The richest neighborhoods in New York City

Where do the wealthiest New Yorkers live? The answers may surprise you (or not)

It was just three years ago that we looked at the Higley 1000, a list that uses information from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey to rank the nation's most affluent neighborhoods according to their mean household income. But the Higley list was compiled using data from the 2006–2010 ACS, and in the years since, more data—this time from the 2010–2014 ACS—has been released, showing changes in where the wealthiest New Yorkers live.

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 city'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 would be in Manhattan, you would be correct—here are the top 10:

10) Upper West Side: $161,30

9) Brooklyn Heights/Cobble Hill: $169,555

8) West Village: $180,247

7) Hudson Yards/Chelsea/Flatiron District/Union Square: $182,129

6) Midtown/Midtown South: $184,315

5) Battery Park City/Lower Manhattan: $185,275

4) Lincoln Square: $188,144

3) Turtle Bay/East Midtown: $196,721

2) Soho/Tribeca/Civic Center/Little Italy: $235,555

1) Upper East Side/Carnegie Hill: $311,109

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). But Tribeca/Soho is a change from our 2014 findings, though one that's easily explained: an influx of pricey developments—residences like celeb magnet 155 Franklin Street, for example—have brought wealthier residents to the neighborhood.

Ditto the amalgam of Hudson Yards/Chelsea/Flatiron/Union Square; the transformative real estate boom around the High Line has led to more wealthy folks living there, hence the jump in mean income. (There are more than 10,000 households with a yearly income of more than $200,000, at least according to the ACS data.)

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).

Now, a caveat: this methodology is different from the Higley method of looking at neighborhoods; for its list, the Higley folks aggregate "contiguous block groups with a mean income over $200,000." Here, we've used the neighborhoods as designated by the NYC map itself, which is why there's some variance. 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.