Wednesday December 2, 8:35 pm Eastern Time
NYC immigrants forge ahead, but not
the middle-class
By Joan Gralla
NEW YORK, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Immigrants, who make up more
than 45 percent of New York City's middle-class, forged ahead
during the city's latest economic comeback even as the middle class itself was shrinking, according to
a report put out Wednesday by the City Council.
''Perhaps the single biggest challenge facing New York City in the next millennium is insuring that this
city is a more hospitable place for middle-class families to live,'' City Council Speaker Peter Vallone
said in prepared remarks.
The City Council's analysis of 1997 data did not say what city leaders should do to keep the number
of working families from shrinking even more, but in January the council will make known the results
of town hearings held by Finance Committee Chairman Herbert Berman, delving into the problems
of housing, transportation and economic development that have made life tougher for the
middle-class.
While well-to-do New Yorkers in 1997 benefited from the rapid growth in wages and jobs, when
56,000 private sector positions were added, a middle-class family of four with an annual income of
$50,235 to $100,471 made little headway.
But the composition of New York City's middle class has changed remarkably, with 45 percent now
being foreign-born. From the late 1890s until around the 1920s, when the U.S. tightened its
immigration laws, the city's middle-class was just about as diverse, but the population was more
white -- until the 1960s, when an economic boom and more open immigration policies kick-started a
trend toward diversity.
Now, more than 57 percent of the city's middle-class is African American, Hispanic or Asian.
Among all city dwellers, 58.9 percent were born in the United States. In the middle-class, 16.6
percent are from the Dominican Republic and 6.5 percent are from Russia, with Mexico and China
contributing 5.7 percent each to that category.
From 1991 to 1997, the going got tougher for wealthy blacks and Hispanics, but not for whites, the
study said. The percentage of upper-income blacks fell 5.6 percentage points to 3.4 percent, though
that still was up 1.4 percentage points from 1977. For upper-income Hispanics, the 1991-to-1997
drop was 1.1 percentage points to 6.9 percent.
Overall, whites kept an iron lock on the highest income group, growing by 2.5 percentage points to
27.5 percent, the report said.
And, women of all races fared better than blacks: upper-income (more than $100,471 a year)
households led by females fell only 2.8 percentage points to 4.0 percent from 1991 to 1997. Still,
upper-income male heads-of households did worst of all, dropping 8.2 percentage points to 6.7
percent in 1997.
As for the overall middle class, their percentage of the city population in 1997 crept up only 4/10ths
of a percentage point to 29.6 percent from the previous year.
In contrast, 31 percent of New Yorkers in 1991 were in the middle class, down from 1/3rd at the
end of the city's fiscal crisis in 1977, when their ranks had been thinned by hard economic times.
''For the middle class, there has been little benefit from the economic recovery,'' the report said.
That was not the case for the entire upper-income crowd. That group of New Yorkers in 1997 rose
2.1 percentage points to 14.3 percent from the previous year, and their population share more than
doubled since 1977.
But for the vast majority of city dwellers, who are in the lower- and lower-middle brackets with
annual incomes of about $38,000, 1997 was hardly a banner year. The lower-middle group fell 1.4
percent to 10 percent from 1991, though that group did fall 2.9 percentage points from 1977.
And the biggest category, the lower class, made up about 46.1 percentage of the population in
1997. While the numbers were down 4.2 percentage points from 1991, they were up 6/10ths of a
percentage point from 1977.
A total of 65 percent of the Hispanic population fell into the low income group, along with almost 56
percent of the black population, the City Council report said. |
