What the Census Says About Us

“Carroll Gardens is getting whiter! Williamsburg is getting smarter! And the Park Slope baby boom is real!” That’s the Brooklyn Paper‘s three exclamation point recap of the census data released yesterday; we’re still a very diverse borough, but the make-up has shifted. Richer, whiter folks have displaced minority families since 2000 in neighborhoods west of Prospect Park, from the Slope to Red Hook, which “had the biggest jump in median household income — 23 percent, to $77,784 — partly because nearly a fifth of black and Hispanic families, who earn half as much as their white counterparts, left during the seven-year period.” Carroll Gardens, Park Slope and Cobble Hill have indeed had baby booms &#8212 “The number of children under-5 shot up 35 percent in the area” &#8212 and around 80 percent more college graduates have flocked to Williamsburg than lived there in 2000. Neighborhoods further out in Brooklyn grew more diverse, with white populations shrinking slightly in Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights and Bensonhurst, and the Asian population increasing by 34 percent. The Brooklyn Eagle looked at the number of “now married” and “never married” folks (roughly the same size), and found that two-parent families are most common, followed by female-headed families. “Ninety-one percent of those surveyed lived in the same house or apartment they lived in a year ago,” they write, signaling that perhaps folks are moving less, or the influx of folks from other boroughs and states is slowing. And the highest concentration of rents fall between $750 and $1,500; must still be plenty of rent stabilized pads out there.
Census ‘Community Survey’ Reveals Facts About Brooklyn [Brooklyn Eagle]
Making Census of Brooklyn [Brooklyn Paper]
Photo by heimdalsgata.