Brooklyn, NY (42nd St / 10th Ave)

There are two complementary measures for understanding the income of a neighborhood's residents: the average and the extremes. While a neighborhood may be relatively wealthy overall, it is equally important to understand the rate of people - particularly children - who are living at or below the federal poverty line, which is extremely low income. Some neighborhoods with a lower average income may actually have a lower childhood poverty rate than another with a higher average income, and this helps us understand the conditions and character of a neighborhood.

The neighbors in the 42nd St / 10th Ave neighborhood in Brooklyn are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 72.2% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 28.5% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 80.7% of U.S. neighborhoods.

The old saying "you are what you eat" is true. But it is also true that you are what you do for a living. The types of occupations your neighbors have shape their character, and together as a group, their collective occupations shape the culture of a place.

In the 42nd St / 10th Ave neighborhood, 30.0% of the working population is employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is executive, management, and professional occupations, with 28.4% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations (23.5%), and 18.1% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.

Languages

The languages spoken by people in this neighborhood are diverse. These are tabulated as the languages people preferentially speak when they are at home with their families. The most common language spoken in the 42nd St / 10th Ave neighborhood is Spanish, spoken by 34.7% of households. Other important languages spoken here include English, German/Yiddish, Chinese and Russian.

Ethnicity / Ancestry

Culture is shared learned behavior. We learn it from our parents, their parents, our houses of worship, and much of our culture – our learned behavior – comes from our ancestors. That is why ancestry and ethnicity can be so interesting and important to understand: places with concentrations of people of one or more ancestries often express those shared learned behaviors and this gives each neighborhood its own culture. Even different neighborhoods in the same city can have drastically different cultures.

In the 42nd St / 10th Ave neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Asian (23.5%). There are also a number of people of Mexican ancestry (21.7%), and residents who report Polish roots (4.6%), and some of the residents are also of South American ancestry (4.0%), along with some Russian ancestry residents (3.7%), among others. In addition, 46.0% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.

How you get to work – car, bus, train or other means – and how much of your day it takes to do so is a large quality of life and financial issue. Especially with gasoline prices rising and expected to continue doing so, the length and means of one's commute can be a financial burden. Some neighborhoods are physically located so that many residents have to drive in their own car, others are set up so many walk to work, or can take a train, bus, or bike. The greatest number of commuters in 42nd St / 10th Ave neighborhood spend between 45 minutes and one hour commuting one-way to work (34.4% of working residents), longer and tougher than most commutes in America.

Here most residents (37.7%) hop out the door and walk to work to get to work. In addition, quite a number also take the train to get to work (28.9%) and 15.3% of residents also carpool with coworkers, friends, or neighbors for their daily commute. This is a special neighborhood for the number of people who walk to work. Combining exercise, low cost, and reduced pollution, plus the chance to see your neighbors, walking to work is fairly uncommon in America but likely to increase as people try to reduce their dependence on automobiles, and this neighborhood offers that opportunity today.