Westchester Has More "Income Diversity" Between Its Neighborhoods Than Any Other NY County

There’s no standard definition of a “neighborhood.” The US Census, however, divides counties into geographic “census tracts.” Westchester County has 242 census tracts, with an average of about 1,500 households in each. So you can think of a tract as something of a stand-in for a neighborhood.

The median income is different, of course, in every tract. Each bar in this chart represents a different income bracket. The height of the bar shows how many Westchester tracts are in a particular income bracket.

As you can see, Westchester’s tracts run across a wide range of income brackets.

Now let's look at how Westchester’s tracts compare to the tracts in other large New York counties. First, many other counties have more total tracts than Westchester. We need to adjust our chart to account for that. So here is the same Westchester chart we used above, but with the maximum number of tracts per income bracket set to 90 rather than 20. This will allow us to compare Westchester to other counties that have more tracts.

Here are charts for some other large New York counties, along with Westchester. You can see that the bars in the Westchester and New York charts are relatively flat as compared to the others. This means that these two counties have a fairly even distribution of tracts across the income spectrum. In contrast, when the tracts in a chart cluster more heavily around certain points, as they do in the other counties, that means their distribution is less even.

Here’s another way to view the same data. This chart shows, for each county in New York, the average distance of the tracts’ median income from the average median income in the county (this is what statisticians call the “standard deviation”). A larger number here means a county’s tracts are more “spread out” from each other, in terms of the median income of the tracts within that county. You can see that in Westchester and New York counties, the average tract is much further away from the median income in the county, as compared to other counties.

Geography vs. Income Alone

It is important to note that the income diversity we’ve highlighted here is diversity between census tracts (again, you can think of tracts as being similar to neighborhoods). Interestingly, if you look at household income by income bracket alone, meaning without regard to any geographic considerations, the distributions in these counties actually look much more similar to each other. That's shown in the set of charts here with orange bars. To make it easier for you to compare the two sets of charts, click the "Show Tracts Charts" button to toggle on the charts we saw earlier depicting income diversity between tracts. In the set of charts with orange bars, the height of the bars represents number of households in each income bracket. In the set of charts with blue bars, the height of the bars represents the number of tracts in each income bracket.

Show Tracts Charts:

Why do Westchester and New York have income distribution graphs that flatten when we consider household income by geography (blue bars), as compared to when we look at household income alone (orange bars)? In theory, one explanation could be there are more households in high income tracts. But that’s not the case: the households per tract metric in Westchester doesn’t really correlate with median tract income levels. Instead, it seems reasonable to assume that the Westchester graph flattens when we consider geography because Westchester has more diversity of income levels inside each of our tracts. In other words, Westchester, along with New York County, has less geographic concentration of high income households.