Brooklyn, NY (Bensonhurst West)

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 Bensonhurst West neighborhood in Brooklyn are middle-income, making it a moderate income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 54.6% of the neighborhoods in America. In addition, 6.7% of the children seventeen and under living in this neighborhood are living below the federal poverty line, which is a lower rate of childhood poverty than is found in 58.3% of America'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 Bensonhurst West neighborhood, 51.5% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is manufacturing and laborer occupations, with 18.2% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (15.5%), and 14.9% in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants.

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 Bensonhurst West neighborhood is Chinese, spoken by 44.7% of households. Other important languages spoken here include English, Italian and Arabic.

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 Bensonhurst West neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Asian (54.9%). There are also a number of people of Italian ancestry (25.5%), and residents who report Haitian roots (3.0%), and some of the residents are also of German ancestry (2.7%), along with some Arab ancestry residents (2.3%), among others. In addition, 48.2% 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 Bensonhurst West neighborhood spend between 45 minutes and one hour commuting one-way to work (40.7% of working residents), longer and tougher than most commutes in America.

Here most residents (25.9%) take the train to get to work. In addition, quite a number also drive alone in a private automobile to get to work (18.3%) and 17.5% of residents also hop out the door and walk to work for their daily commute. This neighborhood is distinguished by the high number of residents who take the train to work each day, which can be a very good way to get to work at a lower cost and with less pollution.