Did you know that you can look at household income by census data, mapped? It’s all there in the Census Explorer. Data includes median household income, percent foreign born, percent with at least a high school/college/master’s degree-level education, and percent in the labor force (though the last of these is of ages 16+, so it doesn’t allow you to differentiate between areas with large numbers of labor-force drop-outs vs. those with a disproportionate number of retirees).
You could spend hours (well, maybe not hours, but a lot of time) playing round with this. And when you do — let me know what you find out about your neighborhood, or other cities of note.
My initial observations:
In my neighborhood, labor force participation is actually below average – 60%. I take this to be the result of lots of stay-at-home moms and an above-average number of retirees (18%). My old neighborhood, in a different part of town, has an even lower, and higher percent, respectively — 53% in labor force and 33% above 65 — but, then, a part of that census tract consists of a “retirement community.”
In Detroit, I doubt that the very high numbers of tracts with low labor force participation are explainable to any significant degree by high numbers of retirees.
In the Metro Detroit area, for the most part, having a large foreign-born population is a sign of wealth, or middle-class-ness, anyway, where in Chicagoland, quite the opposite is true.
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