WORKING WEALTHY
New York may have the most millionaires in the world, but they’re far more ‘regular’ than billionaire-bling
NEW York City has more millionaires than any other city in the world, according to immigration consulting firm Henley & Partners — 350,000 of them, or one in 24 New Yorkers and 48% more than a decade ago.
Wowee! While the news is sure to feed “tale of two cities” sophistry, we should celebrate the Big Apple’s most under-appreciated class — what I call MiddleClass Millionaires, who are the city’s social and economic lifeblood. Almost everyone I know falls into the category but none think of themselves as rich for a very good reason: They’re not.
The story in The Post last week explained a number of phenomena that long puzzled me, such as how restaurant diners barely half my own age of 74 cheerfully blow $1,000 on an ordinary dinner for four, and how some of my friends casually drop tens of thousands of dollars on escorted vacations to the temples of Angkor Wat.
They deserve their affluence, although it’s a relative affluence that means less than it seems in the Big Apple, the priciest place to live in the United States. Many made their money through honest, hard work — not by mugging people on subway trains or by mugging whole companies and their employees with merger-and-acquisition ploys on Wall Street.
Their ranks include every kind of striving New Yorker not born with silver spoons in their mouths — not only stockbrokers who live on Manhattan’s Third Avenue, but plumbers and accountants on Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway who manage their dough wisely.
New York City’s legions of poor residents have more “advocates'' than are good for them. But impoverished New York City public housing residents need more decent jobs and stable families, not bleeding-heart essays about their plight in left-wing media and burn-the-public-dough social welfare programs.
The “equity”-obsessed New York Times reported in December, for example, that many lower- and what it called “middle-income” residents were “heading for the exits,” a trend that could “jeopardize the city’s uneven recovery.”
At the other extreme, excesses of the super-rich — who buy $50 million apartments and resell them for $75 million without ever moving in — are too much romanticized. (We’re “blessed” with 60 billionaires, according to the survey).
Home-swapping celebrities can be fun to read about, like Martha Stewart, who just unloaded a West Village triplex for a new $12.3 million Upper West Side duplex.
Others are merely infuriating, like the unidentified Chinese woman who purchased a unit at One57 in 2013 to save for her daughter after she graduated college. The daughter was 2 years old at the time.
But the supertalls enrich only developers who tear down viable older buildings to construct them, not local businesses that supposedly benefit from a “trickle-down” effect.
Our 350,000 residents who are mere millionaires are a different story. The word suggests a level of privilege that far exceeds the reality in most cases. (The Henley & Partners survey defined them as residents who have at least a seven-figure net worth in terms of liquid assets — cash and/or stocks, bonds and money-market funds that can easily convert to cash.)
A million dollars in the five boroughs doesn’t mean the same as a million dollars in the rest of the country. It costs so much more to live here — for homes to buy or rent, for education, medical care and even for hot dogs like the one that was notoriously priced at $26 — that a million can seem like what families in other parts of the country keep in piggy banks.
Even in cosmopolitan Chicago, living costs are 42.9% lower than in the Big Apple, according to Forbes and every other source of comparative urban data.
Yet, the word “millionaire” continues to enjoy an oversized mystique in American life. It always sounded impressive but took on exalted status due to the popularity among Boomers of the 1955-1960, prime-time TV drama series “The Millionaire.” (For those too young, a fictious, mysterious benefactor each week chose a deserving stranger to gift with a “cashier’s check” for $1 million.)
Few realize that $1 million then and $1 million now have as much in common as an elephant and its supposed close ancestor, the little rock hyrax.
The sum actually meant something in the 1950s. Adjusted for 3.7 annual inflation, $1 million at the time would have the buying power of about $10.5 million in today’s dollars. That's a serious number.
Conversely, in 1960, one million 2024 bucks would have been bought a puny $95,845 in goods and services, as calculated by the site Dollar Times. Between 1955-1960, as I gleaned from various sources, that sum would buy a modest house (average cost $16,000), a medium-price car ($2,600), a fancy stainless-steel refrigerator freezer ($8,640), and a four-year undergraduate education at a good private college ($48,000) — leaving just $20,000 for fun and games.
So don’t believe today’s millionaires have it easy, no matter what looneyleft advocates for “equity” would have us believe. Even if they waste $26 on a hot dog.