Community Health Profile: Develop livable communities for Elderly Chinese Immigrants to Feel at Home in Manhattan
Dorothy & Kexin | Metric Visualization Blog Post 2
Background
New York City is getting older as the Baby Boomer generation retires in greater and greater numbers, and medical advances allow more adults to live longer. Today more than 1.1 million adults over 65, about 13 percent of the city’s total population.
According to the Center for an Urban Future, immigrants are almost half of all elderly New Yorkers in the city and that they are practically driving the population growth among older people in the city. By the year 2020, immigrants will form the majority of the elderly population in New York City, with Dominicans, Mexicans and Chinese as the fastest-growing groups.
There is limited research about Asian American groups. As Asian Americans are immigrating into the U.S. in larger numbers, growing old and retiring in the U.S., understanding their sense of home and life satisfaction could shed light on their quality of life, as well as inform policy makers and community organizations of future needs for social services.(Jenny Zhan, 2016)
Kexin and I, we want to visualize the data, analyzes the conditions in which New York City’s elderly Chinese immigrants live and looks at the senior-focused programs and services run by the borough of Manhattan, in order to build stronger neighborhoods in Manhattan.
Chinese immigrants over 65 in Manhattan
First of all, we download two census tracts’ datasets from Social Explorer, one includes the total population of people aged over 65 in Manhattan, another has the total population of Chinese immigrants in Manhattan. We multiply the ratios of each population and got the total population of Senior Chinese Immigrants over 65 years old in Manhattan which looks like this:
We set the ratio of population over 20% as the area(red census tracts) where Chinese concentrated. From the map, we found most Senior Chinese immigrants live in lower Eastside area and Uptown area next to the East part of central park.
Senior Centers
Seniors are likely to look for health services frequently which means the location of Senior Centers around their house could be considered as the other important factors about their life quality. To figure out the available senior centers that could provide services to senior Chinese immigrants, we found a dataset about the social senior center for aging population in Manhattan and created this map:
From these maps, we can clearly found that there are more senior centers located at Lower East Side and Chinatown. Community District 8(Upper East Side) with large numbers of Chinese seniors have relatively few senior centers. Existing programs and services should be adapted to prepare for the inevitable growth in demand that will occur as the population continues to age.
Transportation
Creating livable communities for seniors requires that public transportation systems be accessible for older adults. In NYC, MTA is a rapid transit system that serves people to get places efficiently. Residents who live close to the subway station will feel more convenient to go outside. Thus, we found the dataset about NYC subway entrance from OpenData and we want to see the amount of subway stations located in Chinatown. Here is the map we made:
From these maps, we found that there are more subways located in Upper East Side and less located around Lower East Side and Chinatown. So that government should improve public transportation systems by building additional bus shelters and benches to better serve seniors, and invest in accessible subway stations.
What we need to do next:
- Visualization more Age-Friendly Neighborhoods to enable more communities to plan effectively to address the needs of an aging Chinese. We listed factors associated with their daily life which include: 1) bus shelters and benches, 2)Hospital/Health center
