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Disabled in New York City; Also: Is The City Still Booming?


Over one million New Yorkers between the ages of 21 and 64 are officially disabled, based on the classifications established by the Americans With Disabilities Act.

According to recent Census reports, about a quarter of all New Yorkers within that wide age group living on their own say that a physical, mental or emotional condition lasting six months or more has made it difficult for them to:

Learn, remember or concentrate

Dress, bathe or get around inside the home

Get outside the home alone to shop or visit a doctor’s office

Or, work at a job or business

The most common impairments concern something that affects the ability to work or to go outside the home.

New York City residents who live on their own are more likely to report disabilities than do those who live in the rest of the United States. Plainly those who have difficulties caring for themselves in their own homes also are likely to have difficulties in working and in going out of their houses.

It is the objective of those who provide services and aid to the disabled to make it easier for them to live a full life. For this reason, providing disabled New Yorkers with transportation becomes very important. Though bus-riders in wheelchairs have become a common sight, there is no other mode of transportation in the city that is as accommodating; as a result, too many disabled New Yorkers feel as if they are trapped in their homes.

The areas with the highest rates of disability include the Bronx and Washington Heights, Elmhurst, Bellerose, Brighton, Borough Park, Long Island City and East New York. These areas have high concentrations of minority and poor residents, and some have a high concentration of immigrants.

The disabled are less likely to be white and more likely to be black than the rest of the population. A higher proportion of the disabled are born abroad and do not speak English as their first language. They are less educated: Only 17.3 percent spent four years in college compared to 33.4 percent for the rest of the population at large. They earn less money -- $23,500 median versus $30,000 for the rest, and are more likely to be in poverty.

Is The Boom Over Or Not?

There have been three recent demographic reports that together do not make very much sense.

1. Sam Roberts of the New York Times recently reported that the Census Bureau “ officially listed the city's population at 8,168,338, another record high.” He attributed this to the expert “sleuthing” of city officials.

2. The Pew Hispanic Center study found that the “inflow of newcomers peaked between 1990 and 1995, gradually declined as other states were peaking, and fell again after 2001, to about 90,000 annually, down from 168,000 in 1990. The vast majority of immigration to the state is concentrated in New York City.”

3. A study done I did showed that the top fifth of the population in Manhattan had average incomes over 50 times that of the bottom fifth.

So is the city booming or is the boom over?

During the 1990s, it is plain that high income and the availability of jobs coupled with better counting did lead to the population growth found in New York City. Immigration fueled this growth. Immigrants also tend to accept lower wages and incomes for the same work, so New York City has what some call an hour glass economy -- with a large top and bottom and little in the middle. There are the Wall Street workers, and the people who deliver their food to them. The cooks and the deliverers are immigrants; their customers are very wealthy.

But the Pew study indicates that immigration growth may have ended in the 1990s. So, how can New York City’s population still be growing? The simple answer is that maybe it isn’t – maybe simply the census bureau is doing a better job of counting the population.

Next year, however, we will have the benefit of the first full-blown large scale on-going survey from the bureau. If all goes according to plan, we will know how large is NYC’s population, and how much money New Yorkers are making – whether, in other words, New York is still booming.

Andrew A. Beveridge has taught sociology at Queens College since 1981, done demographic analyses for the New York Times since 1993, and been in charge of Gotham Gazette's demographics topic page since 2000. The opinions expressed are his alone. 

Who Can Afford to Live in New York City?


Affordable housing has been one of the few concrete campaign issues this year; every candidate seems to have a plan. But is it possible to satisfy the need for affordable housing in New York City? Usually housing is considered unaffordable if it costs a household more than 30 percent of its income. With that definition, about 1.1 million of the 3 million households (36.7 percent) are living in housing that is not affordable to them. In fact, over 600,000 (19.9 percent) spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. By reviewing housing databased on the U.S. Census from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, one can understand just how unaffordable housing is in New York City.

The department has determined that the median income for a family of four in 2000 was $52,100, and it labels income as "low," "very low," or "extremely low" depending on how far income falls below that median.

Slightly less than half of all households in New York City are considered low income (anything $41,700 or below for a family of four), and most of them must pay a large percentage of their total income to obtain housing -- whether they are renting their home, or own it. Almost two thirds of these households spend more than 30 percent of their income for housing. Almost two-fifths spend more than 50 percent on housing.

Housing is even less affordable for those with very low (under $26,050) or extremely low (under $15,650) incomes.

To live in New York City and not spend a tremendous fraction of your income on housing requires the household to have higher income. Even among those with higher incomes, 13.4 percent spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. (Only 2.9 percent spend more than half). These results and others are in the accompanying table.

Cost Burden for Housing for Various Income Levels
Rental Units
Owner Units
Total
Extremely Low Income
Total
555,562
 
72,386
 
627,948
 
% Cost Burden >30 %
395,005
71.1%
51,466
71.1%
446,471
71.1%
% Cost Burden >50 %
331,115
59.6%
44,445
61.4%
375,513
59.8%
Very Low Income
 
 
 
 
 
 
Total
833,300
 
137,538
 
970,838
 
% Cost Burden >30 %
594,143
71.3%
97,920
71.2%
691,980
71.3%
% Cost Burden >50 %
419,991
50.4%
74,741
54.3%
494,839
51.0%
Low Income
 
 
 
 
 
 
Total
1,181,311
 
250,449
 
1,431,760
 
% Cost Burden >30 %
737,871
62.5%
159,005
63.5%
896,630
62.6%
% Cost Burden >50 %
445,396
37.7%
111,324
44.4%
556,602
38.9%
Non-Low Income
 
 
 
 
 
 
Total
927,421
 
661,672
 
1,589,093
 
% Cost Burden >30 %
84,395
9.1%
128,364
19.4%
212,938
13.4%
% Cost Burden >50 %
13,911
1.5%
31,760
4.8%
46,084
2.9%
All Units
 
 
 
 
 
 
Total
2,108,732
 
912,121
 
3,020,853
 
% Cost Burden >30 %
822,405
39.0%
287,318
31.5%
1,108,653
36.7%
% Cost Burden >50 %
459,704
21.8%
143,203
15.7%
601,150
19.9%

 

It is important to emphasize that New Yorkers spend a large amount on rent even though New York City is one of the few places in the United States with rent regulation. It also has a very large number of its residents living in public housing or availing themselves of other federal subsidies, and there are also such housing programs for the middle-class as Mitchell-Lama housing. Yet, when compared to the 107 places in the United States that have at least 100,000 housing units, New York City ranks first in the proportion of "low income" residents who pay more than 50 percent of their income for housing costs, and ranks fourth for all residents whatever their incomes who pay more than half, following Miami, Los Angeles, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The accompanying map shows the distribution of those households who pay more than 50 percent of their income throughout New York City.

Housing cost burdens are highest in areas of most poverty. An earlier columndefined the areas where the poor live.

These areas, include, the following:
• The Bronx, including the South Bronx; part of Harlem;
• Brooklyn, including the area around Bedford Stuyvesant and Flatbush, as well as some parts of Greenpoint and Williamsburg,
• In Queens, some areas of Jamaica.

Many of the residents living in these areas are either in a housing project or have a housing subsidy, yet they still spend a very large amount of their income on rent.

The conclusion is inescapable: Many low income New York City residents cannot afford the homes in which they are living. For all the publicity in the mayoral race given to affordable housing plans, given the scope of the problem, these amount to little more than token developments for a lucky few.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can NYC Profile Young Muslim Males?


Earlier this month Assemblyman Dov Hikind and Councilmember James Oddo both suggested that random searches in the subway weren’t good enough; the police should target particular people. “When we look at the list of the most-wanted people by the FBI in terms of terrorism, they fit a profile," Hikind said. "They look a certain way, they are young, and they come from a certain part of the world.” Oddo was even more explicit in a commentary he wrote for the Daily News: "It is important to acknowledge that nearly every Jihadist who has engaged in terrorist attacks has been a young man who called himself Muslim - the common denominator among the recent bombings in London and Madrid, the 9/11 attacks, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the would-be millennium bombers, the destroyer Cole, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Pan Am Flight 103, TWA Flight 847 and the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon.”

But even if the New York Police Department wanted to do so – and it has said clearly that it doesn’t -- profiling young Muslim males is virtually impossible. They are not as easy to spot as Oddo and Hikind seem to think.

Muslims live in most countries throughout the world. Click here for a chart that shows the countries with the highest Muslim population. China ranks ninth. Russia ranks 18th. Indonesia has the most absolute number of Muslims, more than 88 percent of their population is Muslim, and yet there are 30 countries that have a higher proportion of Muslims.

So, some Chinese New Yorkers may be Muslim, while some Indonesians may not be. But let’s take the 25 countries in which at least 50 percent of the population is Muslim. There are 231,000 New Yorkers who claim heritage from these 25 countries, as the following table shows.

Number and Percent Those With Muslim Country Heritage
Heritage
Number
%
Afghan 4,448 1.93%
Albanian 26,260 11.39%
Arab 14,766 6.41%
Bangladeshi 32,335 14.03%
Bosnian 2,838 1.23%
Croatian 11,971 5.19%
Egyptian 16,346 7.09%
Eritrean 323 0.14%
Indonesian 3,601 1.56%
Iranian 7,937 3.44%
Iraqi 1,006 0.44%
Jordanian 956 0.41%
Lebanese 11,332 4.92%
Malaysian 2,695 1.17%
Middle Eastern 1,075 0.47%
Moroccan 4,982 2.16%
Nigerian 16,904 7.33%
Pakistani 40,051 17.37%
Palestinian 3,334 1.45%
Sierra Leonean 795 0.34%
Somalian 17 0.01%
Sudanese 943 0.41%
Syrian 11,685 5.07%
Turkish 12,357 5.36%
Yemeni 1,578 0.68%
Total 230,535  

Some are black, some are Asian; more than 50 percent are white.

Muslims will be much more difficult to pick out from a New York crowd. They are not racially or physically distinct.

But even if one could pick out Muslims as they boarded the subways or airplanes, there is demographic evidence that it would be a wasted effort. When compared with other New Yorkers those whose heritage is a Muslim-majority country are richer, better educated and more likely to be married than other New Yorkers. Most are citizens.

Characteristics of Those With Muslim Country Heritage

Ancestry Muslim Country All Others
Male 55.8% 45.6%
Black 9.2% 28.9%
White 56.8% 47.3%
Asian 35.6% 10.1%
Other 14.6% 17.3%
Four Years or More College 37.3% 27.3%
Married With Spouse 61.3% 44.3%
Non-Citizen 43.7% 19.9%
Working 58.5% 52.9%
Owned House 25.7% 30.4%
Median Household Income $40,000 $37,000

This is also true of Arab-American New Yorkers , as I demonstrated previously.

Profiling by origin is the sort of policy that seems appealing during periods of stress and hysteria, but in hindsight is almost always seen as a mistake – such as the internment of Japanese-American during World War II. In this case, however, it wouldn’t even be possible.

Andrew A. Beveridge has taught sociology at Queens College since 1981, done demographic analyses for the New York Times since 1993, and been in charge of Gotham Gazette's demographics topic page since 2000. The opinions expressed are his alone. 



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