Posted by Aaron, a resident of the Palo Alto Hills neighborhood, on Feb 11, 2010 at 5:26 pm

This bodes well for academic achievement in the Bay Area. It also means that our property values will do relatively well.

Posted by Resident, a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood, on Feb 11, 2010 at 5:39 pm

I don't think this surprises anyone living here, but if we make any comments I expect the editors will delete them.

Posted by Lies and Statistics, a resident of the Barron Park neighborhood, on Feb 11, 2010 at 5:54 pm

Or perhaps it has to do with the fact that there are fewer unique Asian surnames. For example, if 1000 homes were sold to 998 Caucasians with different last names, but 2 with the last name "Nguyen", then a Vietnamese surname would be the most common surname even though they represent less than 1% of the total home buyers. A better statistic would simply be the percentage of homes sold to Asian buyers.

Posted by wsj, a resident of another community, on Feb 11, 2010 at 5:58 pm

I'm guessing that there is no official data on the number of homes sold to members of each ethnic group, so journalists have to make up easily computed metrics like this. On the other hand, it is kind of interesting that all 10 of the most common names are Asian-sounding names.

Posted by Outside Observer, a resident of another community, on Feb 11, 2010 at 7:58 pm

Quote from a Steely Dan song, updated for the 21st century:

"You are obsolete, look at all the Asians on the street"

Chuc Mung Nam Moi! :)