Category: Racial Diversity

As I have mentioned in my posting on wealthy urban neighborhoods, one cannot really compare entire city neighborhoods to homogenous single family suburban neighborhoods. The 69 suburban Chicago neighborhoods in the Higley 1000 have an average of of 624 households. The 11 contiguous central Chicago neighborhoods spotlighted in this essay have an average of 7,740 [...]

I had the good fortune to first move to Chicago in 1972 when the city was on the cusp of its rebirth. It was an exciting time to be a young advertising account executive in one of the world’s great cities that was about to reclaim the attention of the country as a dazzling jewel [...]

West Suburban Chicago
View Larger Map of Higley1000 neighborhoods in West Suburban Chicago
The West Suburban cluster of neighborhoods is centered on Oak Brook and Hinsdale. They are the odd couple of Chicago’s suburbs. Hinsdale (the Felix Unger of the two) is older, gracious and stately. Hinsdale’s lovely tree lined streets have been the site of [...]

The Barrington Area
View Larger Map Higley 1000 Neighborhoods in the Barrington area
One could almost consider the Barrington Area as an annex to the North Shore. New upscale development was blocked to the north along the lakefront by downscale North Chicago and Waukegan, therefore it moved west. The Barrington area (as I have defined it) stretches [...]

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 earned [...]

The wealthiest 100 neighborhoods in the United States have similar racial make-up as the Higley 1000. There was a slightly higher percentage of Non-Hispanic Whites (91.5%) and significantly fewer Asian-Americans and African-Americans than in the larger list. Hispanics and “Others” were about as well represented in the 57,362 households found in these Elite 100 neighborhoods.
Asian-Americans [...]

In many ways Grosse Pointe is emblematic of the racial divide that cleaves Detroit. Long an icon of wealth and privilege, it’s once unrivaled and unquestioned position at the center of upper class Detroit society, has slowly drained away to the point that it is a mere island of affluence, albeit a lovely one of [...]

Princeton, located halfway between New York City and Philadelphia, doesn’t really “belong” to either metro area although for statistical purposes it is tallied with Gotham by the Census Bureau. In many respects, Princeton operates as Micropolitan area with the Borough of Princeton serving as the CBD. Princeton Township (which geographically surrounds the borough) is the [...]

There are few Higley 1000 neighborhoods in central cities. The two exceptions to this rule are Manhattan and San Francisco. Urban neighborhoods that are based on Block Groups are usually too heterogeneous in terms of housing options to qualify for the list. As a rule, any substantial number of rental units will bring down the [...]

The bar graphs below show some interesting patterns. Asian-American are over-represented (compared to their percentage of all Americans) in every category… particularly in wealthy urban neighborhoods. African-Americans are much less likely to be found in either central cities or suburbia. Hispanics have penetrated the nations best neighborhoods more broadly and deeply than Blacks, but [...]