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Immigrant residency and happiness in New York City

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Abstract

We explore the quality of life of immigrants in New York City through housing and neighborhood conditions by creating a happiness metric to measure a household’s quality of life. Utilizing data provided by the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, the New York City Police Department, the New York City Department of Education, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, along with reports from Happy City and the New Economics Foundation, a happiness score was assigned to each sub-borough in New York City. This happiness score evaluated five main domains: work, place, community, education, and health. As a result of this analysis, we discovered higher happiness scores were associated with lower percentages of immigrant households.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Statistics, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 45056, USA

    Alison Tuiyott, Robert C. Garrett, Lydia Carter, Benjamin Schweitzer, Karsten Maurer & Thomas J. Fisher

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  1. Alison Tuiyott
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  2. Robert C. Garrett
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  3. Lydia Carter
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  4. Benjamin Schweitzer
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  5. Karsten Maurer
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  6. Thomas J. Fisher
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Correspondence to Thomas J. Fisher.

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Appendix

Appendix

To help explain the calculation of the Happiness Score Index in Sect. 3.2 consider the sub-borough region in Fig. 3. That particular sub-borough of Brooklyn is the South Crown Heights area with 54.53% of households being immigrant families. The average total household income in the sub-borough is $57,339.35 and average monthly rent contract of $1,253.65 (thus the place measurement is about 2.18%). Once scaled to the range [0, 1], the corresponding income and place measurements are 0.138 and 0.469, respectively.

This particular sub-borough is part of five different Police precincts with total major crimes ranging from 956 to 2322. The South Crown Heights sub-borough is part of two different school districts with achievement rates of 0.062 and 0.145 and five different community districts with two different lowest age in the median death age ranges (70–74 and 75–79). There are 19 unique intersecting regions in this sub-borough.

Using Eq. (1), we aggregate across all 19 unique \(j=1,\ldots ,5\), \(k=1,2\), \(l=1,\ldots ,5\) combinations using the area of the intersecting region as its weight for each term. Note that for income and place, the measure is based on the entire sub-borough and will receive full emphasis (the aforementioned 0.138 and 0.469 values). The resulting crime measure is 0.653, education is 0.202 and health is 0.632 after the weighted summation. At the conclusion, the Happiness Score for South Crown Heights is 2.095115.

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Tuiyott, A., Garrett, R.C., Carter, L. et al. Immigrant residency and happiness in New York City. Comput Stat 38, 1657–1668 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00180-023-01392-y

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