Quantitatively compare New York neighborhoods
Image from New York Mag.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com crunched numbers to rank 60 New York City neighborhoods on their livability, combining housing costs, transit, safety, nightlife, parks, schools, and more.
Brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods dominated the top rankings, largely due to their relative affordability compared to comparable Manhattan neighborhoods. But you can tweak the weightings of various criteria and watch the rankings change. As the intro points out, it’s very dependent on where price fits in; make price less important and pricey Manhattan neighborhoods like Tribeca jump to the top; weight price more highly and Queens moves up.
Silver finds something of an inexplicable premium placed on living in Manhattan. Also, interestingly, he finds that neighborhood prices per square foot rise exponentially with desirability, whereas in Chicago they rise linearly. Perhaps, he theorizes, that’s because in Chicago it’s much easier to move to a larger house if a family has more money, whereas in New York City itself, with fewer single-family house neighborhoods in desirable areas, people simply move to nicer and more central neighborhoods.
The authors computed the weightings by surveying people for their preferences. However, I wonder if it would be possible to compute the weightings empirically by using price as a signal. If we assume that prices reflect New Yorkers’ actual preferences for neighborhoods, what weighting of the other criteria generates a list that makes neighborhoods’ scores closest? Manhattan neighborhoods are closer in travel time to Midtown; could the model be underweighting travel times in a way that looks like a Manhattan bias?
And, of course, it would be amazing to have data and a tool like this for Greater Washington, and for other regions. Wouldn’t it be great to have a Wikipedia-like tool where people can collaboratively enter data sources they find for various neighborhoods in various cities, connected to a tool with sliders that shows rankings like the New York calculator?