NEW YORK (AP) – Queens is the only large county in the nation where the median income of black residents has surpassed that of white residents, according to a report.

The picture is quite different across the river in Manhattan, where the gap between whites and blacks is wider than in any other large county in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of Census data. The report, published Sunday, examined all U.S. counties with more than 65,000 residents.

In Manhattan, the median income of whites was $86,494 – greatly outpacing the $28,116 in yearly median earnings reported by blacks.

In Queens, home to about 2 million people, black households reported a median income of $51,836 – higher than the $50,960 reported for non-Hispanic whites. Asians in the borough reported a median income of nearly $53,000, while Hispanics reported yearly gains of about $44,000.

Some residents pointed to the success of immigrants from the West Indies and elsewhere as one reason for the shift in the borough. The earnings of foreign-born blacks outpaced the income of blacks born in the United States.

“Southeast Queens, especially, had a heavy influx of West Indian folks in the late ’80s and early ’90s,” said David Veron, a 45-year-old lawyer who was born in Jamaica. “A large percentage are college graduates. Were now maturing and reaching the peak of our earning capacity.”

Andrew Beveridge, a Queens College demographer who analyzed the Census Bureau data for the newspaper, said of the trend: “It started in the early 1990s, and now it’s consolidated. They’re married-couple families living the American dream in southeast Queens.”

An economist at New York University, Professor Edward Wolff, suggested that the wealthiest whites may have left the city for the suburbs, shifting the income balance in the borough.

Richard Nathan, co-director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, called Queens “the flip side of the underclass.”

“It really is the best illustration that the stereotype of blacks living in dangerous, concentrated, poor, slum, urban neighborhoods is misleading and doesn’t predominate,” he said.