Braintree is known as being a “gateway” to the South Shore, and is a diverse community filled with large corporate parks, retail corridors and smaller, local business hubs. Therefore it is no suprise the town is fairly split among occupational classes.
The “service class” has the highest share in Braintree, followed by the “creative class” and finally a small “working class” share, according to a report by The Atlantic Cities, which uses a map to show how class lines divide within and among Census tracts.
The service sector fills in around a largely “creative” population in the Greater Boston Area, according to the Atlantic Cities report, which uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
From the report:
The service class largely surrounds the metro’s creative class clusters in the north; there are bigger swathes of it directly to the south. Along the North Shore right outside of the city, Everett, Lynn, and Beverly have large concentrations of service sector workers.
The creative class—which includes professionals working in the science and technology, business, arts, media, law and healthcare industries—makes up about more than 41 percent of the metro area’s workforce. That’s just short of the service class, which includes food service, retail, clerical and administrative positions and comprises 43.4 percent of the regional workforce, the report says.
Members of the working class make up less than 15 percent of the regional workforce, according to the Atlantic Cities report, which contrasts that figure with the image of “Boston metro’s blue collar past as a port and center of textile and shoe manufacturing.”
According to the report, members of Metro Boston’s creative class earn an average of $84,403; the working class an average of “$42,765 in wages and the service class an average of $33,738. All three of those are better than the national averages.
The Atlantic Cities report draws Braintree into several Census tracts. Below are the rough areas and their breakdowns. Zoom in on the Google map provided with the report for more geographic detail
Now, You Tell Us:
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