20. Houston, Texas: more than $123,416
• How much money it takes to be in the top 1% in Texas: $424,507
• Median income in Houston: $61,708
• Metro-area population: 6.8 million
The U.S. Bureau of Statistics reported in 2013 that Houston was the leading job creating city in the United States, after finding that the city was the first major metro in America to create new jobs to replace all the ones lost during the Great Recession that started in 2007, but the city went even further than that: It added over two jobs for every one that had been lost during the recession. Houston is a global leader in energy production because of the vast reserves of oil and natural gas in Texas, extracted and processed by prominent energy companies based in Houston, but the city is also a leader in biomedical research and development, as well as for the aeronautics industry. Increasingly, alternative energy companies working in wind and solar are making up a greater share of Houston’s energy industry.