Project Report

Project Description

• Partners: Beespace
• Intervention: Data analysis of the American Community Survey for CNY and NYC regions
• Method: Mapping
• Outcomes: Demographic and socioeconomic differences and further neighborhood sorting are bound to have polarizing effects

Project Report

The Maxwell X Lab partnered with Beespace to provide a data-driven exploration of Central New York (CNY) to assist Beespace as they considered opportunities in the CNY area and attempted to identify factors that have led to polarization with New York City (NYC). Using the American Community Survey as the primary data source, we provided detail on CNY and NYC, historical data for both regions, and a map of the data that illustrates how the regions differ spatially.

Results from the analysis showed that CNY is much more homogenous than NYC in nearly all aspects, especially demographically and economically. CNY has a large majority of white residents who are native-born, while NYC has a much more racially and ethnically diverse population in which more than a third are not native-born. Additionally, income and education levels appeared to be quite consistent across the counties in the CNY area. Spatially, CNY is also quite homogeneous at the neighborhood level, with neighborhoods that are highly segregated with isolated pockets of poverty. Within the NYC region, there is considerable heterogeneity across the counties in terms of income and education. However, CNY is more heterogeneous than NYC in the political affiliation of the population. CNY has a roughly equal proportion of Democrats, Republicans, and others/unaffiliated, while NYC’s proportion of Democrats is roughly twice as high. Over the past fifteen years, CNY has had flat or negative job growth, rising poverty, and little rise in income.

Our research concluded that these demographic and socioeconomic differences and further neighborhood sorting were bound to have polarizing effects.