Brooklyn, NY


Most expensive Brooklyn neighborhoods

Brooklyn profile

Living in Brooklyn

Brooklyn is an enormous coastal borough (i.e. on the ocean, a bay, or inlet) located in the state of New York. With a population of 2,619,637 people and 760 constituent neighborhoods, Brooklyn is the largest community in New York. Brooklyn has an unusually large stock of pre-World War II architecture, making it one of the older and more historic boroughs.


Unlike some boroughs, Brooklyn isn’t mainly white- or blue-collar. Instead, the most prevalent occupations for people in Brooklyn are a mix of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Overall, Brooklyn is a borough of professionals, service providers, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Brooklyn who work in office and administrative support (12.75%), sales jobs (9.52%), and management occupations (8.53%).




One downside of living in Brooklyn, however, is that residents on average have to contend with a long commute, spending on average 40.24 minutes every day commuting to work. It is, however, a pedestrian-friendly borough. Many of its neighborhoods are dense enough and have amenities close enough together that people find it feasible to get around on foot. In addition, local public transit is widely used. For those who would prefer to avoid driving entirely and leave their car at home, it may be an option to use the transit instead.


In terms of college education, Brooklyn is substantially better educated than the typical community in the nation, which has 21.84% of the adults holding a bachelor's degree or graduate degree: 32.84% of adults in Brooklyn have a college degree.

The per capita income in Brooklyn in 2010 was $26,774, which is middle income relative to New York, and upper middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $107,096 for a family of four. However, Brooklyn contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.

Brooklyn is an extremely ethnically-diverse borough. The people who call Brooklyn home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Brooklyn residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Brooklyn also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 19.62% of the borough’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Brooklyn include Jamaican, Irish, Russian, and Haitian.

Brooklyn also has a high percentage of its population that was born in another country: 37.46%.
