Everyone in Bushwick has a perspective on how the neighborhood is changing, but explaining those changes in concrete terms can be difficult. Earlier this year, The Bushwick Community Map was released was developed to help Bushwick residents make sense of the shifts occurring here. Now, a fascinating new map developed by NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy presents CoreData.nyc, a free, powerful tool for analyzing the forces transforming New York City.
The map uses a variety of sources, including the annual American Community Survey analyzed using Public Use Microdata Samples, to come up with the statistics it presents. Check out the numbers for Bushwick by selecting an option from the toolbar above the map, then turning on “neighborhood indicators.”
Here are some of the many interesting facts you’ll find about Bushwick:
The map contains some visualizations developed individually that can be overlaid on the other data. One of those is a map of all of the neighborhood’s new housing units in 2015—take a look at that here.
Every year for the past decade, approximately half of Bushwick’s population has been comprised of lifelong residents of New York State.
The number of Bushwick individuals hailing from other countries has been remained between 30% and 40%, with some ups and downs, for the past decade, too. Furthermore, the neighborhood’s racial diversity index, which “reflects the probability that if two people were chosen at random in a given area, they would be of different races and ethnicities,” has been more or less static at just about 50% for the past decade (that’s not to say there haven’t changes in the neighborhood’s ethnic makeup, of course—take a look at the ethnic demographic indicator to get a sense of what those changes look like year by year).
The map identifies Bushwick’s Area Median Income for 2014, the most recent fiscal year for which data is available, as $40,540 (a figure which is down about 3 grand from the 2013 fiscal year); among renters, the median income was a little lower, at $38,520. AMI the basis for identifying a neighborhood’s need for affordable housing and is part of how rent burden is calculated, among many other things, so it’s an important number; this figure may seem surprising to some, considered alongside Bushwick’s 27.07% poverty rate.
The map also tells a stories about the past and the future of the neighborhood. The affects of the recession are clearly evident in the numbers of new developments completed in the neighborhood in the late aughts, and the neighborhood service data will be dramatically affected when first the M train, and then the L train go out of service in coming years.
Check it out, and have fun nerding out about your neighborhood, Bushwick!