Mount Vernon, NY (Vernon Park)

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 Vernon Park neighborhood in Mount Vernon are upper-middle income, making it an above average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 70.5% of the neighborhoods in America. With 10.7% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 52.2% of U.S. neighborhoods.

A neighborhood is far different if it is dominated by enlisted military personnel rather than people who earn their living by farming. It is also different if most of the neighbors are clerical support or managers. What is wonderful is the sheer diversity of neighborhoods, allowing you to find the type that fits your lifestyle and aspirations.

In the Vernon Park neighborhood, 47.7% 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 21.8% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (20.6%), and 10.0% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.

Languages

The most common language spoken in the Vernon Park neighborhood is English, spoken by 68.5% of households. Some people also speak Spanish (12.6%).

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 Vernon Park neighborhood in Mount Vernon, NY, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Jamaican (15.5%). There are also a number of people of Portuguese ancestry (13.6%), and residents who report Dominican roots (11.1%), and some of the residents are also of South American ancestry (8.4%), along with some Puerto Rican ancestry residents (7.9%), among others. In addition, 30.7% 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 Vernon Park neighborhood spend between 30 and 45 minutes commuting one-way to work (30.9% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods.

Here most residents (43.6%) drive alone in a private automobile to get to work. In addition, quite a number also carpool with coworkers, friends, or neighbors to get to work (21.7%) and 11.9% of residents also hop out the door and walk to work for their daily commute. In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.