a long time maybe I just know how old things are because I remember when they were new. I see some development projects going on downtown because the real estate is cheap particularly for institutional investors. You can get a lot for your money but for a city this size I don't see the influx of new business that would equate to the overall growth of the city. In fact if anything happened to Regions (acquisition, etc.) this town is toast. Serious trouble.

Objectively... you have the highest income zip codes in the State by far and sub-par business environment and you tell me where the money is being generated? It isn't. It is just turned round and round like a hamster wheel.

That's called "Old Money". You can call it Daddy money, Trust Fund money, whatever you like but that's the situation. If you don't agree I don't care. That's my opinion. Our offices are here but we do business/projects all over the country in all kinds of markets. I feel like I have a pretty good feel for where Birmingham stands and I can do much better somewhere else which is what I'm doing. No reason to move out of B'ham. If you are doing business in 17 states moving doesn't change that. I'd have moved to Nashville 15 years ago if I didn't have to work as much as I do. I like B'ham because it is centralized, close to the beach, better market for talent than Montgomery, etc.

This report actually says that Point Clear is the richest zip in the state (based off IRS reportings), not Mountain Brook. Mountain Brook is also not anywhere close to one of the richest zip's in the country.

Not only that- I only know a couple of people that actually bought land off the sweat of their brow. Folks with 500-1,000 acres typically don't buy it, they inherit it. That's a multi-million dollar asset, for free.

You ever heard of the Hamptons? Or Connecticut?

Ummm, you realize his context is/was the state of Alabama?

According to data, the average income tax return for the Mountain Brook zip code (35223) is about $165K, which is well below Point Clear, two zip codes in freaking Mississippi, and hundreds of others throughout the country.

https://www.edq.com/globalassets/infographics/wealthiest-zip-codes.png

That amount does not match up with the cost of real estate in the Tiny Kingdom.

Sounds like a lot of inherited money to me, but maybe it's not. I don't pretend to know, nor do I care enough to find out.

Not saying there aren't self-made people there...there are.

Exactly - when you are talking about houses that cost $350 on about the lowest end. And that's slumming. Average is likely close to $500k.

Don't miss the forest for the trees... Point Clear might be higher depending on what you are looking at but Mt. Brook is split into 2 Zips and has a LOT more people.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-zip-codes-every-state-100023069.html

https://wealth.mongabay.com/cities/ALABAMA.html

The Washington Post ranked 650 super zip codes based on 2 factors = income+education and the only 2 in Alabama were Mt. Brook.