Quality of Life of NYC Children
Most quality-of-life indices don't really account for kids. We built one that does — a 0–10 score for children across all 55 NYC PUMAs that combines infrastructure access, economic pressure, air and water quality, and demographics.
The Question
Most existing quality-of-life indices treat children as a footnote. But the things that matter for a kid — whether there's a library within walking distance, whether the air at school is clean, whether the rent is eating their family's budget — show up later in school outcomes, in health outcomes, in everything.
So we built a composite Quality of Life Index for children across all 55 of NYC's Public Use Microdata Areas. The frame is borrowed from UNICEF's Child Friendly Cities Initiative, Arup's Cities Alive: Designing for Urban Childhoods, and ONE NYC 2050's well-being indicators, then tuned for what New York actually looks like at the PUMA level.
Approach
Each domain rolls multiple indicators into a normalized sub-score, then the four are summed and re-scaled to produce a single 0–10 composite. Indicators where lower values are better (PM2.5, rent burden) are inverse-scored so the index reads consistently.
- Access. Density of bus stops, subway stations, healthcare facilities, libraries, and parks per PUMA — NYC Open Data shapefiles.
- Economic. Median household income and rent burden (gross rent as % of income) — 2019 ACS 5-Year Estimates. Rent burden ≥ 35% scores 1.
- Environmental. Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and water quality (chlorine, turbidity, fluoride) — NYC Open Data Portal APIs.
- Social. Population under 18, age-group breakdowns, and race/ethnicity composition — 2019 ACS 5-Year Estimates.
Python, GeoPandas, scikit-learn (MinMaxScaler), pandas, NumPy, Plotly, Folium, spatial joins on PUMA boundaries.
Outputs
Findings
- No single metric tells the whole story. A PUMA can score well on libraries and bus stops and badly on PM2.5. You need all four domains rolled together to see who's actually well-served.
- Economic and environmental burdens stack. The PUMAs with the highest rent burden are mostly the same PUMAs with the worst air quality. Those kids get hit twice.
- The global frameworks don't quite fit NYC. UNICEF and Arup wrote for cities at every scale. Their default weightings underweight transit access and parks density — exactly the things that dominate child experience in a place this dense and this vertical. Re-weighting moved a lot of PUMAs around.