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Notes -
The demographic of the city are interesting. NYC is roughly 31% non-Hispanic white (in 2010 it was 33% and in 2000 it was 35%), numbers are pretty stable in absolute terms over time. By contrast, the black population of NYC has fallen substantially from 30% of the population in the late 1980s to about 20% today, despite significant immigration from Africa and the Caribbean. Boston actually has a higher percentage of black residents than NYC now.
Most NYC inner suburbs and working / middle class neighborhoods really aren’t squalid by the standards of the median white American of the classes. I think this is a weird combination of a social memory of Taxi Driver 1970s NYC and an even older popular memory of cramped, awful Lower East Side tenements in the days of Ellis Island immigrants as popularized in a lot of historical movies and shows. In reality the neighborhoods in the outer boroughs in which ordinary teachers, cops, criminal defense lawyers, contraction supervisors, small business owners and so on live certainly have smaller house sizes than the US average but are not particularly dirty, nasty or horrible to live in compared to picket fence Midwestern suburbs, for example.
Having been to both and having spent a lot of time in the latter I find this so so so hard to believe. I believe you could find statistics backing this up but then I wonder about the accuracy of the statistics. Also I understand what you're saying about working/middle class neighborhoods in like Queens and much of Brooklyn being nice to live in but parts of Brooklyn are pretty horrible and the Bronx and most of the area above Central Park really are pretty bad in my opinion
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