Brooklyn, NY

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 2,736,074 people and 804 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.


Brooklyn is a decidedly white-collar borough, with fully 85.66% of the workforce employed in white-collar jobs, well above the national average. 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 (10.91%), management occupations (10.01%), and sales jobs (8.50%).






One downside of living in Brooklyn is that it can take a long time to commute to work. In Brooklyn, the average commute to work is 41.06 minutes, which is quite a bit higher than the national average. On the other hand, local public transit is widely used in the borough, so leaving the car at home and taking transit is often a viable alternative. In addition, it is also a pedestrian-friendly borough. Many of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods are dense enough and have amenities close enough together that people find it feasible to get around on foot.

Brooklyn is a big city, and with that comes lots of benefits. One benefit is that most big cities have public transit, but Brooklyn really shines when it comes to the extensiveness and use of its public transit system. More than most large American cities, Brooklyn citizens use public transit daily to get to and from work. And while there are transportation options, most people in Brooklyn ride the subway. Whereas in some cities one is destined to sit in traffic every morning to get to work and every evening to get home, in Brooklyn a lot leave their cars at home (if they even choose to own one), and hop a ride on the subway.

The education level of Brooklyn citizens is very high relative to the national average among all cities (21.84%): 38.84% of adults in Brooklyn have a bachelor's degree or even advanced degree.

The per capita income in Brooklyn in 2018 was $36,295, 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 $145,180 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 18.87% of the borough’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Brooklyn include Italian, Irish, Jamaican, Russian, and Haitian.

Brooklyn also has a high percentage of its population that was born in another country: 35.60%.
