77005, a tony municipality where the city’s doctors and lawyers live
Earlier this month, the Chronicle published a report that named West University the state’s wealthiest town. Hugged by Houston, West U, which, makes up the 77005 Zip code, is its own municipality within the 610 Loop, and it’s vastly different than Houston and the rest of the country.
While about 1 percent of American adults work in legal professions, West University’s 77005 ZIP code is a hotbed for legal workers, with 11 percent of the area’s workforce claiming jobs in this field. The national legal workforce includes a wide variety of actual job titles — everything from paralegals to partners at whiteshoe firms — but salaries in West U point to more of the latter. On average, legal workers across the country earn $74,408 a year, according to the Census, just a small percentage of the average $205,917 West U legal workers rake in per year.
Doctors? They’ve got those, too. Fourteen percent of West U workers are in medical professions, compared with 6 percent nationwide, and the West U health care workers earn more than double the national average, which means more doctors and fewer nurses.
So what are all these doctors and lawyers doing with their salaries? More than 66 percent of families in the 77005 ZIP code send their high schoolers to private school, compared with 9.4 percent nationally and 7.1 percent of Houstonians.
And a quick drive through the neighborhood will tell you they’re buying bigger houses than typical American families. And the homes are older, too. About one in five homes in the 77005 ZIP code were built before 1939 — positively ancient for Houston — compared with about one in eight nationally.