Quote:
Originally Posted by miketoronto
I find it interesting how NYC is so expensive and rich (and it does have a large high income population). But the city still lags in every way when it comes to wealth. It has high rates of low income populations, below median family incomes compared to the rest of the metro area, etc.
It is an expensive place, yet many people are living there in very low wages.
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NYC (city proper) will probably always have lower median income than the metro area, and will probably always have significant % of lower income.
A huge proportion of housing in NYC is income-restricted. Therefore, by definition, only poor or moderate income people can live in this housing. These are not only housing projects (which house something like 10% of the city population) but also limited-equity coops (limited income ownership housing), Mitchell Lama housing (moderate income rental housing), and various other city programs.
Even in Manhattan, which probably has more wealthy than any other geography on earth, you still have a high proportion of poor. This is because Manhattan, with all its wealth, has a massive amount of permanently subsidized housing for the poor. You have more far more housing project units in Manhattan alone, than in any other U.S. city.
In contrast, the suburbs rarely have programs for income-restricted housing. So you may have fewer wealthy in some cases than in NYC, but you will also have few poor. Even a kind of dumpy suburb will have relatively few below the poverty line because the housing will be all market-rate, and mostly single family ownership, and market-rate single family ownership housing tends to be expensive in the NYC area.
Another factor is immigration. In contrast to many U.S. metros, immigration to the NYC area is still concentrated in the city proper. And NYC tends to get huge proportions of poor immigrants; a much higher proportion than in most parts of the U.S. The leading immigrant groups to NYC are as follows (only counting 75,000 or more immigrants)-
1. Dominican Republic
2. China
3. Mexico
4. Jamaica
5. Guyana
6. Ecuador
7. Haiti
8. Trinidad & Tobago
9. India
10. Russia
11. Bangladesh
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...l?ref=nyregion
And some of these immigrants are particularly poor. NYC Mexicans, for example, are different than the Mexican populations you get in most parts of the country. Outside of a wealthy class of Mexican expats in Manhattan, NYC Mexicans tend to be Indios from Southern Mexico, and often don't speak Spanish. They are very heavily from Oaxaca, Chiapas, and extreme rural Puebla.