All cities are not created equal

...but some are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and among these are Life, Liberty, and the ability to attract the Wealthy. My apologies to Thomas Jefferson.

At the end of the preceding post, I included the factoid that New York City has more millionaires than any other place on earth. According to the site where I found that bit of information, the top 20 places of concentrated wealth on our planet are:

Rank	City	Millionaires	Billionaires
#1	New York City, USA	345,600	59
#2	Tokyo, Japan	304,900	12
#3	San Francisco, USA	276,400	62
#4	London, England	272,400	38
#5	Singapore	249,800	26
#6	Los Angeles, USA	192,400	34
#7	Chicago, USA	160,100	28
#8	Houston, USA	132,600	25
#9	Beijing, China	131,500	44
#10	Shanghai, China	130,100	42
#11	Sydney, Australia	129,500	16
#12	Hong Kong, China	125,100	28
#13	Frankfurt, Germany	117,400	14
#14	Toronto, Canada	116,100	17
#15	Zurich, Switzerland	105,100	12
#16	Seoul, South Korea	102,100	25
#17	Melbourne, Australia	97,300	12
#18	Dallas, USA	92,300	18
#19	Geneva, Switzerland	90,300	16
#20	Paris, France	88,600	15

In summary, the 20 cities above are home to 3,259,600 millionaires and 543 billionaires. Any way you slice it, the group represents a lot of moolah.

Other websites have put together other lists that mention other cities, so I suppose the jury is still out. In New York City's case, 345,600 millionaires is a formidable number but it is actually only four per cent (4%) of the city's 8,500,000 inhabitants. Still, if that same percentage of millionaires to population had existed in the little Texas town of 1,000 where I grew up, there would have been 40 millionaires among my neighbors.

I have one thing to say about that.

No way, José.

Speaking of millionaires, today's closing factoid is that former Atlanta Braves baseball player Chipper Jones has downsized. Earlier this month he sold his 23,000 sq.ft. house on 38 acres for $11,750,000 and later the same day paid $5,700,000 for a 9,100 sq.ft. house on 10 acres. Even the ultra-wealthy need to tighten their belts occasionally. And since both properties are right here in Cherokee County he is tecnically a neighbor of mine.