Median Family Household Incomes by School

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is no way that’s correct

What seems off?

Way too low. Is this just from all the people who filed in the zone and then it says how many families at that school. I would guess that there are many, many families at Whitman that make in the high 6 figures. There's no way to extrapolate only the student families.

Basically, yes. There's no way to limit it to only student families. This is all families in the service area. Families include retirees.

I've been working on an updated version that just looks at families with kids under 18. I have some initial numbers there, but I've been trying to find ways to double-check them, particularly since some of the differences were surprising. Switching to families with kids under 18 required switching to pulling census numbers from tracts rather than data block groups. High school boundaries are big enough that tracts shouldn't be a problem. When the reported median is under $200k, there isn't much interpolation involved except for assuming a uniform distribution of incomes within each census-reported income bin. That's certainly not accurate, but isn't going to dramatically affect the data.

It has to model the incomes above $200k. I kept looking for a way to avoid it, even if it meant shifting a mean instead of a median, but the data isn't available at a granular enough level. There seems to be a lot of blocks where aggregate income numbers are withheld, which usually indicates someone very, very rich lives there. So, I'm much less confident in the over $200k medians, but they shouldn't be far off. Churchill's number is surprising. This suggests families with kids in the Churchill area have slightly lower incomes than families overall. I'm skeptical. This might be a byproduct of how this modeling works, but there's no particular reason it should do much worse with Churchill data.

Interesting but those still seem low.

Median, not average. If you drive around Bethesda, you'll spend so much time around the fancy houses that you'll forget about the apartments and condos. It skews perceptions of "normal".

We don’t drive a lot in Bethesda as we don’t live there. Those apartments except the subsidized are very expensive, more than our mortgage.

Again, you have a skewed view. There's a spectrum of apartments, including a lot of subsidized and below-market-rate apartments. They're not as visible as the fancy homes, but there are a lot of them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is no way that’s correct

What seems off?

Way too low. Is this just from all the people who filed in the zone and then it says how many families at that school. I would guess that there are many, many families at Whitman that make in the high 6 figures. There's no way to extrapolate only the student families.

Basically, yes. There's no way to limit it to only student families. This is all families in the service area. Families include retirees.

I've been working on an updated version that just looks at families with kids under 18. I have some initial numbers there, but I've been trying to find ways to double-check them, particularly since some of the differences were surprising. Switching to families with kids under 18 required switching to pulling census numbers from tracts rather than data block groups. High school boundaries are big enough that tracts shouldn't be a problem. When the reported median is under $200k, there isn't much interpolation involved except for assuming a uniform distribution of incomes within each census-reported income bin. That's certainly not accurate, but isn't going to dramatically affect the data.

It has to model the incomes above $200k. I kept looking for a way to avoid it, even if it meant shifting a mean instead of a median, but the data isn't available at a granular enough level. There seems to be a lot of blocks where aggregate income numbers are withheld, which usually indicates someone very, very rich lives there. So, I'm much less confident in the over $200k medians, but they shouldn't be far off. Churchill's number is surprising. This suggests families with kids in the Churchill area have slightly lower incomes than families overall. I'm skeptical. This might be a byproduct of how this modeling works, but there's no particular reason it should do much worse with Churchill data.

Interesting but those still seem low.

Median, not average. If you drive around Bethesda, you'll spend so much time around the fancy houses that you'll forget about the apartments and condos. It skews perceptions of "normal".

We don’t drive a lot in Bethesda as we don’t live there. Those apartments except the subsidized are very expensive, more than our mortgage.

Again, you have a skewed view. There's a spectrum of apartments, including a lot of subsidized and below-market-rate apartments. They're not as visible as the fancy homes, but there are a lot of them.

There aren't a lot, there are some subsidized housing. An average apartment is $3K, our mortgage was never over $2K. So, yes, its skewed as what you think is expensive and what I do is different. Even the subsidized is expensve except section 8.

[Anonymous]

You can see a map with the main data here:
https://felt.com/map/MCPS-Media-Income-vLq8NNHbQYiHZ5VJbZtnyC

It shows the individual census tracts. At the tract level, a median income of $200k just means it is at least $200k, since the high income modeling happens at the high school service area level (not the individual tract level).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is no way that’s correct

What seems off?

Way too low. Is this just from all the people who filed in the zone and then it says how many families at that school. I would guess that there are many, many families at Whitman that make in the high 6 figures. There's no way to extrapolate only the student families.

Basically, yes. There's no way to limit it to only student families. This is all families in the service area. Families include retirees.

I've been working on an updated version that just looks at families with kids under 18. I have some initial numbers there, but I've been trying to find ways to double-check them, particularly since some of the differences were surprising. Switching to families with kids under 18 required switching to pulling census numbers from tracts rather than data block groups. High school boundaries are big enough that tracts shouldn't be a problem. When the reported median is under $200k, there isn't much interpolation involved except for assuming a uniform distribution of incomes within each census-reported income bin. That's certainly not accurate, but isn't going to dramatically affect the data.

It has to model the incomes above $200k. I kept looking for a way to avoid it, even if it meant shifting a mean instead of a median, but the data isn't available at a granular enough level. There seems to be a lot of blocks where aggregate income numbers are withheld, which usually indicates someone very, very rich lives there. So, I'm much less confident in the over $200k medians, but they shouldn't be far off. Churchill's number is surprising. This suggests families with kids in the Churchill area have slightly lower incomes than families overall. I'm skeptical. This might be a byproduct of how this modeling works, but there's no particular reason it should do much worse with Churchill data.

Interesting but those still seem low.

Median, not average. If you drive around Bethesda, you'll spend so much time around the fancy houses that you'll forget about the apartments and condos. It skews perceptions of "normal".

We don’t drive a lot in Bethesda as we don’t live there. Those apartments except the subsidized are very expensive, more than our mortgage.

Again, you have a skewed view. There's a spectrum of apartments, including a lot of subsidized and below-market-rate apartments. They're not as visible as the fancy homes, but there are a lot of them.

There aren't a lot, there are some subsidized housing. An average apartment is $3K, our mortgage was never over $2K. So, yes, its skewed as what you think is expensive and what I do is different. Even the subsidized is expensve except section 8.

The Bethesda numbers are surprising, but I think the map points to what is likely happening.

A substantial number of families with kids in Bethesda seem to live in the apartments near East West Highway. There's another concentration in the apartments/condos in and south of downtown. Between those areas, and what I suspect are single-income homes elsewhere in the service area, 45% of families have incomes below $200k. There's no doubt many very high incomes, but the question ultimately becomes whether about 5% of families have incomes between $200-225k. Because incomes probably spike very rapidly, I suspect the model overestimates the number of incomes in that range. But, as a comparison point, 12% of families in the Bethesda service area have incomes between $150-200k, so 5% being between $200-225k seems plausible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is no way that’s correct

What seems off?

Way too low. Is this just from all the people who filed in the zone and then it says how many families at that school. I would guess that there are many, many families at Whitman that make in the high 6 figures. There's no way to extrapolate only the student families.

Basically, yes. There's no way to limit it to only student families. This is all families in the service area. Families include retirees.

I've been working on an updated version that just looks at families with kids under 18. I have some initial numbers there, but I've been trying to find ways to double-check them, particularly since some of the differences were surprising. Switching to families with kids under 18 required switching to pulling census numbers from tracts rather than data block groups. High school boundaries are big enough that tracts shouldn't be a problem. When the reported median is under $200k, there isn't much interpolation involved except for assuming a uniform distribution of incomes within each census-reported income bin. That's certainly not accurate, but isn't going to dramatically affect the data.

It has to model the incomes above $200k. I kept looking for a way to avoid it, even if it meant shifting a mean instead of a median, but the data isn't available at a granular enough level. There seems to be a lot of blocks where aggregate income numbers are withheld, which usually indicates someone very, very rich lives there. So, I'm much less confident in the over $200k medians, but they shouldn't be far off. Churchill's number is surprising. This suggests families with kids in the Churchill area have slightly lower incomes than families overall. I'm skeptical. This might be a byproduct of how this modeling works, but there's no particular reason it should do much worse with Churchill data.

Interesting but those still seem low.

Median, not average. If you drive around Bethesda, you'll spend so much time around the fancy houses that you'll forget about the apartments and condos. It skews perceptions of "normal".

We don’t drive a lot in Bethesda as we don’t live there. Those apartments except the subsidized are very expensive, more than our mortgage.

Again, you have a skewed view. There's a spectrum of apartments, including a lot of subsidized and below-market-rate apartments. They're not as visible as the fancy homes, but there are a lot of them.

There aren't a lot, there are some subsidized housing. An average apartment is $3K, our mortgage was never over $2K. So, yes, its skewed as what you think is expensive and what I do is different. Even the subsidized is expensve except section 8.

The Bethesda numbers are surprising, but I think the map points to what is likely happening.

A substantial number of families with kids in Bethesda seem to live in the apartments near East West Highway. There's another concentration in the apartments/condos in and south of downtown. Between those areas, and what I suspect are single-income homes elsewhere in the service area, 45% of families have incomes below $200k. There's no doubt many very high incomes, but the question ultimately becomes whether about 5% of families have incomes between $200-225k. Because incomes probably spike very rapidly, I suspect the model overestimates the number of incomes in that range. But, as a comparison point, 12% of families in the Bethesda service area have incomes between $150-200k, so 5% being between $200-225k seems plausible.

I lived in the Topaz House apts in Betheda and were tons of kids and middle class people.