Santa Monica, CA

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• Top 6 Suburbs of Los Angeles

  Currently #2 · score 0

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• Pasadena, CA

  Pasadena has hosted the Rose Parade every New Year's Day since 1890, a tradition older than the Rose Bowl football game it now precedes, and the parade's elaborately decorated floats — built entirely from flowers, seeds, and other natural materials — have made Pasadena's Colorado Boulevard one of the most nationally televised stretches of road in the country every January 1st. The Rose Bowl stadium itself, opened in 1922, has hosted more college football national championship games than any other venue and served as the site of five Super Bowls, giving the city a sports-hosting legacy well beyond its own modest size of roughly 140,000 residents. Caltech, one of the most academically rigorous science and engineering institutions in the world, sits in central Pasadena and operates NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory just north of the city, giving Pasadena a genuine aerospace and scientific research identity layered on top of its parade-and-football-game public image. Served by the Metro L Line (formerly the Gold Line), Pasadena's combination of a globally televised New Year's tradition, a historically significant football stadium, and a serious research-university and NASA-lab presence has made it one of the most nationally recognized suburb names anywhere in the Los Angeles area, and Old Pasadena's restored historic downtown has become one of the more walkable commercial districts in the entire region.

• Manhattan Beach, CA

  Manhattan Beach anchors the northern end of LA's South Bay beach cities, and it holds a genuine claim as one of the birthplaces of organized beach volleyball — the sport's modern two-person format took shape on Southern California beaches through the 20th century, and Manhattan Beach has hosted top-level professional tournaments on its sand courts for decades, cementing its status within the sport's own history. The city's downtown, built around a pedestrian pier and a walkable grid of restaurants and boutiques just a block or two from the sand, has kept a genuinely small-beach-town feel despite property values that rank among the highest of any coastal community in the entire Los Angeles metro area. Manhattan Beach's public schools, particularly the Mira Costa High School area, have consistently ranked among the strongest in the South Bay, a reputation that's drawn families willing to pay a substantial premium for beach proximity combined with strong academics, a combination that's kept the city's housing market among the tightest and most competitive in the entire region. The city's distinctive network of car-free beachfront "walk streets" — narrow pedestrian-only lanes lined with densely packed homes running perpendicular to the beach — has become one of its most architecturally distinctive features, reflecting an early-20th-century development pattern rarely replicated in newer Southern California coastal construction.

• Beverly Hills, CA

  Beverly Hills incorporated as its own independent city in 1914 specifically so residents could avoid being annexed into the rapidly growing city of Los Angeles surrounding it, a decision that's let the small city — just under 6 square miles — maintain its own separate police and fire departments, school district, and municipal government for well over a century since. Rodeo Drive, the city's three-block luxury shopping street, has become one of the most internationally recognized retail addresses in the world, lined with flagship stores for nearly every major global luxury fashion house and drawing visitors specifically to window-shop or shop the strip regardless of whether they have any other reason to visit Los Angeles. The city's residential streets, particularly north of Sunset Boulevard in the area known as the Beverly Hills flats and the hillside neighborhoods above it, have housed generations of entertainment-industry stars and executives, and the zip code 90210 became so culturally loaded that it was used directly as the title of a nationally broadcast television drama in the 1990s. Beverly Hills's combination of over a century of genuine municipal independence from Los Angeles, one of the most famous luxury shopping streets in the world, and a sustained concentration of entertainment-industry wealth has made it one of the most internationally recognized suburb names of any city on Earth, despite its small physical size.

• Calabasas, CA

  Calabasas sits in the Santa Monica Mountains at the western edge of the San Fernando Valley, and its extensive network of gated communities and large, custom-built estates has made it one of the more consistently private and security-conscious affluent suburbs anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area. The city gained substantial national visibility over the 2000s and 2010s as the home base of the Kardashian-Jenner family, whose reality television programming frequently featured Calabasas homes and local businesses, giving the small city — incorporated only in 1991, making it one of the more recently established municipalities in the entire region — an outsized level of national pop-culture recognition relative to its modest population of roughly 24,000. The Commons at Calabasas, an open-air shopping and dining center built in a Mediterranean architectural style, has functioned as the city's primary retail and social hub since opening in the early 2000s, drawing shoppers and diners specifically for its combination of upscale retail and a walkable, outdoor mall format uncommon in much of the surrounding Valley. Calabasas's combination of Santa Monica Mountains scenery, an extensive network of gated luxury communities, and a level of reality-television-driven name recognition unusual for a suburb of its size has made it one of the more culturally distinctive and consistently expensive communities in the western San Fernando Valley area.

• Malibu, CA

  Malibu stretches across roughly 21 miles of Pacific coastline northwest of Los Angeles, and that combination of surfable beach breaks and dramatic coastal bluffs made it a magnet for the Southern California surf culture that took shape through the mid-20th century, with Surfrider Beach in particular regarded as one of the sport's most historically significant breaks in the entire state. The city has drawn entertainment-industry wealth to its beachfront for nearly a century, and the stretch of oceanfront homes along Carbon Beach — informally nicknamed "Billionaire's Beach" — has become one of the most expensive and closely watched residential real estate markets in the entire country, despite Malibu not incorporating as its own city until 1991. Pepperdine University's hillside campus, overlooking the Pacific from bluffs above the Pacific Coast Highway, gives Malibu a small but genuine higher-education presence layered on top of its beach-town and celebrity-residence identity, and the historic Malibu Pier, first built in 1905, remains a working pier open for fishing and dining along the same coastline. Malibu's combination of a historically significant surf culture, one of the most expensive stretches of residential coastline in the country, and dramatic bluff-and-ocean scenery along Pacific Coast Highway has made it one of the most nationally recognized coastal communities anywhere in the United States, despite a year-round population of only around 10,000 residents.