A Few Facts about the Residents of Washington Heights

Abstract

The Washington Heights Health District, a geographically demarcated area in upper Manhattan, can scarcely be called a community. Yet it is important to know something about the kinds of people who live in the area. The facts and figures presented here about the residents of Washington Heights were gleaned from the findings of a household sample survey carried out between November, 1960, and April, 1961.1 It should be borne in mind, accordingly, that these data reflect only the characteristics of the district's population at that time and are accurate only within the limits of sampling error as well as nonsampling error to which interview data are inevitably subject. For both descriptive and administrative purposes, the district has been arbitrarily divided into three zones.2 The central zone was designated at the outset by the Columbia-Washington Heights Community Mental Health Project as a possible catchment area for future service programs. About half of the district's total land area is contained in the north zone; the central zone contains about a third and the south only a sixth. Yet the population count by the 1960 Census shows the north zone with 115,000 persons, or 42 per cent of the total; the central zone with 99,000, or 37 per cent; and the south zone with 55,000, or 21 per cent. A density index of proportion of population divided by proportion of area yields relative density measures of 0.8, 1.1 and 1.6, respectively. In other words, the south zone is half again as densely populated as the central zone and twice as densely populated as the north zone. Another measure of crowding, housing density index, reveals that the proportion of dwelling units in the south zone with one