Page 72 - Westchester Magazine - January 2011

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What a difference a decade makes: a look at 10 ways our county has changed in 10 years.
We’ve come a long way, baby. Just a decade ago, George W. Bush was being sworn in to his first term as president, tweeting was something that only birds did, Taylor Swift was just 12 years old (and Justin Bieber, 7), and Westchester Magazine was launching its first issue with cover girl Meredith Vieira, who was still five years away from hosting her gig on the Today show. (We were so prescient.) What else has happened in the past 10 years—right here? We look at 10 ways Westchester County has changed from a decade ago.
{1}We Are Different People
We’re all Westchesterites. But we weren’t all born Westchesterites. According to the most recent U.S. Census stats, 24 percent of county residents are foreign-born, up from 22.2 percent in 2000.
And that’s not the only demographic shift we’ve seen in the past decade. At the beginning of the decade, only 15.6 percent of residents identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino in the Census—and, by 2009, that number bumped up to 19.8 percent. The Asian popula- tion also grew quickly during that time, going from 4.5 percent to 6.1 percent of the popula- tion. (Interestingly, the African American popu- lation stayed roughly the same, going from 14.2 percent to 14.4 percent.)
Thankfully, the county—or at least some of it—tries to be prepared for the influx of new residents. Says Carola Otero Bracco, executive director of the Mount Kisco-based nonprofit organization Neighbors Link, “Integration of recent immigrants into our community has been the mission of Neighbors Link for almost a decade, and the story of our country since its beginnings.”
By MARISA LASCALA with Phil Corso and Julia Sexton
70 / JANUARY 2011 / WWW.WESTCHESTERMAGAZINE.COM