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Clicking through the Times online this morning, we spotted this great Flash piece all about Brooklyn demographics. We sort of remember seeing it back in June, but this time we spent some real time looking through it, and learned some interesting facts about our home borough:
1. Since 1980, Brooklyn population is up, and poverty is down.
2. The largest percentage of Brooklyn foreign-born comes from Latin America.
3. Over the last 20 years: more blacks live in East Brooklyn, more Asians live in South West Brooklyn, more Hispanics live in South East Brooklyn.
4. Italians and Irish have moved to the suburbs over the last 20 years, and have been replaced by Arabs, Africans, and Latin Americans.
5. The income gap between very rich and very poor has grown over the last 20 years.
6. Percentage of Brooklynites with college degrees is up sharply over the last 20 years.
7. Lots more authors, taxi drivers, designers, and editors. Less firemen and foremen.
8. All crime is way, way down over the last 20 years.
9. Expensive rents (>$1000) are up, way up, over the last 20 years.
Check out this data-- it's really interesting. Do you notice any trends that we missed?
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The big picture is this.
As in all metros, there is a wave of passed-down housing in the New York Metro gradually left by the middle class and wealthier (who can afford new homes) to those less well off. It typically happens when housing hits about 50 years old. There are still some parts of Brooklyn where this is taking place, but it had happened in most of the borough by 1980. Since then it has been Queens, then Staten Island, and now some older suburbs have been getting relatively poorer.
In New York, there is a second wave of gentrification moving out from the center, beginning with the eastern half of the Upper East Side in the 1940s and 1950s, followed by the Upper West Side, the Village, the rest of Manhattan, Brownstone Brooklyn, etc. People who can afford to rehab and replace housing, once again the middle class and affluent, are rebuilding neighborhoods that had fallen into disrepair. This wave keeps moving along as well. More and more of Brooklyn is behind it.
The first wave moves in real estate busts, the second in real estate booms. Thus, in real estate booms (like now) the working poor have trouble finding neighborhoods they can afford. The older suburbs will probably become significantly poorer in the next real estate bust, unless they are really upscale (Scarsdale, Garden City).
Larry Littlefield,
I read Gothamist comments all the time, but yours was a particularly well formed one. I'm curious to know what you think will happen to the suburbs as they become poorer. Will that become the new focus of crime (i.e. parts of michigan surrounding Detroit, other areas of the midwest). Bottom line, where are the poor people in new york headed to (within the tri-state area)?
One thing that the stats imply, but don't say explicitly, is that the presence of Islam in Brooklyn has increased sharply. There are now nearly 36,000 Arabs in Brooklyn, and while not all Arabs are Muslim, it's safe to guess that a high percentage are. There's also been an increase in sub-Saharan Africans, many of whom are Muslim, and of Carribeans and Asians, of whom some meaningful percentage are most likely Muslim. That's why you find so many more Halal restaurants than you used to, like Cafe Kashkar in Brighton Beach.