Districting Commission, CUNY Release Study of City’s Evolving and Emerging Neighborhoods

By Michael V. Cusenza

e City Districting Commission and CUNY Research Consortium on Monday released a study of NYC’s evolving and emerging neighborhoods.

e Districting Commission is legally required to consider communities of interest when drawing City Council district lines. With the new Council lines having been drawn, the report identi es and analyzes emerging communities of interest across the ve boroughs. For the purposes of the study, researchers de ned a community as a group of people who share some-thing in common, live together in the same place, or both. e report noted the following key trends: percent) or Latinx (28 percent), with 23 percent white and 16 percent Black. Brooklyn has the second highest Asian population share (26 percent) followed by Manha an (17 percent), Bronx (5 percent), and Staten Island (4 percent). However, the ethnic composition and concentration of Asian New Yorkers varies a great deal across the boroughs. Not surprisingly, given that it is the largest Asian ethnic group, the Chinese make up large shares of the Asian populations of Manha an (52 percent), Brooklyn (65 percent), and Staten Island (48 percent). Even in hyper-diverse Queens, the Chinese make up 40 percent of its sizable Asian population. e Asian population in the Bronx is small, but it is majority South Asian, with only 12 percent of the borough’s Asian population being Chinese. Queens is home to an overwhelming majority of Nepalese (86 percent) and Indonesian (82 percent) New Yorkers. In addition to these small ethnic groups, a majority of New York’s sizable Asian ethnic groups including Asian Indians (60 percent), Koreans (58 percent), Bangladeshis (67 percent), Filipinos (62 percent), ais (67 percent) and Burmese (65 percent) call Queens home.

• e city’s population and voting age citizenry grew between 2010 and 2020, but future growth trends are less clear as the impacts of COVID play out and the city gradually ages.

• e racial makeup of the overall population and “citizens of voting age population” (i.e., those who are eligible to vote, referred to as CVAP) CVAP continued to shi , as the white and Black populations declined and Asians and Latinos grew, driven by immigrants and their native born descendants. e map on the cover of this report shows their current spatial distribution.

• e pa erns across the broad racial groups within the population and CVAP have been driven by distinctive trends among the speci c ethnic groups that make them up: some of these ethnic groups have been declining while others are growing, some rapidly.

• ese ethnic groups have also been shi ing their spatial concentrations across the city, driving neighbor-hood change and increasing neighborhood diversity. e racial intermarriage is also increasing.

• All groups experienced an increase of real household income per capita and educational and occupation-al a ainment, but at di erent rates.

Courtesy of City Districting Commission

Section 4 of the report notes that Queens has become the epicenter of Asian New York, providing home to 49 percent of the city’s Asian population. More than half of the population of Queens is Asian (27

Also, the study shows that t the decline of the city’s Black (-1.84 percent) and white (-1.75 percent) populations was oset by substantial net growth of the Asian (14.45 percent) and Latino (3.42 percent) populations, yielding the modest overall gain (2.2 percent).