Boston slipped back to majority non-White in 2007. Maybe.
Another batch of American Community Survey data from 2007 was released by the United States Census Bureau today.
Here’s a couple of quickie top line data that may be of general interest:
Total population for Boston in 2007: 613,117 (almost 14,000 more than the actual population estimate released earlier this year for Boston in 2007).
Whites made up 49.8% of the population last year, down 0.4 percentage points from 2006.
There were about 14,000 more females than males in the city, mostly because there were 13,000 more black women than men.
October 4, 2008, update: I promised more data and commentary but it will be a while before that happens in a substantial way. For now, I think there are a handful of data points worth noticing. As may recall, the city of Boston claims there are about 616,000 residents in Boston rather than the measly less than 600,000 that the Census Bureau estimates. Boston argues that the city has an under-counted group quarters poplation consisting of college students and public housing dwellers. What’s interesting about the 2007 ACS is that it concedes the top line but not the argument. The ACS pegs the group-quarters population at 38,000, not remarkably more than the 35,000 the Census counted in 2000. Also, The size of college population is virtually the same in the 2007 ACS as in the 20000 Census.
Also unchanged is the school-aged (Pre-K-12) population, which surely must annoy the Mayor since enrollment in the city’s public school system has dropped by several thousand students since the start of the decade.
So what has changed? The racial composition, for one thing. The city’s black population has fallen by some 12,000 while the Hispanic has perked up by 20,000. One would expect the Hispanic population to have increased because of the large and continuous immigration from Latin America. Plenty of anecdotal data suggests that there has in fact been a decrease in the city’s black population, especially the African-American segment of it.
The Latino poverty rate jumped from 27% in 2006 to 32.3% last year and they now have the highest poverty rate of the major races in the city. Asians, who in Boston consist of Chinese immigrants to a large degree, also topped 30%.
Here’s the median age in Boston according to the 2007 ACS (male/female):
Black: 32 (27.9/35.9)
Asian: 31.5 (31.2/31.8)
White: 35.7 (35.3/36.4)
Latino 28.6 (27.6/29.9)
Latinos have a small majority of men while the three other races have female majorities. For some reason the surplus of white women has been reduced sharply since 2000 which seems a bit strange.
Anyway, some time this fall I hope to do a bit more exhaustive presentation of the data.
