Millionaires are showing resiliency in rebound

Reporting from New York —  The millionaires of Los Angeles are on the road to recovery, but as of the end of last year they weren’t back to where they were before the recession.

A new study shows that the number of millionaires in the Los Angeles metropolitan area rose 13.3% in 2009. That was not enough to make up for the 17.8% drop in their ranks the previous year during the heart of the financial crisis.

The city was left in 2009 with 235,800 “high net worth individuals,” as the study termed them, the largest number of any city in the country after New York.

In New York, the rise in the number of millionaire households in 2009 was enough to make up for the losses the year before — bringing the city’s total number to 667,200.

Capgemini, a French consulting firm, calculated the number of individuals with a net worth of more than $1 million, excluding real estate, in the 10 largest U.S. metropolitan areas.

Most of the gains for the rich are attributed to the climb in the stock markets.

The results provide further confirmation that the nation’s wealthy have recovered more swiftly than the nation’s less well-off. In the study, the total number of rich individuals grew by 17.5% in 2009, a year when the national unemployment rate increased to 9.3% from 5.8%

New York had more millionaires than the next three areas combined — Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C. — and was one of four cities to see the ranks of the rich bounce back to where they were in 2007, along with Washington, D.C., Houston and San Jose.

San Jose had the highest percentage of rich residents of any city — 5.9% — while Houston had the lowest — 1.9%. Of the 10.2 million people in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, 2.3% were counted as having more than $1 million by Capgemini.

nathaniel.popper@latimes.com