By Sam Roberts
The New York Times

Since 2000, according to census figures released last year, the number of children under age 5 living in Manhattan mushroomed by more than 32 percent. And though their ranks have been growing for several years, a new analysis for The New York Times makes clear for the first time who has been driving that growth: wealthy white families.


At least half of the growth was generated by children who are white and non-Hispanic. Their ranks expanded by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2005. For the first time since at least the 1960s, white children now outnumber either black or Hispanic youngsters in that age group in Manhattan.
The analysis shows that Manhattan’s 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005, which means they are growing up in wealthier households than similar youngsters in any other large county in the country.
What those findings imply, demographers say, is not only that the socioeconomic gap between Manhattan and the other boroughs is widening, but also that the population of Manhattan, in some ways, is beginning to look more like the suburbs — or what they used to look like — than like the rest of the city.
“We knew Manhattan was having a baby boom,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College of the City University of New York, who conducted the analysis. “Now we know who’s having the babies.”
The raw numbers are subject to interpretation

Here’s Chris Osborne, 44, who lives on the Upper West Side with his wife Marcia, 37, and their two children, ages 4 and 6:
If both parents are working, it actually becomes logistically difficult to live in the suburbs. If you’re 90 minutes away, we just don’t like that feeling.
Even if we were disposed to — for the usual space, quality of life reasons — to go to suburbs, we would have to consider the practical difficulty.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites