Jersey City, NJ (Lafayette West)

There are two complementary measures for understanding the income of a neighborhood's residents: the average and the extremes. While a neighborhood may be relatively wealthy overall, it is equally important to understand the rate of people - particularly children - who are living at or below the federal poverty line, which is extremely low income. Some neighborhoods with a lower average income may actually have a lower childhood poverty rate than another with a higher average income, and this helps us understand the conditions and character of a neighborhood.

The neighbors in the Lafayette West neighborhood in Jersey City are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 89.1% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 59.8% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 96.8% of U.S. neighborhoods.

A neighborhood is far different if it is dominated by enlisted military personnel rather than people who earn their living by farming. It is also different if most of the neighbors are clerical support or managers. What is wonderful is the sheer diversity of neighborhoods, allowing you to find the type that fits your lifestyle and aspirations.

In the Lafayette West neighborhood, 35.5% of the working population is employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is executive, management, and professional occupations, with 28.4% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (18.7%), and 17.5% in manufacturing and laborer occupations.

Languages

The languages spoken by people in this neighborhood are diverse. These are tabulated as the languages people preferentially speak when they are at home with their families. The most common language spoken in the Lafayette West neighborhood is English, spoken by 50.8% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish, Arabic, Vietnamese and Tagalog (the first language of the Philippine region).

Ethnicity / Ancestry

Culture is shared learned behavior. We learn it from our parents, their parents, our houses of worship, and much of our culture – our learned behavior – comes from our ancestors. That is why ancestry and ethnicity can be so interesting and important to understand: places with concentrations of people of one or more ancestries often express those shared learned behaviors and this gives each neighborhood its own culture. Even different neighborhoods in the same city can have drastically different cultures.

In the Lafayette West neighborhood in Jersey City, NJ, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Puerto Rican (24.6%). There are also a number of people of Arab ancestry (13.1%), and residents who report Dominican roots (12.3%), and some of the residents are also of Asian ancestry (9.0%), along with some Sub-Saharan African ancestry residents (8.9%), among others. In addition, 35.0% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.

Even if your neighborhood is walkable, you may still have to drive to your place of work. Some neighborhoods are located where many can get to work in just a few minutes, while others are located such that most residents have a long and arduous commute. The greatest number of commuters in Lafayette West neighborhood spend between 45 minutes and one hour commuting one-way to work (35.8% of working residents), longer and tougher than most commutes in America.

Here most residents (42.0%) drive alone in a private automobile to get to work. In addition, quite a number also ride the bus to get to work (19.6%) and 9.7% of residents also take the train for their daily commute. In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.