NYU Report: These 15 NYC Neighborhoods Have Changed The Most Since 1990

The NYU Furman Center has put out a new report that breaks down the massive change NYC has seen throughout the past generation.  

According to the report, 15 of 55 neighborhoods in the five boroughs classified as “gentrifying”—which the Furman Center defines as areas whose residents' incomes were in the bottom 40% in the city in 1990, but who saw rent growth above the median for the city over the next two decades.  

Much of what the report found wasn’t a big shock: Since 1990, the city’s population as a whole has become more educated, and households with more unrelated adults became a much bigger phenomenon.

But one thing the report found was that these changes have happened to a greater extent in the city’s 15 gentrifying neighborhoods than in the 40 deemed either “non-gentrifying” or “high income.”

The gentrifying areas include the Lower East Side, a large swathe of northern and central Brooklyn, nearly all of Upper Manhattan and a chunk of the South Bronx. 

While there has been a citywide decline in the white population since 1990, the 15 gentrifying neighborhoods all saw both an increase in the number of white residents and a larger decrease in black residents through 2014 than the five boroughs overall.

Average incomes also saw the most change in gentrifying neighborhoods, climbing 14% across all 15 between 1990 and 2014. Non-gentrifying neighborhoods took an 8% hit on average income, and high income neighborhoods didn’t see a significant change.