Equity in the Creative and Innovative Economy
The Working Classes’ Struggle to Survive in New York City
Continuing with our investigation into the working class, we will be further examining this class in Sunset Park. Previously, we have begun uncovering who the working class is. But we needed more variables to understand the complexity of this class in the neighbourhood and decided to look into the Socio Economic Status (SES) and indicators.
But we needed to understand how SES is measured in New York City and what kinds of metrics is used. We first looked at the “Social Indicator Report” — an analysis of social conditions across New York City that includes geographic, demographic and statistical breakdowns, as well as changes over time. The data is used to analyse the social, economic and environmental conditions and measures disparities based on race, gender, income and other characteristics.
We then chose indicators we wanted to utilise in order to see the current state of the working class in Sunset Park. Not only do we want to discover the SES but we also wanted to measure social and economic mobility. This means that there is a spatio-temporal condition where we would compare and analyse the collected data sets from different time periods, which would tell us the upward and downward movements of the working class, therefore informing us of their mobility and also stability.
Race/ethnicity
We wanted to understand the racial breakdown and the percentages of foreign-born in each tract. As we have identified that Sunset Park was a rich and vibrant immigrant community.
The chart below shows us all the census tracts broken down by race. Pink represents the Latinx population, the orange is the Asian population, and to the right is the total foreign-born population.
Education
When we looked into educational attainment levels, we saw that much of the community had no high school education. In contrast, 31–34% of the population in tracts 145 and 147 had attainments of a bachelor’s degrees. And from our previous map, we saw that these had the least amount of foreign-born population - with only 21% compared to the rest of the tracts.
So we wondered if there was a relationship between the foreign-born, Latinx, Chinese population and the educational attainment levels.
In this chart, each dot represents a census tract. On the far left is the foreign-born population, the pink represents the Latinx population and the orange represents the Asian population. We can see that there is a strong correlation between a high percentage of foreign-borns with no high-school education.
Tracts 145 & 147 stood out with the highest percentage of bachelor’s degree attainers — and also having a relatively high-percentage of a Latinx population. And tract 98 has the largest percentage of population without a high-school degree for both the Latinx and Asian population.
Income
In our initial findings, the majority of all residents are under the city’s median household income which is $57,782. So we wanted to take a deeper look at the tracts of the highest and lowest median income levels through a racial breakdown.
Rent Burden
We also took a deeper look into rent burden. It is defined as having to spend more than 30% of income on rent, and extreme rent burden is defined as spending more than 50% of the income. And tracts 118 and 120 are severely rent burdened, with a high percentage in Asian population.
Occupations
Both 145 and 147 have the highest percentage of employment in management, finance and business operations. And 145 has the lowest percentage of employment in transportation and material moving, whereas 147 has the lowest percentage in manufacturing.
And both 118 and 120 has the highest percentage of employment in the food preparation and service sector. The lowest employment percentage for tract 118 is Manufacturing and for tract 120 it is Construction.
Surprises in Our Findings
Affluence in South Slope
Tracts 145 & 147 are the most affluent with the least amount of foreign population but is made up of 33–44% Latinx population. We can assume these are most likely 1st generation Latinx with at least a high school degree and about 30% have attained a higher education.
Newly Arrived Immigrants
Tracts 118 and 120 predominantly consists of the Asian population and also foreign-borns. It is also tracts with the lowest median income, and roughly 56–57% of the population don’t have a high-school education.
Concentration of Occupations
Both tracts 145 and 147 have the highest percentage of employment in management, finance and business operations. And the lowest percentage of employment in transportation and material moving and manufacturing. Which we can see that there is an overall lower percentage in the more labour-intensive sectors and service industries but a high number in business and finance sectors. And both 118 and 120 has the highest percentage of employment in the food preparation and service sector.
Challenges
- Complexity of Socio-Economic Mobility Indicators.
We realise that measuring socioeconomic mobility is not that simple and there are many different variables affecting it. And with our findings, we would need to compare over time the upward or downward social or economic mobility of the Sunset Park working class community.
- Identifying the indicators that could be interpreted into our communities in Sunset Park
There were many questions that surfaced and one main one was whether the indicators we used are applicable to the immigrant working class in Sunset Park?
- Deciphering the data for each indicator.
Even though we have gathered different data sets for different indicators, does the data tell us anything about the SES in Sunset Park?
Next steps:
SES Analysis
We want to identify 2 tracts that have a high percentage of Latinx, Asian and foreign-born populations to start mapping out the SES indicators. And possibly comparing them with the more affluent neighbouring areas and tracts (Park Slope, Bay Ridge).
Spatial-Temporal Analysis
To examine if the waterfront developments, especially Industry City, is affecting the surrounding neighbourhoods. For example, we would measure the impact by collecting data on rent burden and income levels but different time periods — before the development and opening of Industry City and after it has been established.
