CCC’s Community Risk Ranking: Measuring Child Well-being in New York City’s 59 Community Districts

Published December, 2017

The ability to identify where risks concentrate is important, as research tells us that the presence of multiple risk factors can have cumulative negative effects on child development and child well-being.

CCC’s Community Risk Ranking looks at 18 different indicators across six domains of child well-being—economic security, housing, health, education, youth, and family and community—to determine where risks to child well-being concentrate in New York City. We rank New York City’s 59 community districts from highest to lowest risk, within each domain and overall, and place community districts into one of five risk categories: highest risk, moderate-high risk, moderate risk, moderate-low risk, and lowest risk.

In this edition of the Community Risk Ranking, we look at how risks to child well-being have changed at the community district level from 2010 to 2015 (the most recent year for which data is available). This period represents a time when New York City began to recover from the impacts of the Great Recession. We see in this analysis, however, that not every community district has benefited from the recovery to the same degree or in the same ways.

While discussions of change at the neighborhood level are often centered on demographic shifts, neighborhoods in New York City can change in a variety of ways. Even in areas that don’t experience easily apparent or widely discussed changes, outcomes for children and families may be shifting in ways that suggest either an increase or reduction in risk factors. Those changes may be occurring in vastly different—and often opposing—ways from one neighborhood to the other.

In this publication, we identify changes in ranking for overall risk and within each of the six domains for all 59 community districts. This allows us to see the geographic areas where data suggest outcomes for children have improved, and those where elevated levels of risk to child well-being remain. On each of the domain pages, we provide a brief analysis of citywide trends for the indicators that make up that domain, and identify several community districts where outcomes go against the citywide trend.

After the domain pages, there is a section focusing on five areas of the city that experienced some of the biggest changes in overall risk ranking, with detail on which domains and indicators drove those changes. This analysis shows us that even where the city has made substantial progress—which it has along several indicators as it recovers from the Great Recession—those gains have not been felt uniformly across the city.