People & Neighborhoods

Making Neighborhoods

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Intro

All New Yorkers can recognize changes to their neighborhood and their city. Old neighbors move away; new people arrive; unfamiliar languages are suddenly heard on the streets; subway stops are more crowded with new faces; favorite shops are replaced by new ones, which quickly become part of the landscape. Some communities experience change through absence and loss, others through gains and discovery.

It is the people living in a neighborhood who shape its identity—they make the neighborhood.

Why Making Neighborhoods?

New Yorkers recognize these changes without the benefit of demographic studies. They know that their neighborhoods aren’t defined by maps of community districts or legislative lines. It is the people living in a neighborhood who shape its identity—they make the neighborhood.

And yet policymakers entirely depend on artificial government-drawn boundaries when trying to understand the issues of our population and our neighborhoods. Data about the population will be broken down by community district or by sub-borough area, for example, which can obscure wider trends that cross those boundaries.

A clearer understanding of New York City’s changing population, residential patterns, and how they shape our neighborhoods, is critical in order to spot trends, identify pressing issues, allocate scarce resources, and intercede to address emerging problems.

In 2014, CHPC released the first Making Neighborhoods report and interactive map studying demographic change in New York City in the decade spanning 2000 to 2010.

Making Neighborhoods initiative uses cluster analysis, a common strategy in economic and marketing studies, to pars large amounts of data into groups with shared traits. Using 16 variables to measure race, age, foreign birth, household/family type, education level, and poverty, our model identified 14 clusters of census tracts where populations share these characteristics. First, we identified the locations of all of these population clusters in 2000 and then we tracked these clusters 10 years later. The results reveal whether these population types grew in number or geographic size or moved into new areas; if their numbers declined or they retreated from their neighborhoods and were replaced by others; or if groups remained relatively unchanged in a decade. By following groups of people with shared characteristics, we see a different portrait of a changing city. It is one that New Yorkers will recognize, as it reflects the neighborhoods they make for themselves.

In 2018, we expanded our work to include the metropolitan area surrounding the city. The Making Neighborhoods study measures change from 2000 to 2010, as well as presents our thoughts on the implications of the results for the regional housing market looking forward.

New York City

New York City report

Making Neighborhoods report summarizes the findings of CHPC’s cluster analysis measuring the demographic change in NYC neighborhoods from 2000 to 2010:

1. What cluster analysis tells us
2. The major trends revealed
3. The housing conditions that impact the clusters
4. What this means for NYC neighborhoods

The results reveal whether these population types grew in number or geographic size or moved into new areas; if their numbers declined or they retreated from their neighborhoods and were replaced by others; or if groups remained relatively unchanged in a decade. By following groups of people with shared characteristics, we see a different portrait of a changing city. It is one that New Yorkers will recognize, as it reflects the neighborhoods they make for themselves.

New York Region

New York Region report

Making Neighborhoods study uses cluster analysis to measure the demographic change in NY region from 2000 to 2010 and presents potential implications of the results for the regional housing market looking forward.

There were also new trends that emerged unique to this wider regional study:

  • A low-income, majority white population cluster, which did not emerge from our study of the five boroughs, was the fastest growing cluster between 2000 and 2010.
  • Some tracts that were home to a lower-income black population cluster transitioned to a higher-income black cluster.
  • Some areas in urban neighborhoods or straddling urban and suburban areas transitioned from a white majority to a Hispanic majority.

Our report details the methods and results of this innovative approach to studying demographic change.

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