- New York City is now home to 349,500 millionaires. The city has the most in the world.
- Meanwhile, the rising cost of living is forcing residents with lower incomes to leave the city.
- Growth in global wealth is driven by the strong performance of financial markets, Henley & Partners said.
New York City is the metropolis with the largest number of millionaires, according to a ranking published Tuesday by the immigration consulting firm Henley & Partners.
Some wealthy residents have moved out, but many more have moved in during the pandemic, bringing the number of millionaires in the Big Apple to 349,500, more than any other city in the world.
With a population of 8.2 million, that means one in 24 New York residents is a millionaire. This figure is up 48% from a decade ago, according to Henley data.
With 60 billionaires, New York also claims the title of city with the second highest number of ultra-rich residents, just behind the Bay Area’s 68 billionaires.
This ranking could be further evidence that New York is increasingly becoming a place for the rich, as the cost of living in the city skyrockets.
Residents with the lowest incomes are packing their bags. Nearly 200,000 New Yorkers earning less than $172,000 migrated out of the city between 2017 and 2022, according to a report from the Fiscal Policy Institute released in December.
For many, the exodus was the result of record high costs of living. The average two-bedroom apartment in the city costs $4,950, up 26% from 2023, according to apartment search site Zumper. Childcare has also become incredibly unaffordable for many people – a the family must earn around $300,000 per year pay for childcare in the city. The city’s median family income is around $75,000, meaning 80 percent of the city’s residents cannot afford child care.
Mark Radcliffe is one of many New Yorkers leaving the city for a better life.
Radcliffe spent more than 12 years in New York before moving to Tulsa, Oklahoma in September 2020, he wrote last year for Business Insider.
“I was paying $4,000 a month for my one-bedroom apartment in the West Village,” Radcliffe said of his rent in New York. In Tulsa, his monthly expenses dropped to $2,000 a month. He managed to save enough to buy a three-bedroom house.
On the other side of the country, the Bay Area, which includes San Francisco and neighboring counties, has the second highest number of millionaires, with 305,700, according to Henley data.
The company reported that Miami, which is seeing an influx of ultra-wealthy Americans due to better weather and lower taxes, has seen the number of millionaires increase 78% over the past 10 years, to 35 300.
In Asia, Henley said Tokyo had the highest number of people with seven-figure net worths, at 298,300, down 5% from a decade ago.
Singapore has become a hotbed for millionaire migration due to its political and economic stability and lack of capital gains tax. The city-state is fourth on Henley’s global list of millionaire hotspots and has seen a 64% increase in millionaires compared to 10 years ago. Given its small population of 5.92 million, it shares New York’s statistics of one millionaire for every 24 residents.
businessinsider
