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Hastings and the Rivertowns are appealing weekend visit stops for New York City residents, but often these visits can elicit something more. A number of people that visit Hastings are so enchanted that they uproot their families from elsewhere to live here.
Although the idea that Hastings residents are prior Brooklyn inhabitants has been the long-standing consensus, it had yet to be substantiated by much statistical evidence until an anonymous survey was released to Hastings High School students to gauge the truth of this legend. The survey asked questions about where HHS students had lived in the past, where their parents lived in New York City (if applicable), and why they moved to Hastings.
To attempt to understand how many students believe in the Brooklyn-to-Hastings pipeline, the survey questioned what percent of Hastings residents respondents thought were from Brooklyn. A striking 67.6% believe 11-50% of the Hastings population is; 20.7% guessed at 0-10%, followed by 10.8% estimating 51-75% and a mere 0.9% adventurously presuming over 75% of Hastings residents are of Brooklyn origin. Overall, Hastings students believe that a significant portion of their population have Brooklyn roots.
74.8% of surveyed students reported having lived outside of Hastings prior to moving here. Of these students, 26.5% reported having lived in Brooklyn, while 33.7% had lived in Manhattan in the past. Equally as many students reported having lived in another area of NYC as having lived in another state in the United States, at 18.1%. The number of those who lived elsewhere in New York State was equal with the amount of students from another country at 8.4%.
Even though a significant portion of Hastings residents did live in Brooklyn, six (or 7.2%) more lived in Manhattan before they moved to Hastings. Not only is this surprising because of Hastings’s reputation as “Brooklyn-turned-suburban,” as Houlihan Lawrence, a local real estate agency, put it, but it is also surprising because Brooklyn, or Kings County, has about 1,000,000 more residents than Manhattan, or New York County.
In spite of that, further data shows that 40.5% of survey respondents’ parents had lived in Brooklyn at some point. This significant number has more implications than the geographic proximity of Hastings and Brooklyn, however:
Hastings has developed a Brooklynite reputation according to many sources, as Westchester Magazine called its residents “priced-out Brooklynites who were relocating” to the Rivertowns to find a home away from home.
The reasons that many survey participants offered for why their families had moved to Hastings from Brooklyn correlated strongly with Westchester Magazine’s description, as many students cited better schools, larger houses, more safety, and suburbia as reasons for moving.
Several respondents also cited the amount of stress involved in the New York City public school admissions race, as one response noted that “you have to go through all the stress of applying for even just middle schools… it wasn’t worth it.”
For all of these reasons and more, Brooklynite parents have moved to Hastings with their kids, contributing to the town’s hipster reputation.
According to Houlihan Lawrence, Hastings has a reputation of being full of Kings County residents who decided to join the “growing creative class revitalizing once-ragtag Rivertowns a hundred miles upstream.”
