Despite the tired melting pot analogy, New York City has long really resembled more of a buffet, with a variety of people from all kinds of ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds coexisting in enclaves little and big of their own around the city, a sign of the city’s powerful draw and the opportunities it provided.
Now it seems like we had the right idea the first time around, as New York’s old-country neighborhoods are melting together and growing as new ethnic and racial communities rise up around the long-dominant groups. That’s according to a detailed report on so-called communities of interest prepared by CUNY researchers for the NYC Districting Commission using 2020 census data.
The researchers detailed all number of fascinating trends, like a growing Asian population bolstered not only by the historically large population of Chinese New Yorkers, but a rising populace of South Asians including from India and Bangladesh, or a changing Black community that saw sharply a decreasing African-American population somewhat evened out by significant increases in African and Afro Latino arrivals.
