The richest neighborhoods in New York City

Where do the wealthiest New Yorkers live? It’s not hard to guess the neighborhoods with the highest concentration of super-duper-rich residents, but the Census Bureau's American Community Survey offers concrete data.

The most recent ACS, covering the years 2013-2017, offers some insight by tracking the mean household income of various New York City areas. And luckily for those who have a morbid curiosity about the richest neighborhoods in the five boroughs (so, you, if you’re reading this), that data is available on the Department of City Planning’s GIS mapping tool. The city breaks down the ACS numbers along varying data sets—demographic, social, economic, and housing—and can be viewed neighborhood-by-neighborhood, which is what we’ve done here.

So with that in mind, what are the richest neighborhoods in New York City? If you were going to guess that most of them are in Manhattan, you would be correct—here are the top 10:

10) Gramercy: $185,536

9) Hudson Yards/Chelsea/Flatiron District/Union Square: $185,556

8) Upper West Side: $190,281

7) Battery Park City/Lower Manhattan: $203,548

6) Brooklyn Heights/Cobble Hill: $205,275

5) West Village: $207,649

4) Lincoln Square: $212,844

3) Turtle Bay/East Midtown: $220,079

2) Soho/Tribeca/Civic Center/Little Italy: $258,531

1) Upper East Side/Carnegie Hill: $322,432

That the Upper East Side is No. 1 should come as no surprise, given the concentration of wealth found along the westernmost border of the neighborhood (i.e., Museum Mile and the Gold Coast). Ditto Tribeca/Soho coming in at No. 2, given the recent influx of pricey developments—residences like celeb magnet 443 Greenwich Street, or the ultra-luxurious 70 Vestry—that have brought wealthier residents to the neighborhood.

Just one non-Manhattan neighborhood made it onto the list, and unsurprisingly, it was Brooklyn Heights/Cobble Hill, home to some of that borough’s priciest real estate (and wealthiest residents). It also moved up to the No. 6 spot; when we last looked at this data in 2017, it was at No. 9.

The neighborhood with the highest percentage of residents with a household income of $200,000 or higher is also the Upper East Side, with close to 44 percent of its residents falling into that category. But the neighborhood with the highest total number of uber-wealthy residents is the Upper West Side, with close to 18,000 residents with a household income of $200,000 or higher.

As for methodology, we’ve used neighborhoods as designated by the NYC Planning map, which is why some areas (Lincoln Square and the Upper West Side, for instance) are separate, while others (Soho/Tribeca/Civic Center/Little Italy) are smushed together. Still, this is a pretty good indicator of where the one percent are currently camped out in the city—at least, until we get the results from the next American Community Survey.