This post first appeared on witBlog
This past Sunday an article I researched was published in the NY Post – Financial District residents get highest tax bills, returns in city
We like to think of New York City as The Melting Pot…and as a whole its the most diverse city in the country hands down. Diverse in culture, ancestry, race, cuisine, employment, and economics. But when you look locally and compare neighborhoods, zip codes and blocks, we find that the city is actually quite segregated along each of those dimensions.
The IRS’ Statistics of Income (SOI) dataset is particularly compelling when evaluating economic diversity. While we certainly expect that individuals will have widely disparate income, taxes, deductions and refunds, looking at the data by Zip Code illustrated how wealth is concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods.
Zip Code Deciles
Let’s take a look at some of the IRS data grouped into decile ranges.
What About NYC’s Top Earning Zip Code?
If you think the decile values are skewed to the top, just look at the numbers for Zip Code 10005, the highest average individual income tax earnings area in the city:
$944,134 – Average AGI (Adjusted Gross Income)
$281,245 – Average Itemized Deductions
Distribution by Borough?
It’s probably not a surprise, but deciles are very unevenly distributed across city regions.
Lowest incomes
Bronx = 13 Zips
Brooklyn = 3 Zips
Queens = 2 Zips
Highest incomes
Manhattan = 17 Zips
What’s next?
As you might expect, the IRS SOI data distribution correlated with a wide range of other datasets we work with on a national basis including Real Estate prices, crime, neighborhood stability, racial composition / diversity, and volume of storefronts.
If you’d like to learn more or collaborate to gather insights from your own datasets, get in touch!
The post The Inequality of Taxes in NYC appeared first on OnBlog.
