As hurricane Sandy stormed through New York, a crane dangled from atop a luxury condo construction site at 157 West 57th Street in midtown Manhattan.  The storm has passed, but the crane still hangs as plans to secure it are put in place before construction on the 90-story $90 million per unit building can resume.

Social Explorer takes a look at who lives in the shadow of the crane using data from the 2006-10 American Community Survey.

• Over 6,200 people live in census tract 137, many of whom are barricaded out of their apartments to prevent injury.
• The area is dense (72,200.7 people per square mile), even for Manhattan (69,357.7 people per square mile), and especially when compared to the state and country (408 and 86.1 people per square mile, respectively).
• The area is predominately non-Hispanic white (78.9 percent).  The next most populous group is non-Hispanic Asian (9.8 percent), whilenon-Hispanic African Americans represent less than one percent of residents (0.9 percent).
• With a median age of 42.9, residents tend to be older than other Manhattanites (median age 36.3).
• A large share of residents are employed in finance and insurance, and real estate and rental  and leasing (25.3 percent), as well as professional, scientific, and management, and  administrative and waste management services (20.6%)
• The median household income ($117,242) is nearly twice that for other Manhattanites ($64,971), and the poverty rate is less than half for the rest of Manhattan (7.0 percent compared to 14.5 percent).
• Home values and rents are high as well ($879,400 for owner-occupied units, and $2,001 for median gross rent).

In the Shadow of the Crane: Census Tract 137 Population Map

Find out more about the area by clicking on the map or creating your own Social Explorer report.

This week, Hurricane Sandy tore through the Atlantic and landed on the East Coast.  After high winds and flooding, dozens of people died in the storm, millions remain without power, and property all along the coast suffered damage.

Using American Community Survey data from 2006-10, Social Explorer takes a look at a few of the New York-area communities hit hardest by the storm.

In New York City, the storm left behind flooded transit tunnels and a power station exploded, shutting off for over 25 percent of customers, including everyone south of 39^th Street.

Map of Downtown Manhattan 2006-10 American Community Survey (click to explore)

The storm caused a great amount of damage in New Jersey, especially along the iconic boardwalk areas such as Seaside Heights and Atlantic City, as well as Hoboken.

Map of Atlantic City, NJ, 2006-10 American Community Survey (click to explore)

The barrier island along Queens and Long Island suffered greatly as well.  The storm devastated the community of Breezy Point, known as the “Irish Riviera,” on the tip of Rockaway, Queens.  In addition to water damage throughout the area, over 100 houses burnt down.

Map of Breezy Point, Queens, American Community Survey 2006-10 (click to explore)

To learn a little more about who lives in these communities, the table below summarizes a few demographic facts about each of these areas.  Visit Social Explorer’s map and report tools to learn more about these and other places.

Table features American Community Survey 2006-10 data on the following geographic areas:

Downtown Manhattan (PUMA 03809 and 03810)

Atlantic City (census tracts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24, and 25, Atlantic County, NJ)

Breezy Point (Census Tract 916.01, Queens County, NY)

This week is Unmarried and Single Americans Week.  Initially dubbed National Singles Week, the occasion was expanded to accommodate other un-partnered populations as well.  For over three decades, single Americans have been recognized with their own week.  The rise of living alone is also much-discussed topic, and  some notable singles have also earned recognition on this blog.

In 1980 when the week was first instituted, unmarried and single Americans made up 42.7 percent of the adult population (all single, separated, widowed and divorced Americans over the age of 15 counted by the Census Bureau).  By 2010, the unmarried and single population had become the majority, with 51.2 percent of Americans (according to the 2010 American Community Survey).  So, unmarried and single Americans should celebrate the week alone together.

Using Social Explorer, you can learn more about where single Americans live and how the population has shifted over the decades through maps.  (Click around the maps to explore more.)

Map of Never Married Americans (2010 American Community Survey)

And compare it with the population in 1980.

Map of Never Married Americans (1980 Census)

And, you can zoom in on any area, such as Ohio, where the celebratory week originated.

Map of Never Married Ohioans (2010 American Community Survey)

Map of Never Married Americans (1980 Census)

To get the full picture of the unmarried population, you can also explore where the divorced, widowed, and separated populations live using the mapping tools.

Social Explorer won the Web Marketing Association Publishing Standard of Excellence Award.  Our distributor Oxford University Press entered us in this competition.

The Web Marketing Association was founded in 1997 to help set a high standard for Internet marketing and development of the best websites on the World Wide Web.  The Web Marketing Association is the producer of the WebAward Competition.  Now in its 16th year, the WebAward program is the longest running annual website award competition dedicated to naming the best Web sites in 96 industries while setting the standard of excellence for all website development.

The websites are judged using seven criteria – design, ease of use, copywriting, interactivity, use of technology, innovation and content.

Google recently announced that it will provide internet service–Google Fiber–but many disadvantaged minority communities that would be eligible for it may not get it.  In the article “In One City, Signing Up for Internet Becomes a Civic Cause,” John Eligon writes about digital and socioeconomic divides in Kansas City.  The company requires locals to signup in advance to ensure coverage, but many predominately black areas may go under-served because not enough residents pre-registered.  Eligon cites data and analysis from Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge.

For generations, Kansas City has been riven by racial segregation that can still be seen, with a majority of blacks in the urban core confined to neighborhoods in the east. Troost Avenue has long been considered the dividing line, the result of both overt and secretive efforts to keep blacks out of white schools and housing areas and of historical patterns of population growth and settlement, said Micah Kubic, with the nonprofit Greater Kansas City Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

Nearly three in four people living east of Troost in Kansas City’s urban center are black, according to an analysis of 2010 Census data by Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York City.

As recently as 15 to 20 years ago, black residents said, they did not venture west of Troost for fear of harassment from the police. Today, they complain that their schools are failing, crime is rampant and infrastructure is dilapidated…

As of Sunday evening, only about 32 percent of people in the neighborhoods that qualified for Google Fiber were black, while just over 54 percent were white, according to Mr. Beveridge.

Click here to read the full article.

Sunday, September 9th is National Grandparents Day.  First declared a holiday by President Carter in 1978, the occasion celebrates grandparents’ contributions to family life and society.  Using Social Explorer, we can look at the number of grandparents in the US, and their relationships with their grandchildren.  Census and American Community Survey data show the role of grandparents over the past decade.

In 2000, 5,771,671 grandparents lived with their own grandchildren (under 18 years old).  That is 3.6 percent of all adults.

In the New York Times article “A Stubborn Racial Disparity in Who Calls the Upper East Side Home,” Elizabeth Harris discusses the continued lack of diversity on the Upper East Side, and interviews some of the few African Americans living in the neighborhood.  She cites data and analysis from Social Explorer’s Susan Weber-Stoger.

It has been more than 35 years since the television family the Jeffersons moved on up to the East Side. The main character, George Jefferson — played by Sherman Hemsley, who died last month — was a successful black businessman, and he became a significant cultural touchstone. But he apparently didn’t start a trend.

The proportion of non-Hispanic black residents on the Upper East Side has remained exceedingly low for decades, rising from 2.1 percent of the area’s population in 1990 to just 2.7 percent about 20 years later, according to an analysis of census data by Susan Weber-Stoger of the Queens College department of sociology, which defined the Upper East Side as the area between Fifth Avenue and the East River, from 59th to 96th Streets.

The proportion of white residents, meanwhile, has also held fairly stable, dipping to 81 percent from 88.6 percent…

According to recent census data, there were about 450 black households on the Upper East Side with an income of $100,000 or more, and more than 4,600 in Harlem.

For more on racial segregation, living in a homogenous neighborhood, and being mistaken for a nanny, click here to read the rest of the article.

In the New York Times article “Fury Reveals Deep Rifts Near ‘Happiest Place on Earth,’” Jennifer Medina details the historic and growing divides along ethnic and class lines in Anaheim, CA.  The story also features data and maps from Social Explorer.

There have always been divides in this city south of Los Angeles, where Disneyland and professional hockey and baseball teams bring in millions of visitors each year. The money generated by the resort area makes up roughly a third of the city’s annual income. But few visitors ever see the poor neighborhoods just beyond Disneyland Drive.

While most of the city’s population of nearly 350,000 lives on the west side of the bowtie-shaped city, in recent decades a wealthy enclave known as Anaheim Hills has flourished to the east. The hills are about 15 miles away from downtown, more like a separate town than a part of this mostly working-class and largely Latino city. There, household income is roughly twice as much as in the flatlands, as the rest of the city is known…

Like much of northern Orange County, Anaheim has changed drastically in the years since Disneyland opened in 1955. It grew rapidly through the 1990s, and as the Latino population nearly doubled, it became one of the largest cities in the state. Today, the city is more than half Latino…

In those neighborhoods, the mostly Latino residents have grappled with unemployment, poverty, crime and gangs for years. Now, suddenly, those longstanding problems are being thrust into wider view.

Click here for the full article.

Amidst the usual partisan wranglings in congress, a movement has emerged to end the American Community Survey, the annual detailed data collected by the Census Bureau from a sample of households across the nation.

In his latest Demographics column for the Gotham Gazette “The Attempt to Kill the ACS: Its Implications for New York City,” Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge details this proposal and what it could mean for policy makers, researchers, and the public.

Today, the American Community Survey is used across the country by researchers, businesses and policymakers. Almost anything that a person would want to know about the population of the U.S. – from income to disability – can be found from a review of the data.

For New York City or, for that matter, any community across the country, the ACS is a critical tool for understanding demographic change down to the neighborhood level.

Given its importance, then, it might come as a bit of a surprise that the Republican majority in Congress wants to get rid of the ACS – and has even put forward an amendment to do so – arguing that it represents an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.

Beveridge questions the validity of the privacy concerns, discusses the legal mandates behind the survey, and describes a few of its many uses.  He goes on to defend the ACS:

But forget about knowing all that if policymakers do away with the ACS.  Politicians and researchers will know a whole lot less about who resides in the country, how they are faring and how the country is changing.

This may be the way the GOP House Majority would prefer it – so that politicians and commentators can make their appeals based upon opinion with no chance of contradiction or fact-checking.  Of course, they point to cost-saving to tax payers and its supposed impact on privacy.

But the ACS’s demise will deprive the city and the nation of a major source of important information that researchers have relied on for decades.

It would be like asking astronomers to do astronomy without telescopes and physicians and biologists to work without microscopes.

Click here to read the full article.

New York City is more crowded than ever according to newly reported Census data.  In “New York Led Country in Population Growth Since 2010 Census,” Sam Roberts details the big apple’s dominance for the New York Times.

An analysis of the latest reported population changes since the April 2010 census found that New York City grew at twice as fast a rate as the rest of the metropolitan area and faster than the city’s annual growth since 2000, because of higher birthrates among immigrants, a greater influx of newcomers and the recession…

The 15-month population increase in the city amounted to a third of the city’s entire growth from 2000 to 2010, according to the census.

He cites data and analysis from Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge:

“New York metro gained .6 percent, but, digging deeper, New York City’s gain of 0.9 means the city is now growing faster than its surrounding region,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York who analyzed census data.

Read the full article here.