According to a recent look at Census data, more white people are moving to Brooklyn than any other area in the country.
Executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute Michael Petrilli set out to find which neighborhoods where gentrifying (experiencing an influx of people with higher incomes into a lower income area) at the highest rate. However, since income data was not yet available for the year 2010 from the Census bureau, Petrilli looked at the share of white people in the populations of different zip codes instead.
What he found was that four of the country’s 25 zip codes with the highest increase in white share of the population from 2000 to 2010 are in Brooklyn. Basically that means, white people are moving to those areas in Brooklyn at a faster rate than anywhere else in the U.S.
The four Brooklyn zip codes that saw the highest influxes of white people, in order, 11205 (Fort Greene), 11205 (East Williamsburg), 11238 (Prospect Heights), and 11237 (Bedstuy).
Other areas of the country that made the list include Columbia, SC; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; Denver, CO; Chattanooga, TN; and Portland, OR.
Petrilli acknowledged that this isn’t an entirely scientific study.
“I looked at zip codes (which isn’t perfect, because boundaries can change) and places with a large increase in the white share of the population (which isn’t perfect, because you’d really want to look at changes in income levels, but those data aren’t available yet for 2010),” he wrote.
But it at least provides a quick reference point for the ever-changing make-up of our country’s cities and population.
