The Future of Ethnic Neighborhoods

A pretty good article about recent Demographic trends from the NY Times. Again, it's important to note that this is not a snapshot of the city today, or even in 2010. This is survey data from 2005 - 2009, and has a sometimes very significant margin of error.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/23/nyregion/20110123-nyc-ethnic-neighborhoods-map.html?ref=nyregion

One passage in the article that is very important, and kind of gets glossed over, is the following: American Community Survey data released last month revealed a striking metamorphosis during the last decade. Traditional ethnic enclaves sprawled amoeba-like into adjacent communities.

This, in my opinion, is going to be the future of New York. We are very, very used to thinking of neighborhoods in ethnic terms - Bensonhurst is Italian, Bed-Stuy is African-American, Washington Heights is Dominican, and so on. We are also very used to thinking of ethnic change as neighborhood-based and total: Ozone Park was Italian, then became South Asian; Riverdale was Irish, then became Jewish; the Lower East Side was Jewish, then became Puerto Rican, then becamse hipster/yuppie. This process can be short (East New York turned over from Jewish to African-American in about 2 years), or long (the turnover of the West and South Village from Italian to Yuppie took almost half a century), but it always ends the same - one group moves in, displacing the other.

But the future may hold something different. Instead of smaller, more solid ethnic neighborhoods, I think we'll be seeing larger, less solid, ethnic neighborhoods overlapping each other. And instead of one group slowly or quickly replacing another, I think we'll see a few different groups achieve a balance throughout a neighborhood.

The hows and whys of this theory, in my opinion, are really interesting but need to be backed up with some migration data that I haven't dug into yet. We'll see if me or the Times gets to this first

Progress Update

Updated maps for Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn are on the right - I didn't make any new progress in Manhattan or Staten Island over the fall.

I didn't quite reach my goals for 2010 which were to be 99% done with Brooklyn and the Bronx, and 50% done with Queens. I did scrape out Queens with a bitterly cold walk through 7 tracts in Jamaica one evening before catching the Airtrain to JFK. I came pretty close in Brooklyn, and one or two solid treks through Southeast Brooklyn plus a few odd tracts should wrap that up soon. But I was shameful in the Bronx, not even managing to cover 2/3 of the borough.

The reality is that with good planning and patience with public transportation, this project is actually not that much walking. If I really made this a priority I could probably finish up in 2 months. As it is though, I think fall of this year is a realistic ending point I'm going to shoot for.

Brooklyn Map - January 2011

Queens Map - January 2011

Bronx Map - January 2011

Redesign

I'm currently taking down my 1998-esque main site and transferring everything over to the two blogs (NYC blog and Travel blog). All the old pages will eventually end up here, although it might take a bit.