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103 6.The Housing of Older NewYorkers Kenneth Knapp Introduction Perhaps the single most important element that helps define a city’s quality of life is its housing. It is not just a source of shelter, but also a major component of household wealth, especially for older persons, who have higher ownership rates than do younger persons, and the vast majority of whom own their homes free of mortgage obligations.1 “Housing, like all issues of modern urbanization, is complex,” Patricia Pollak wrote in 1995.2 Housing in New York City, one of the oldest cities in the United States and the most populous and most economically and culturally diverse, is no exception. More than 400,000 residents live more than twenty stories above street level; 600,000 live on ground floors.About 1.2 million live in buildings comprising one hundred or more units; nearly 1.4 million reside in single-unit structures. Of the city’s eight million residents, 65 percent are renters. Some renters live in rentcontrolled or rent-stabilized apartments, some in public housing, others in unregulated free-market residences. There is variety among homeowners, too—they live in conventional owner-occupied homes, private cooperatives and condominiums, or regulated units.3 This chapter provides a summary of the housing of older NewYorkers.4 Among the features of housing discussed are tenure, regulation status, type of structure, housing costs, and measures of housing quality. I discuss housing in New York City as a whole and in each of the city’s five boroughs—the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island—with a focus on a comparison of the core of the city, Manhattan, to the others.5 While such a comparison is instructive, there are often great disparities of housing conditions within each borough. Since these disparities often reflect disparities in household incomes of different areas within boroughs, sub-borough areas have been selected for analysis based on median household income.6 Within each borough, sub-­boroughs with the highest and lowest median household incomes are compared (Table 6.1). Staten Island has only three sub-boroughs, and data for these are not presented (incomes across these three are higher and less variable than is true citywide). The median income in New York City is $45,000. Although Manhattan has a lower median income ($52,243) than Staten Island’s ($66,000), and one virtually equal to that of Queens ($51,200), this figure conceals great disparities across the sub-boroughs of Manhattan. Of the fifty-five defined sub-boroughs across all five boroughs, the four wealthiest are in Manhattan: the Upper West Side, Stuyvesant 104 Growing Older inWorld Cities Part II: NewYork Town/Turtle Bay, Greenwich Village/Financial District, and the Upper East Side— richest of all, with a median income of $104,200. On the other end of the spectrum, East Harlem, poorest in Manhattan ($23,000) and ironically the northern neighbor of the Upper East Side, is the city’s third-poorest neighborhood. The Lower East Side/Chinatown, Central Harlem, and Washington Heights/Inwood, all in Manhattan , also are among the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Income disparities are not nearly as wide in the Bronx—unfortunately for its residents. Five of the city’s six poorest sub-boroughs are in the Bronx (Manhattan’s East Harlem being the exception), which has the lowest median income ($32,000) Table 6.1. ResidentsWho AreWhite and Median Household Income: NYC, Boroughs, and Selected Sub-Boroughs, 2000–2002 Median household income Age 65+ White % All Owner Renter NYC 45 $45,000 $35,160 $14,544 Boroughs Bronx 30 32,000 25,000 13,000 Brooklyn 41 40,800 30,000 12,200 Manhattan 54 52,243 64,400 14,086 Queens 44 51,200 35,424 19,800 Staten Island 78 66,000 35,000 18,892 Selected Sub-Boroughsa Morrisania/East Tremont (Bronx) 22 18,000 16,272 9,804 Throgs Neck/Co-op City (Bronx) 61 52,600 21,300 10,800 Bedford Stuyvesant (Brooklyn) 7 28,000 34,301 14,944 Flatlands/Canarsie (Brooklyn) 38 61,000 38,000 15,476 East Harlem (Manhattan) 25 23,000 16,000 9,600 Upper East Side (Manhattan) 87 104,200 70,100 21,932 Astoria (Queens) 57 41,525 28,600 20,232 Bayside/Little Neck (Queens) 65 67,000 42,000 17,600 Source: Percent White -- Census 2000 data accessed through InfoShare, and U.S. Census Bureau, County and City Data Book: 2000, (13 Edition...

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