Racial Integration of the Wealthiest 1000 Places in America

How the 1% Voted in the Presidential Election: 2 to 1 for Clinton

The recent New York Times interactive map of all voting precincts in the United States allowed me to investigate how 300 of the highest income places voted in the Presidential Election. (An Extremely Detailed Map of the Election, July 25, Matthew Block, Larry Buchanan, Josh Katz, and Kevin Quealy).

Kasino Markets, Nordic Immigrants And The Highley Elite

Nordic immigrants are changing how residents in certain areas are choosing to spend their leisure time. Nettikasinot, as for instance Finns say, have become increasingly popular in those areas where Nordic immigrants decide to recide in. The phenomenon is relatively new, but quite obvious. At the same time, many casino companies have also moved their operations to the US, and gambling will certainly become more prevalent among the general population. […]

Nettikasinot Conservative Cities: Entertainment & Casino has Everything to Do with It

Even the most conservative cities in America are barely right of center, and offer extensive music, sports & casino entertainment as the great charts from the Economist, based on research from Chris and Christopher at MIT, shows. It also supports the findings of Nettikasinot Ilman Rekisteröitymistä -survey made in Finland, regarding the entertainments affect on housing and general happiness. […]

The Higley Elite 100: Variance & Stability in the American Community Survey

New research shows that the huge variances for individual neighborhoods only nudges the racial makeup of the Elite 100. I’m afraid that many of the visitors to my site are solely interested in the question of which neighborhood is Number One. In the hope of highlighting the futility of trying to determine which neighborhood is […]

All Higley 1000 Neighborhoods by Metropolitan Area

Below is the list of all of the Higley 1000 neighborhoods. If any of my readers would suggest a ‘better’ name for any of the below, I’m listening. Due to the huge number of New York City neighborhoods, I has been broken New York City into Connecticut, Long Island, New Jersey, New York City, and […]

The Higley 1000

The results of the Higley 1000 have finally been tabulated down to the block group level. Many thanks to USA.com for doing what the Census Bureau could not accomplish: an easily usable database combined with a detailed and accurate mapping component. Methodology My data is derived from the American Community Survey. My methodology consisted […]

Highest Income Census Tracts in the United States: The Manhattan Story

“…one can’t help but notice the heavy preponderance of New York City metro area tracts, particularly those located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Fairfield County, Connecticut. Twenty-seven of the top 50 tracts are located in the New York Metro area.”

Dramatic Gains for Asians & Hispanics. Dramatic Decline for Non-Hispanic Whites

Editors Note: The following article was written when I gave up trying to crack the data from the Census below the Census Tract level. A much more accurate way of looking at the data is at the Block Group data (which I used for the original Higley 1000). Although the information in the article […]

Fifteen Up & Coming Places of Affluence in the United States

I am waiting for the American Community Survey to update the Higley 1000. However, there are some new places that are bubbling up as possible neighborhoods when the new Higley 1000 is created anew next year. A database by “Caspio” and published on the web by G. Scott Thomas on the website The […]

The Wealthy Neighborhoods of Birmingham, Alabama

An Overview of the Metro Area Birmingham has indeed come a long way in its relatively brief history. Born in the aftermath of the Civil War (1871), the city quickly burgeoned into the iron and steel industry’s “Pittsburgh of the South” by the early 20th Century. The city’s explosive growth in its first forty years […]

Eric Fischer’s Racial Maps by Major Metro Areas

Eric Fischer has posted an extensive array of maps of each American metropolitan area’s racial distribution. As they are germane to my website, I have posted them in all their glory. Each red dot on the map represents Non-Hispanic Whites; each blue dot African-Americans; each gold dot represents Latinos; and, each green dot represents Asian-Americans. […]

High Income Urban Neighborhoods

The Higley 1000 does a grave disservice to urban neighborhoods. The diversity of urban places, the very life-blood that makes them so desirable to their residents, can not possibly be captured by the Block Group data that is the basis for the Higley 1000. High income urban neighborhoods are mixtures of condominiums, rental apartments, and townhouses with occasional blocks of single family homes. Therefore the mean household incomes of these places tend to be much lower than in the suburbs. With the exception of the Block Groups along Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue (see the New York, New York to the left), the urban neighborhoods represented in the Higley 1000 are stray Block Groups that are representative of those neighborhoods. As I have written in my Methodology section, the list has a strong bias towards small, homogeneous suburban neighborhoods.

In order to look beyond suburbia and explore the state of racial integration in Urban America, I have also examined the racial makeup of America’s wealthiest and most prominent urban places. One should note that the neighborhoods listed below will be based on entire city neighborhoods. The geographic definition for an urban neighborhood on this page will not consist of the richest contiguous Block Groups but entire neighborhoods. Obvious outliers like public housing projects such as the Lathrop Homes in Lincoln Park will be dropped from the data in the interest of the goals of this site.

Determining what is “urban” and what is “suburban” is a bit of a call in some situations. In general, I have used average household size as an indicator. Urban neighborhoods have an average household size between 1.5 and 2.0 (versus the 2.5 to 3.o people per household found in suburbia. I have also dropped suburban places with high densities as they often are characterized by high-rises in a suburban setting. A good example of this would be the Friendship Terrace complex in Bethesda, Maryland. Through a complicated intersection of geography and Block Group data, I was able to isolate this large, luxurious high-rise complex. Atlhough Friendship Terrace reaches all of the benchmarks to be listed as an “urban neighborhood”, it is located in the bowels of suburbia and therefore is not on the list. [...]

The Elite 100: America’s Highest Income Neighborhoods

The 100 neighborhoods with the highest incomes in the United States have similar racial make-up as the Higley 1000. There is a slightly higher percentage of Non-Hispanic Whites (91.4%) and significantly fewer Asian-Americans and African-Americans than in the larger list. Hispanics were better represented primarily on the strength of five Miami neighborhoods with high Cuban populations. The five Miami neighborhoods contribute 38.4% of Latinos in the Elite 100. There were a total of 51,844 households found in all Elite 100 neighborhoods.

Asian-Americans are still over-represented in the Elite 100 with 4.3% of the households versus 2.7% of the total households in the United States. Although African-Americans makeup only 1.0 % of the Higley 1000 households, they contribute significantly fewer households (.7%) to the Elite 100. As I have questioned repeatedly on my site, where are the wealthy Black households? They made up 11.7% of all American households in the 2000 and 4.4% of the households making over $200,000, yet there representation in the best neighborhoods is negligible.

The Elite 100 is surprisingly diverse in terms of the number of metro areas represented on the list. No less than 27 Metro areas have their “best” neighborhoods on the list, although many of them (13) only have one place. As in the list of 1000 neighborhoods, the New York City metro area dominates the Elite 100 with 30 neighborhoods or small villages. There are 17 in the state of New York, 7 in Connecticut, and 6 in New Jersey for a total of 30% of the Elite 100. The Los Angeles metro area is a distant second with 11 neighborhoods on the list, followed by Chicago with nine.

When defining the type of neighborhoods that make up the Elite 100, it is best to think of a continuum as some neighborhoods are difficult to assess on a national scale. As an example what is “traditional” or “nouveau riche” in Florida? With some equivocation I have adjudged that 65 of the 100 as “traditional” and 30 as “nouveau riche“. The remaining five are hard to catagorize oceanfront Florida neighborhoods (Jupiter Island, Johns Island, the Everglades Club of Palm Beach, Lost Tree Village-Seminole Landing, and Ponte Vedra Beach).

There are 15 neighborhoods found in the corporate limits of central cities, however, only Midtown Manhattan could truly be considered urban.

The richest neighborhood in the United States is the lush Holmby Hills neighborhood just west of the Los Angeles Country Club in the so-called Platinum Triangle (along with Beverly Hills and Bel Air). This small neighborhoods has some of the most gargantuan houses in the United States including Candy Spelling’s 60,000 square foot mansion.

The second richest neighborhood in the United States is located in Denver’s Cherry Hills Village. I have named this collection of upscale sub-divisions Buell Mansion-Cherry Hills Park after two of this Block Group’s most luxurious developments. Cherry Hills Village is typical of the Western United States in that it is hard to categorize. It is a combination of old wealth and the uber-mansions of the nouveau riche.

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