Jeffrey Gentry
Take a guess where the wealthiest people in Delaware live.
Centreville? Nope.
Greenville? Wrong again.
Hockessin? Not even close.
It's Alapocas. Alapo-who?
Alapocas. A community just north of Wilmington and south of Rockland that consists primarily of a neighborhood of the same name, a park and Wilmington Friends School.
And wealthy people.
It's not only the wealthiest neighborhood in Delaware but the wealthiest in the entire Philadelphia region, according to an analysis done by retired professor and author Stephen Higley using data from the American Community Survey.
As reported last month in a Delaware Inc. item, Alapocas also comes in as the 95th wealthiest community in the nation, according to Higley's ranking of the country's 1,000 richest neighborhoods.
So stand up and give yourselves a quiet golf clap all you Alapocites ... Alapocians ... Alapocans. Call yourselves whatever you like. You and your mean household income of $370,420 have earned it.
Other Delaware communities making the list:
• Winterthur-Centreville was ninth in the region with a mean household income of $294,510
• Greenville was 26th in the region with a mean household income of $242,605
Higley's list also gave the racial makeup by percentage of the communities:
• Alapocas: 2.2 percent Black, 2.1 Asian, 1.2 Latino and 93.1 non-Hispanic white.
• Winterthur-Centreville: 1.7 percent black, 2.9 Asian, 1.7 Latino and 91.9 non-Hispanic white.
• Greenville: 4.4 percent black, 8.3 Asian, 3.1 Latino and 81.9 non-Hispanic white.
For comparison sake, Delaware's overall population is 22 percent black, 3.5 Asian, 8.6 Latino and 64.6 non-Hispanic white.
The white-dominant numbers in wealthy neighborhoods are not an only in Delaware thing. This is what Higley says:
It will come as no surprise to anyone that non-Hispanic whites totally dominate America's wealthiest neighborhoods and suburbs with 90.4 percent of all households. ... There are 68 places that are 100 percent non-Hispanic white, and 377 of the Higley 1000 neighborhoods are more than 95% white.
In case you were wondering, the wealthiest community in the nation is The Golden Triangle in Greenwich, Conn., with a mean household income of $614,242. That's some real money there.
You Alapocasitians – whatever – you all are going to have to work a bit harder to get to that level.