The absence of the Fort Lauderdale, Delray Beach, and Pompano Beach neighborhoods from the Higley 1000 is a combination of several factors. First of all, my statistics are taken from Census Geography at the Block Group level. Many times waterside mansions are geographically linked to high-rises and condominiums that tend to kill high income averages. Secondly, many of these homes are second homes and the owners report their income at their first home address. An thirdly, it is my observation that a large number of retirees sometimes kills the mean income. This isn’t always the case, as almost all of Palm Beach is represented in the Higley 1000.

Florida is a particularly hard nut to crack geographically as the waterfront houses set up a linear pattern of wealth that is just difficult to capture in Block Group data. I’ve been agonizing over how to capture the waterfront wealth of Jacksonville’s St. Johns’ River mansions for the last couple of weeks!

If I feel a worthy neighborhood has not been captured by the Census data, I reserve the right to call it a “Higley Designated Place” where I estimate the income and build the racial makeup block by block of Census data. As you can imagine, this is an incredibly time consuming and difficult process.

The bottom line is that the data is not perfect and I am always working to refine the list of neighborhoods.

Thanks for your comments, I should possibly revisit the South Florida river front/canal front/oceanfront mansions.