By Raanan Geberer
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

BROOKLYN – Since the New York Times recently ran an article on what the Census Bureau’s recently-posted 2007 American Community Survey revealed about the city as a whole, we thought we’d do so for Brooklyn specifically.

For starters, two-parent families are the most common in the borough, followed by female-headed families, followed by people living alone or with roommates. Males living with children are fairly uncommon. The average household size is 2.81.

Interestingly, “now married� individuals and “never married� people are about equal (“now married� leads among men, “never married� among women), followed only then by divorced and widowed people. This may reflect the growing number of young, unmarried people moving into the borough from elsewhere.

Of the population 25 years old or younger, the most common are high school graduates, followed by “some college, no degree� and then by people with bachelor’s degrees. Seventy-seven percent have a high school degree, a fairly high percent if one takes into account the large number of immigrants from third-world countries.

Only about one in 30 people age 18 or older are veterans, reflecting the fact that the World War II, Korean War and Vietnam War generations are rapidly getting older and older; and that service in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts has been nowhere near as universal as in the early wars.

Ninety-one percent of those surveyed lived in the same house or apartment they lived in a year ago, perhaps showing that the flood of people coming in from other parts of the country is slowing down.

Of those people who were born abroad (about a third of the general population), the majority arrived before 2000. As far as “countries of origin� is concerned, about half came from Latin America, making that region the leader by far, with the remaining half split between Europe and Asia.

Only a little more than half of the population “5 years old and older� lived in homes where only English was spoken exclusively, again reflecting the large number of immigrants. The largest ancestry group among both native-born and immigrants, at 324,906, was West Indian, followed by Italian, at 170,459, and then by Russian.

In the employment category, only 6.7 percent were unemployed, about the same as the national employment rate. Public transportation, as one would surmise, was the most popular way of getting to work.

The most common types of work for Brooklynites were management/professional, service, sales and office occupations. If one took the same survey 50 years ago, one would see manufacturing high on the list.

The median family household income is $67,000, and the greatest concentration for family incomes is in the $50,000-$75,000 range.

For those who pay rent, the high concentration of rents paid fall into the $750-$1,500 range, reflecting today’s high rents but still much lower than Manhattan. Apartment houses outnumber single-family houses, but if one added up all one- to four-family houses in the borough, they would basically equal the number of apartment units.

And with all the new condos and other housing units being built, the number of units built since 2000 is still only about 3 percent of the total.

In terms of age, the categories encompassing ages 25 to 44 encompass the greatest number of Brooklynites. And in the area of race, whites are counted as 1,064,335; blacks at 884,160; and Asians at 226,697. Hispanics “of any race� are listed at 493,961.

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