It was the best of times in Newport Beach, it was the worst of times in Reading."

With apologies to Charles Dickens, that could well be the start A Tale of Two Cities if his 1859 masterpiece had been written today about the economic quality of modern American life. After all, we’re living in a time when economists talk hopefully about a recovery, but the recession still holds the nation in its merciless grip.

Key indicators tell this unhappy story. The national unemployment rate might have dropped from the double-digit level it hit in December, but the January rate of 9.7 percent is nothing to cheer about. Average wages have declined for two consecutive quarters, something that last occurred in the late 1970s.

But the pain is not spread equally. Many areas are being battered by the full force of the Great Recession—Detroit and Phoenix are prime examples—yet others are remarkably comfortable.

Prominent among the latter is Newport Beach, which hugs the California coast 40 miles south of Los Angeles. The self-proclaimed “Beverly Hills of Orange County” has felt a few minor economic tremors in recent months, but remains impressively affluent.

(Explore an interactive that breaks down the survey results and take a tour of the nation by clicking here.)

Its combination of astronomical incomes and luxurious homes, in fact, earns Newport Beach first place in the Portfolio.com/bizjournals new ranking of America’s wealth centers:

• Newport Beach’s per capita income (PCI) of $86,586 easily leads the 420 U.S. communities with populations above 75,000, and it triples the national PCI of $27,589. (Per capita income is the average amount of money earned by each resident of a community in a given year.)
• More than a quarter of Newport Beach’s households (28.6 percent, to be exact) have annual incomes of more than $200,000. Just two other cities in the study group are above 17 percent—Newton, Massachusetts, and Pleasanton, California—though neither does any better than 24 percent.
• The median value for homes in Newport Beach exceeds $1 million. Another California city, Santa Barbara, is the only other place analyzed by Portfolio.com/bizjournals that can make that claim. (A median is a midpoint, with half of all homes being worth more and half worth less.)

Portfolio.com/bizjournals created a six-part formula to assess the relative affluence of all 420 cities, incorporated towns, and unincorporated urban areas with populations of more than 75,000. Places with high income levels and large inventories of expensive homes naturally earn the highest scores.

The study’s raw data come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey, the most recent source for federal statistics at the local level. All figures are for specific municipalities, not for the broader metropolitan areas to which they belong.

Right behind Newport Beach on the list of America’s wealth centers is Newton, which is 10 miles due west of Boston. Nearly 23 percent of the households in Newton earn more than $200,000 a year. And it’s one of only seven communities in the study group with median household incomes above $100,000.

Rounding out the top five in the overall rankings are Pleasanton; Arlington, Virginia; and Santa Monica, California. They’re located outside San Jose, Washington, and Los Angeles, respectively.

The highest-rated major city—a classification limited to places with populations of at least half a million—is San Francisco, which ranks eighth on the overall list of wealth centers.

It’s commonly assumed that affluence is confined to small, exclusive communities. But the Portfolio.com/bizjournals rankings disprove that belief. The top-10 wealth centers have a combined population of 1.8 million, yet are at the very top of the economic scale:

• The collective per capita income for the 10 communities is $52,400. That’s 90 percent higher than the national average.
• Sixteen percent of all households in the 10 wealth centers draw annual incomes greater than $200,000. The corresponding figure for the nation as a whole is 4.3 percent.
• Median home values range from $486,500 to $1 million in the 10 places atop the Portfolio.com/bizjournals rankings. The national median is $197,600.

There is a flip side to these results, of course. Several communities fall light-years short of qualifying as wealth centers.

Reading, Pennsylvania, which has 80,000 residents, is dead last in the rankings. Its per capita income of $14,120 is roughly half the national average. Not a single household in Reading pulls in $200,000 a year.

Joining Reading in the bottom five are Camden, New Jersey; Flint, Michigan; Brownsville, Texas; and Gary, Indiana. The lowest-rated major city is Detroit, which is sixth from the bottom.

The collective per capita income for the 10 communities with the lowest wealth scores is $15,370. That’s 44 percent below the nationwide PCI of $27,589—and 82 percent below the corresponding figure of $86,586 in Newport Beach.

(Dig deeper into the nation's demographics by exploring more reports on how Americans live, play and work in the Portfolio.com special report U.S. Uncovered.)