Super-rich and looking for a place to call home? Luckily there's a short-list of possible locations.
The homes of Ultra High Net Worth (UHNWs) individuals, or people who are worth over $30 million, often cluster around specific cities, according to a new report from Wealth-X, a company that assists private wealth firms, luxury brands, and not-for-profit organizations find potential clients.
There are currently 57,860 UHNW individuals in the U.S., Wealth-X finds, and the number of millionaires worldwide reportedly increased by 22 percent last year, indicating that those clusters of wealth might only get more dense.
The true center of the super-rich remains New York City. With 7,270 super-rich residents, the Big Apple has nearly double the number ultra high net worth households than the second-place city, Los Angeles, which is home to 4,350 members of the elite club.
"Certain geographic clusters generate and attract wealth,” Wealth-X Co-Founder David Friedman said in a press release. "While Occupy Wall Street protesters may direct their anger at wealthy, New York bankers, the more relevant question is, ‘What about New York, or any of the other cities, has engendered unique ecosystems of education, risk capital and human capital that result in prosperity[?]'"
The geographic concentration of wealth in New York may be one of the reasons why the movement start in the heart of the city's financial district. Out of a number of grievances, income inequality has surfaced as a dominant issue at Occupy Wall Street. That could be because the world's millionaires now control 35.6 percent of global wealth, even though they account for less than 1 percent of its population, according to Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Report.
Last year, for example, Houston, which ranks sixth on the Wealth-X list, increased it's number of millionaires by 9.6 percent, 24/7 Wall St. reports. The year before that, 2008 to 2009, San Jose's millionaire population increased by 24.5 percent.
Here are the cities with the most ultra high net worth individuals, according to Wealth-X:
