Retirement looks very different when you’ve spent decades in the public eye. For most people, picking a place to settle down comes down to climate, cost, and proximity to family. For retired celebrities, the checklist runs a good deal longer. Add in paparazzi density, personal safety concerns, estate taxes, and the near-impossibility of living anonymously in certain zip codes, and the math changes fast.
Some cities that seem like natural fits for the famous and wealthy turn out to be the places they run from the moment the spotlight dims. Here are seven cities that routinely land on that quiet, unspoken avoid list – and the very real reasons why.
Los Angeles, California: Too Familiar, Too Watched
It seems counterintuitive. LA is where careers are made, where mansions fill the hillsides, where the industry lives. Yet many retiring celebrities quietly put distance between themselves and the city the moment they step back from full-time work. The reason is straightforward: there are plenty of celebrities who thrive off the bright flashes from paparazzi cameras, stepping out of their lavish homes in popular A-list cities knowing photographers will be waiting – and for those who want peace, that’s exactly the problem.
Los Angeles continues to face substantial public-safety challenges even as the city invests in policing reforms, with over 27,000 violent crimes recorded in 2024, producing a violent-crime rate well above the national average. Property crime layers on top of that. Los Angeles as a whole maintains a crime rate roughly thirty percent higher than the national average, though geographic disparities are significant, with affluent western neighborhoods experiencing far lower rates.
New York City, New York: Glamour With a Crushing Price Tag
New York carries undeniable cultural weight. For a retired celebrity who wants world-class healthcare, museums, and dining, it checks a lot of boxes. The problem is the cost. New York City’s cost of living is more than twice the national average, and in some boroughs like Manhattan, costs climb even higher. For someone trying to live quietly on a managed estate rather than a full working income, that gap stings.
State income tax rates in New York range from four to nearly eleven percent, with property taxes averaging among the highest in the country at roughly 1.64 percent of a home’s value statewide. There’s also an estate tax to consider. New York is one of the few states with an estate tax, and it uses a “cliff” rule – if an estate exceeds the threshold by even a small amount, the entire estate may be taxed rather than just the amount over the limit. That particular detail tends to focus the minds of wealthy retirees.
San Francisco, California: Beautiful, Expensive, and Getting Harder
San Francisco has always had a magnetic pull – the Bay, the culture, the food scene. Still, the numbers work against almost any retiree who runs them honestly. It is nearly impossible for retirees to successfully live in San Francisco, as housing costs are among the highest in the nation and other expenses like gas are also exorbitantly high. For a celebrity accustomed to certain standards of space and privacy, the financial pressure doesn’t ease just because the bank account is large.
The city also struggles with livability issues that don’t discriminate by wealth. Street-level disorder in many neighborhoods makes simple daily life less comfortable than retirement should be. Some famous people just can’t stand the craziness and lack of personal space and do not want anything to do with photographers who get into their faces and make their day difficult. In a dense, hypervisible city like San Francisco, that particular stress doesn’t go away with age.
Honolulu, Hawaii: Paradise With a Hidden Tax Trap
Few places on earth look better in a retirement daydream than Honolulu. Warm ocean, mountain backdrops, the pace of island life. The reality, though, is that everything imported onto an island costs more, and almost everything in Hawaii is imported. Honolulu’s cost of living is sky-high, with housing, utilities and imported goods all adding significantly to monthly expenses. For retired celebrities who want spacious, private properties with strong security, the price per square foot becomes genuinely punishing.
The visibility problem doesn’t disappear either. Honolulu is a destination city. Tourists swarm its most desirable neighborhoods year-round, and a recognizable face in a small, walkable environment gets noticed fast. Celebrity privacy involves the right to withhold information, and that includes personal details like addresses and family members – all things that become harder to protect in a compact island city where few secrets stay secret for long.
Newark, New Jersey: Cost Without the Upside
Newark occasionally gets floated as an alternative to the New York metro, given its proximity to Manhattan. For retiring celebrities, it offers the worst of both worlds. Newark’s proximity to New York City drives up the cost of living while the median income remains much lower than needed for comfort, and even with average earnings, taxes, property costs and healthcare expenses can drain retirement savings. A high-profile retiree doesn’t need the NYC adjacency perk; they need privacy and ease.
The security environment in Newark adds another layer of concern. Factors like cost of living, weather, crime rate, and tax rates all matter when choosing a city for retirement, and Newark tends to score poorly on more than one of those measures. There’s simply little upside for someone who has options and is specifically trying to exit the pressures of public life.
Miami, Florida: Fame Magnet in Disguise
Miami is where many celebrities move when they leave Los Angeles, drawn by Florida’s well-known tax advantages and the warm climate. The irony is that Miami has become almost as star-saturated as LA. Some celebrities choose to move out of Los Angeles as an easy start, like George and Amal Clooney’s private Lake Como hideaway or Sandra Bullock’s home in New Orleans – two choices that deliberately skip Miami’s spotlight entirely.
The city’s nightlife culture, its paparazzi presence around South Beach and Brickell, and its steady stream of influencers and tabloid photographers make truly quiet retirement difficult. Smaller towns, unlikely celebrity cities, and remote places are the choices for stars who want to get out of the public eye and live relatively normal lives without being hounded around the clock. Miami, increasingly, is none of those things. It traded its laid-back reputation for an image that actively attracts the kind of attention most retirees want to leave behind.
Chicago, Illinois: Cold Winters, High Taxes, and Fading Appeal
Chicago has genuine strengths. World-class architecture, excellent hospitals, a serious food culture. Yet it keeps falling off the lists of places where retired celebrities actually settle, and the reasons are mostly structural. Illinois has one of the highest state and local tax burdens in the country. The city itself has faced persistent fiscal challenges, which translate into ongoing uncertainty around property values and city services in many neighborhoods.
The worst places to retire tend to lag in quality of life, healthcare, and affordability – and Chicago, for all its genuine appeal, doesn’t score cleanly on any of those three. Retirees who dream of sunny, snow-free winters may find a harsh climate a dealbreaker, with long gray winters making travel and outdoor activities more difficult. For someone accustomed to controlling their environment, months of ice and heavy snow on top of high taxes and uneven public safety simply tips the balance the wrong way. The city has its loyalists, but quiet celebrity retirements rarely happen there.
