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…
“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 — “The number of children under-5 shot up 35 percent in the area” — 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.
“One can only be the town crier of doom, the wild-eyed guy with the sandwich board hailing the end of the world, for so long before it’s just street theatre.”
Too true MM. After the collapse of the bubble (if it is as bad as the worst case fears) there has to be something else besides ranting, some way of picking up the pieces. Ranting does work well in terms of getting people to focus on a particular issue but it doesn’t help much in the “fixing the problem” department. I am sure that some people will just take the attitude that they didn’t cause the problem and screw the people who did, but unfortunately that is not the way our society moves forward. Sometimes we have to help pick up the pieces whether or not we did anything to break them in the first place.
z…i’m just saying that new homeowners to the block would definitely be less conscientious than the ones that are there currently. I will amend my original statement and include asians, hispanics, american indians, blah, blah, blah.
Sorry if I offended you.
WHAT..stay on topic or get the hell off of here.
“What you’re doing is postponing the problem into the future and not giving the system time to fix itself,”
Typical. Why fix it now, that’s too much work! Same with Social Security, same with the tax code, blah blah blah ad infinitum.
Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…
I happen to agree with most of what Bonner and Wiggin say in this excerpt from Empire of Debt. Looks like a good book. But it’s really easy to say that the world is run by idiots who screwed us and everyone else in the process. But then what? One can only be the town crier of doom, the wild-eyed guy with the sandwich board hailing the end of the world, for so long before it’s just street theatre. Nobody wants to hear from Cassandra or the boy who cries wolf forever.
I’d like to see ideas for fixing it. OK, we can’t personally fix the macro economy, but we do have an effect on our micro economies. Instead of endlessly crowing “I was right”, how about some ideas on keeping our neighborhoods up while the economy is down? How can we really prevent real or perceived race conflict, upsurges in street crime, what can we do with less police protection? As we go into 2009!!, with all of the changes to Brooklyn as documented by the census figures, how do we keep what we have, change what we need to, and manage to all get along, and prosper.
I’d really like to know.
Montrose Morris, PBA
“Besides, homes where “only English was spoken” are, by definition, less educated.”
Oh, you gone and done it now, DIBS!
One word….Asians!
“I had very little chance for QOTD as it was”
Biff, has an epiphany!!
Hold on! I want to show the INSANITY that’s going on right now. The whole world is nut and things like this will speed up our destruction!
Fannie, Freddie May Waive Appraisals for Refinancings (Update2)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601009&sid=amYW0UdC2LdY&refer=bond
Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage-finance companies seized by the U.S. government, are considering forgoing new appraisals on refinanced loans to help struggling homeowners, their regulator said.
“If they refinance someone, rather than doing a loan mod, do they need a new appraisal if they already have the credit?†Federal Housing Finance Agency Director James Lockhart told reporters after a speech in Washington today. “That’s an issue that’s being discussed. They’re looking at it.â€
Fannie and Freddie, which own or guarantee $5.3 trillion of the $12 trillion U.S. home loan market, must consider that some homeowners who need to refinance owe more than their property is worth and wouldn’t qualify for the necessary mortgage insurance, Lockhart said. Another consideration is the issue surrounding the valuation of refinanced loans on the companies’ balance sheets.
“It sounds like a disaster,†said Paul Miller, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets in Arlington, Virginia. “What you’re doing is postponing the problem into the future and not giving the system time to fix itself,†he said, adding that regulators are bowing to political pressure.
Are you kidding me?????????!!!!!!!!!!!! On a 1003 you place the Apprised value down! Now we just put IDFK (I Don’t Ferking Know) and that’s it!!!!! 2009 can’t get here fast enough!
The What
Someday this war is gonna end!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the notion that white residents are less likely to care for their homes than black residents is troubling. if someone said the reverse, they would be run out of town.
I recall an article in the Times, about demographics. It stated in the next 20 years or something there would be 500,000 more Asians, 500,000 more Hispanics, like 100,000 more whites (I may misremember though), and the same number of blacks, but African and Caribbean blacks would be even with blacks raised in the country.
The thing I tell visitors to Brooklyn when we’re out is, the thing to notice is the number of Hispanics and Asians in the city.