Any broker firms or others publish building censuses? Number of apartments, number of residents, ages, income and wealth, years in the building, type s of people, etc.

I believe a lot of that information would be illegal under Fair Housing Laws. There is is information at the Census Tract level and Census Tracts in NYC can be very small. On the other hand our housing stock is extremely diverse so you can have a tenement (yes they do still exist although fewer and farther between them) next to a eight figure townhouse, therefore sharing a Census Tract.

>Eumendides - If you'll just post YOUR age, income, wealth,number of people in your household,location and market value of your current home, and type of person (????) you are, I am sure the helpful folks here on SE could help you narrow your search for area, building and apartment.

I think he's selling his house in Westchester to move into Manhattan.

Do you think you'd want HIM for a nosy neighbor? I sure wouldn't.

brokers don't publish it, gov does moreso by 'nabe than building tho..

reverse white flight is the trend.. blacks/latinos moving to suburbia, whites/asians getting our SATC on.

"Age, types of people, etc."

Boy you are dense. For the umpteenth time, go read about the Fair Housing Act. You don't have to like it, you're entitled to your provincial opinions, but please spare us from these repeated FHA-violating inquiries.

Two suggestions:

1) Go sit outside the buildings you are casing and count the ages, "types of people", etc. coming and going. Don't worry, the staff will use the back door when not in uniform, so you won't have their "type" messing up your narrow-minded census.

2) Re-think this whole NYC thing. You're going to be surrounded by all sorts of people all the time. Move somewhere else. Forget NYC, forget Westchester, try the 1950's.

I think you need to rethink what you want. I know from your postings you want a place in the city with lots of restaurants, cultural activities close by, no children and people closer to your age and economic status and that you are looking to spend about 1.5. But to ask for the type of info you are looking for is a little too much. It really sounds like you should be looking in a senior 50+ community that has like people to you in economic and social status. This place should be close to NYC so you don't have to live with all the types of people you don't want as neighbor's but still have the things the city offers. I understand you have lived in te surburbs for 20+ years and am looking for people like your former neighbors in economic and racial lines. This will not be available in NYC for what you want to spend. Of course if you want to live in a 10 million plus building you might find like people but not on a 1.5 m . Not being sarcastic but think you don't realize how bigoted you sound on ths board.

Who said anything about race? The conclusions people jump to are more revealing about them than us, that’s for sure. Type of people is standard information that a lot of companies already have: single, married no kids Yuppies or DINKs, families with young children, families with grown children, single parents, empty nesters, retired couples, divorcees, widows and widowers, etc. The companies that send you junk mail get this information from you, from the Nielsen people such as Prism, and from the big credit bureaus who have a lot more information on you than if you paid your mortgage on time. The postcard that you get from Verizon or Comcast trying to get you to upgrade to internet and phone that has a picture of the family with kids or alternatively the picture of grandma talking on the phone to the grandkids isn’t sent randomly, they use this exact type of information when they pick which image to show you.

It isn’t illegal and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allowing freedom of the press doesn’t violate fair housing laws.

If realtors, sponsors and developers are in a special category that they can’t offer this information that’s one thing. Nothing can stop a media company from publishing this type of census data, or any other valid or invalid information or opinion that they want. And certainly there is no violation for any buyer seeking any information. No buyer has ever been arrested or sued for seeking information or having a preference on where they want to live.

Did you know that some companies look at which school districts have high percentages of students receiving free or subsidized meals when they determine if they want to do business in an area? You can investigate an area with a qualitatively “good” school district, and you can look at additional hard quantitative information such as that as well as college acceptance rates to determine what you want.

If you are spending $200,000 on your home or $10 million, you are entitled, and in fact responsible, to understand all aspects about how you are spending your money. Getting information that already exists and is in use is not a moral question. Your co-op board gets to know about you as a potential future owner and neighbor, you should get the opportunity to know about your neighbors.

I'll leave the question open for now.

You are correct marketing organizations rely on this type of data all the time, usually at the zip code or census tract level. Census data is available online, I don't know if its aggregated to zip but that would be irrelevant in NYC anyway. While developers obviously look at demographics and pyschographics in building and marketing projects, actual discussions of these issues in individual real estate sales or rentals is prohibited by Fair Housing Laws as any broker will tell you. (Ali and others have stated so many times on Street Easy).
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I agree with Huntersburg and Alan, most outright discrimination is restricted, no pun intended, to the most expensive and elite building.

And with Nada, go hang out outside the building at key times (8 am, 3:30 pm, 6 pm, Saturday morning) and see who comes and goes. Chances are if its a typical NYC building you will see people from 5 days to 90 something, unless its a "twentysomething" building.

Eumendides,
considering the value of the information I think we have a business idea.

Cut Eumendides a break, he just wants to know if his future neighbor will be black Elmo or regular Elmo.

All in the Family Alan

Eumendides, I understand that you don't give a crap about the FHA. You have a constitutionally-protected right to spew all sorts of idiocy. God bless America.

But you come here repeatedly asking about FHA-violating behavior. Since you know so much about business, riddle me this. Suppose you are running a successful NYC brokerage. Some employee, who has repeatedly been to FHA training, comes to you with the brilliant idea of collecting and disseminating by-building FHA-sensitive data. Do you:

a) Wonder how close you can skirt the line between the FHA and the First Amendment, never mind the public backlash.
b) Fire the idiot employee.

I%u2019m not sure what the Elmo reference is.

Senior living (which is most often not assisted living) makes it pretty clear that if mature adults don%u2019t want to be inundated by babies and strollers, toddlers, or teenagers, then it%u2019s not a moral issue, it%u2019s a personal preference.

As for the mouth foamers once again, the behavior is only so-called FHA-violating by the industry because the industry created its own problems and misbehaved in the first place. Nothing outside of the broker/realtor industry and real estate developers prohibits discussion or dissemination of information relating to the composition of building residents. So only the industry itself can violate the FHA. I%u2019m not in the industry.

If no one in the industry wants to or can answer, apparently they haven%u2019t, then they don%u2019t have to and/or shouldn%u2019t. But FHA doesn't limit asking the question or someone answering the question if they aren't in the industry. FHA is about as relevant to a buyer or information publishing company as the DMV is to a pedestrian who crosses the street or a mapping company. I%u2019m for freedom of speech and freedom of association, and my and my wife%u2019s preference for association is as few resident children in the building as possible. Perhaps it is unattainable, we know it is not guaranteed.

Lastly, the data I was talking about, and more, is available at a household and family level. Maybe not readily to the public which might only have access to public census data, but certainly to businesses that are doing marketing.

There was a recent TV expose about a firm in Arkansas that knows just about everything about every American, and they make their money by collecting and then selling the information.

Falcongold1 has the right idea, and as far as the employee of the brokerage with the brilliant idea, that is where entrepreneurs come from: they leave their stuck in the past business or badly regulated industry and create something new that consumers want. So yes I agree with inonanda when he says, God bless America.

Unless someone says that they have the information I was originally seeking, this will be my last post on this thread regardless of the replies to this post.