Analyzing the Finances of Boston’s Neighborhoods
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The city of Boston is one of the most recognizable places in the United States, and it’s one of the oldest establishments of English origin on the East coast of North America, dating back to the early 1600s.
It was an epicenter for the American Revolution, a movement that defines the American spirit of independence. Additionally, Boston is home to Harvard University, the oldest college in North America. Needless to say, Boston is rich in history, culture, and personality.
While many think of New York City as the financial capital of the U.S., Boston was in-fact an equally important financial center during the nineteenth century. On top of that, Boston was an established hub of transportation and commerce, aiding greatly in the development of the New England Region.
Recently at LendEDU, we’ve been taking a deeper dive into the finances of the major cities in the U.S. This time around, it was Boston’s turn. Like some of the other studies, we analyzed several interesting financial metrics of Boston, including median household income, credit score, delinquency rates, and several different forms of debt.
Scroll down if you are interested in the results! If you’re from Boston, go ahead and see how your neighborhood stacks up to the rest of the city.
Map of Boston’s Overall Finances
NOTE: Seaport was a low population area according to Onboard, but it was included in this study due to its geographic size.
Best Credit Scores in Boston
Greatest Household Income
Highest Credit Card Balances
Lowest Credit Card Delinquency Rates
Highest Outstanding Mortgage Balances
Lowest Mortgage Delinquency Rates
Highest Student Debt Balances
Highest Auto Loan Balances
Methodology
Data for this report were drawn from three different sources: Experian’s Premier Aggregated Credit Statistics, Onboard Informatics’ City-Level data, and Bostonplans.org.
Experian provided VantageScore®1 3.0, average credit card balance, the delinquency rate on credit cards, average mortgage balance, the delinquency rate on mortgages, average student loan balance, and auto loan balance. It also provided ZIP™2 codes.
Onboard Informatics provided ZIP™ codes, median household income, as well as population (not included in this report). However, not all population figures or household incomes were provided by Onboard; some data were missing.
Bostonplans.org filled the gap left by Onboard by providing neighborhood names for each ZIP Code™ as well as the missing household income and population figures. These figures were pulled from this document as well as this resource.
The rankings for this study were simple. Each data column was split up into its own table as seen above. A simple ranking function in Microsoft Excel was used to sort the neighborhoods of Boston from either ascending or descending order for each piece of data.
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