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From the richest to poorest in New York City
The poorest and richest Congressional districts in the United States are merely miles apart in New York City. Here, Central Park and the Manhattan skyline.
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David Brancaccio: It's primary day here in New York and several other nearby states. Now that Mitt Romney has all-but-sewn up his candidacy for president on the GOP side, he'll give a key speech today pivoting from the primaries toward the general election in the fall. But as part of Marketplace's coverage of what really matters in this election -- what we're calling The Real Economy -- we have a story about an economic gulf in one primary state. By one set of measures, America's richest and America's poorest congressional districts lie just five stops apart along a New York City subway line. Let's visit.
Brancaccio: That's our tour guide, Sarah Burd-Sharps. She's the co-director of the Measure of America that has mapped who's moving ahead and who's lagging in every part of the United States.Sarah Burd-Sharps: I think there's a lot of reasons why the way pie is divided ends up sometimes being very uneven and this is of course true across the nation. It's just not New York City.
We start off on Manhattan's Upper East Side in part of Congressional District 14, the district with the highest income in the country. Here, the typical worker makes $64,000 a year. That's per person -- not per household. But Burd-Sharps says, it isn't just about these obvious signs of wealth.Burd-Sharps: We might want to go to the park.
Susan Bernstein lives in this Congressional district and is spending part of her day laying mulch atop a lush flowerbed in Carl Schurz Park.Susan Bernstein: I'm just putting down the chrysanthemums right now.
She volunteers here one day a week. Bernstein says this park is a place where you can forget about the concrete of the surrounding city, which is why she says the neighborhood is very unhappy about a plan to use a garbage holding station a few blocks away.Bernstein: There are hostas and ferns and daffodils, of course.
New York City wants to re-open a waste transfer center that closed in the late 1990s. The neighborhood's been fighting it.Bernstein: They're going to truck garbage from all over Manhattan up to there, but there's a great group that's trying to stop this from happening. Just F.Y.I.
So while the island of Manhattan currently has zero waste transfer stations at work, ride the subway for about 10 minutes to the South Bronx and it's a different story. You have 19 waste transfer stations here in Congressional District 16, the district with the lowest income in the United States. The South Bronx, among other things, is known as the asthma corridor and has one of the highest rates of hospitalization in the country, which could explain this fact:Burd-Sharps: People in very affluent neighborhoods often have really sophisticated skills for making their voices heard that people don't have to the same extent.
We ran into Melissa Castro and her children at a playground next to Rainey Park in the South Bronx. When Burd-Sharps tells her the number of garbage transfer stations around here, Castro says she had no idea.Burd-Sharps: A baby born today in the 14th District, Manhattan's East Side, can expect to outlive a baby born today in this area by four years.
Researchers continue to investigate links between asthma and the transfer stations and pollution from the network of highways all around here.Melissa Castro: That's why all of our kids have asthma? Wow. I did not know that. Evie's daughter has to carry around with an inhaler all the time, last summer she wasn't like that.
Experts say these conditions help explain why these gaps in standards of living -- just a few subway stops apart -- remain so persistent.Castro: I have to get out of the Bronx for my kids health and even the schools, I don't want to even go on top of that subject.
Since moving to 93rd St. and First Ave. 10 years ago, I’ve come to know more about the residents of the NYC public housing units opposite me, across the avenue. Most of what I’ve learned has come about as a result of joining the fight against the construction of the MTS (garbage transfer station) less than three blocks from where I live and only two blocks from most of the residents of the five buildings that comprise the Isaacs & Holmes public houses.
I’m a retired social worker living on a modest State pension and Social Security. Since joining this fight, I’ve been continuously accused of being part of the rich, white elitists of the Upper East Side, clearly a bad thing to be. As far as the residents of the public houses, when I dare to mention how close they live to the MTS site, I’m told that before this fight I didn’t care about the residents and that I’ll care only so long as it benefits me to do so.
They’re right about one thing. I’m a typical New Yorker. I didn’t know or care about them or about the residents of the fancy-looking hi-rise buildings along York and First Ave or the people living in the small, tenement-like buildings on the side streets. If I knew anything about the person in the next apartment it was an achievement! But in my opinion, this is exactly how a neighborhood becomes a community—when there’s a reason for people to come together for their mutual benefit.
I will tell you some of the things I didn’t know before. I knew the residents of Isaacs & Holmes were serious about work because I see them from my window as they leave in the mornings and it’s in their attitudes. But I didn’t know what truly good people so many of them appear to be: intelligent and well-educated, conscientious about their families, kind, patient and full of fun. And the children I met were just plain amazing. I also didn’t know how many of them don’t have computers or how many choose not to have phones. I probably never would have, if not for this opportunity.
I’ve also been interacting with residents of those fancy hi-rise buildings on York Ave! I’ve learned more about their backgrounds, what’s important to them, where they put their energies. Far from being the self-centered, spoiled, soul-less Upper East Siders they are so often portrayed as, I’ve met a great number who are extraordinarily capable people and who are deeply involved in all kinds of vital, progressive causes that add so much to New York City.
I’ve been greatly enriched. After we win this fight, I look forward to being part of new experiences with residents, shop owners, block association members and local groups to better conditions for myself and my neighbors. That’s how community is created.
The garbage trucks will line up in a driveway bisecting the ball field on one side and the younger children's playground on the other side. The children will be playing next to a line of fully loaded garbage trucks, spewing exhaust fumes and garbage smells. These are not necessarily children from the neighbothood. Every school day there are lines of school buses taking children to the facility from various areas for their school recreation. For the older children, bright lights allow them to play well into the night, but with garbage trucks lining up 24 hours per day six days a week there will be no relief.
How can the city even consider putting a garbage dump adjacent to a children's playground??
HFS-NYC,
The statistic cited in the story is an indicator from the American Human Development Index 2010-2011, median personal earnings; the data come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Median personal earnings include the wages and salaries of all workers ages 16 and up.
The congressional district with the country's highest median personal earnings at the time of our publication, $60,000, was New York’s District 14, which encompasses your neighborhood as well as the rest of Manhattan’s East Side and parts of Queens. The congressional district with the lowest median personal earnings, around $18,000, was New York’s District 16, a few subway stops away in the South Bronx. To see the highs and lows and everyone in between on earnings as well as health, education, and more, see Measure of America 2010-2011 at www.measureofamerica.org, or go to our mapping program; the earnings map is here: http://measureofamerica.org/maps/?area=Districts&race=All&sex=All&year=Y....
Your discussion of conditions in your neighborhood vs. those on Park and Fifth avenues nearby is well taken; tremendous variation in well-being and opportunity exists within as well as between congressional districts in New York City and elsewhere. We are at the early stages of preparing a report on the New York City Metro Area, and in it we will look at neighborhood-level variations of the sort to which you refer.
Sarah Burd-Sharps and Kristen Lewis, Measure of America of the Social Science Research Council
David,
I'm very much a fan of Economy 4.0. I've been hugely concerned about the ever-widening gap between the very rich and the rest of us for about 20 years now. Thanks to your efforts, and others, it's becoming increasingly recognized that it's wreaking terrible havoc.
I live in the neighborhood your story reports on and I'm a volunteer with the "great group" that's trying to keep the City from replacing the old marine transfer station (MTS) with a far larger, incredibly expensive new one. As you'll see below, that's only a part of our fight. The MTS idea is part of a larger, more systemic, more important problem.
Your story intends to be about the chasm between rich and poor in the US, and its unjust, destructive consequences. I applaud the intention. Unfortunately by stating that our Congressional district is the wealthiest in the country (which a Google search indicates is not even accurate), your story implies that the district is wall-to-wall wealthy people and the fight against the planned MTS is carried on for and by people who have access to the levers of power. I’d like to set the record straight. The real story is still about how the very rich can have their way, but it’s different, more complex, and a more intense example of the genre, that raises critical questions about government transparency and the proper roles of elected and public officials. I think it deserves an in-depth journalistic investigation.
The reality is that the people who make this a wealthy congressional district live many, many blocks away from the intended MTS site, mostly along Park Avenue and 5th Avenue and on the adjacent streets. The stratospherically high incomes of a small percentage of them greatly skew the average for the entire district but are not shared by those of us who live near the site. We'd welcome their support, but I've never met even one of them at a meeting of our group. Our impression is that they're not even aware of our fight, or they feel insulated from it.
Our neighborhood, near the site, ranges economically from the hard-working, sometimes hard-pressed, diverse community of about 3000 people that lives in high-rise public housing just across the FDR Drive a mere 100 yards from the site, closest to it; to the middle-income population that lives adjacent to the public housing, in high-rises across narrow York Avenue on the blocks near the site; to the families who live in the 100-year old 5-story tenements on the cross-streets near the site. In all, there are easily 15000 people who live within blocks of the site. At most a very tiny percentage of these people are wealthy or have high incomes, and none of them is nearly as wealthy as those cited above.
Into this poor-thru-middle class, diverse neighborhood, one of the most densely populated in the city, Mike Bloomberg and now also Christine Quinn are pushing hard to set up an extremely expensive facility to concentrate trash disposal at a level that can potentially handle the majority of Manhattan's entire public and private waste output- up to 1000 truck-passes per day through a narrow, often extremely congested street at a point that is crossed daily by hundreds of children, to dump over 5000 tons of trash of unmonitored, potentially toxic content, 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. According to Department of Sanitation, the City is providing a blank check for demolition of the old MTS and construction of the vastly expanded one, despite our fiscally very constrained condition, probably because it is explicitly an option in the City’s permitting applications for the new to be sold to and operated by a private company after the City builds it and pays for it with taxpayer dollars.
Of five new City MTS’s planned, this is the only one that the City plans to put into the middle of a densely populated residential neighborhood. Our neighborhood has been fighting the project for nine years. With extremely heavy input from NYC's Economic Development Corp, the ill-conceived project, driven (in my analysis) by a combination of Mike Bloomberg's political ambitions and extreme wealth, and the grandiose economic development visions of his ultra-wealthy friends, managed somehow to get a clean bill of health- a determination that building and running the new MTS would have zero environmental impact of the neighborhood nearby. Common sense says zero impact is impossible. Endless testimony on our neighborhood’s behalf over the nine years produced innumerable highly qualified, credentialed experts who agreed, none of which was rebutted by experts with comparably relevant credentials on behalf of the City.
I feel that the Mayor's plan fits a pattern of favoring the few big players at the expense of the bulk of the city's population, which I feel should be very much an issue for intense public scrutiny. As a result of his approach, to our shame, NYC is rated 16th among large US cities in the environmental impact of its waste management programs. A true 21st-century plan built around “reduce-reuse-recycle” could make us #1 and a model for responsible waste management, as we should be, and badly need to be, but it would require extensive regulation and enforcement of the waste industry, which so far seems to be contrary to the Mayor's view of how the City should be managed. Not that he doesn't regulate, but he targets and gives tickets galore to regular people, minority kids, and small business people of all kinds. Along with contributing mightily to the City's revenue this also probably produces more social order, but at a steep social price. Meanwhile the huge operators continue to have their way. Social order apparently is on the Mayor's agenda but social equity is not.
We in the "great group" are fighting the MTS project, and more broadly the Mayor's Solid Waste Management Plan, with intense determination. We are not the "very affluent" people Sarah Burd-Sharps refers to. We sometimes fear retribution from the City, as we saw what Mayor Mike could do when we approached being able to send the solid waste plan back to the drawing boards in the City Council six years ago. We sometimes feel outgunned, as the City has mobilized and to some extent subsidized other volunteer organizations that are able to provide paid staff to support the Mayor's plan. We are firmly committed to environmental justice. We feel extremely strongly that huge waste-handling factories must be kept out of all residential neighborhoods. We're sure all of the boroughs deserve something much better than the Mayor's plan, and that it can be brought about. We won't let up until we and our counterparts in the other boroughs achieve that.
It's all about this:
NO NEW YORKER (OR ANYONE ANYWHERE) SHOULD EVER BE TREATED LIKE TRASH.
