In the vast stew of humanity that is New York, we regularly brush by all sorts of people with secret lives, lives rich with closely-held knowledge to which we'll never be privy as we hustle past on Lexington Avenue. That man in the smart business suit? He has crabs! The teen snapping her gum and scrolling through Instagram? She's the reining youngest female chess grandmaster in the world!
But now, new research from Spear's reveals haunting information about the people with whom we share a mayor, a baseball team, a cultural identity. They walk among us, untraceable but for their profusion of cashmere and affinity for Uber: Out of every 25 New Yorkers, one is a millionaire.
Sure, we may be only the fourth most millionaire-drenched city in the world, lagging considerably behind such banking ground zeros as Monaco, Zurich and Geneva. But while 4.63 percent might not seem like an obnoxiously large number, that's still 389,100 people in the city who possess, at a given time, more than one million dollars. And odds are, you interact with them on at least a semi-regular basis. Remember that asshole from OKCupid, Craig? The one who took you out for sushi, insisted on ordering every item from the raw bar, then asked you to split the check? Undoubtedly a millionaire. The woman who nearly crushed you to death while weaving the wrong way down the street on her Citi Bike, then shouted at you to be more careful? Also a millionaire. The miser who once paid you a total of $15 for a month of caring for her arthritic, foul-tempered Pomeranian, Mitzy? Yes. Her too.
Millionaires, of course, are more commonly found in Manhattan, hermetically sealed into private cars and sipping flaming drinks at Buddakan, though global warming has pushed many out into sleek new condos in Brooklyn. Like grass snakes, they likely aren't any more interested in running into you than you are to them.
Unsurprisingly, New York is also home to a higher concentration of billionaires than anywhere else on Earth (1,160 New Yorkers made $10 million or more annually, as of 2011). Meanwhile, nearly half of New Yorkers are poor. Your move, de Blasio.
