Super Zips
Personal Note:
For a while, I have had an interest in ranking places by income or education. When mapping them, I noticed that many of them were clustered together. I then wondered which of these were the largest and most significant, and why they were clustered as such. I then stumbled upon an article that did just that, from the Washington Post, which classified the best Zip Codes as “Super Zips” and commented on the standard of living there. However, I could not really access the data in a spreadsheet format, and the article being from 2013 was a little outdated, and some places may have changed. Therefore, I tried to research to create a new one.
Journey of reaching the data:
I first collected data about the Median Household Income and Share of Residents over 25 holding a Bachelor’s Degree. This was collected by Zip Code from the US Census website. These were 2019 estimates, which were more recent than the 2013 data used by the Washington Post. To identify which Zip Codes were “Super Zips”, I used a methodology similar method to that in the article, where I found the percentile of each Zip by Income and Education, averaged them, and then took the top 5% of them based on population. This gave me 777 Super Zips. I then identified clusters of them and ranked each cluster by population to get the top clusters. A zip code was added to a cluster if it was contiguous to other zip codes in the same cluster.
Here are the top 10 clusters (ranked by population in Super Zips):
Western Washington: 15033393
Manhattan: 968882
West Bay San Francisco: 878232
Boston suburbs: 651258
Oakland Hills-Tri Valley: 546958
Central New Jersey: 442941
Seattle Eastside: 442941
Chicago North Shore: 294914
Fairfield, CT/North Westchester, NY — 290517
Central San Francisco: 236967
Visual depiction :
Here is a map of Super Zips. You can see that they are concentrated in larger metropolitan areas, such as New York, Washington, Boston and San Francisco.
Layman Explanation:
These are the best-educated and highest-income places, which act as a magnet of talent from within the United States, and from outside as well. They do generally have larger than average White and Asian populations, with smaller numbers of African-American and Hispanic-American populations. Many of them are known for their large Jewish communities as well. Many of them are located in large metropolitan areas, with our top 10 clusters being from New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle.
Many members of the professional class who work in finance, technology, law, government and other high-paying professions live in these places. They often have degrees from good universities, and end up moving to these places even if they are not originally from the area. However, clusters emerge even in places outside these large, coastal metropolitan areas, which include Brentwood in Tennessee (south of Nashville) or Bloomfield in Michigan (northwest of Detroit). These clusters emerge with the upper-middle class staying in only certain areas with others like them. However, many here end up being quite out-of-touch with most parts of America, and have little idea of what the rest of the country is like. Additionally, many children who grow up here end up having nicer lives than those who don’t. Many children who grow up in the other parts of the country (95% of Americans) do not have as much chance to end up living in the super Zips and enjoy as high an income.
Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2013/11/09/washington-a-world-apart/