Community services: Develop livable communities for Elderly Chinese Immigrants to Feel at Home in Manhattan (p3)
Last week, our report begins by documenting the senior Chinese population in Manhattan, as well as the neighborhoods with the largest number and highest concentration of Chinese seniors. Last week, we mapped two things by using census, MTA and senior centers data.
We found that there are notable gaps in where senior-focused programs are targeted and where seniors live. For example, certain neighborhoods like Upper East Side with large numbers of seniors have relatively few senior centers and lack MTA stations that is designed to make public transportation and walking easier for older adults.
This week we make an overlap of a map with bus shelters by using census and bus shelters data:
Although Lower East Side/Chinatown has fewer MTA stations, it has high concentration of bus shelters which is designed to better serve seniors.
But in Upper East Side, it has fewer MTA stations and fewer bus shelters either, which should Improve public transportation systems by building additional bus shelters to better serve seniors.
The Change of House Rent in Chinatown from 2013 to 2017 compared with surrounding boroughs.
In addition, housing is the other big issue for seniors. According to the data published by New York City Comptroller, seniors tend to pay in excess of 30% of their income on housing than the total population. It might be the rent or their own house.
The data shows that 60% of seniors spend more than 30% of their income on rent, compared with the total population of renters. Therefore, we found the dataset with the price of median rent in NYC from 2013 to 2017 and made a map that shows the comparison of median rent in Chinatown and its surrounding cities. Since the rent is closely related to many things like the location of the building, surrounding public services, and transportation. From the graphic, we can clearly see the median rent in Chinatown is lower than the rent in surrounding cities. Thus we roughly infer that the living environment in Chinatown might not be as comfortable as the other cities in NYC. Seniors live in this kind of place might not have much sense of happiness.
The Poverty rate in Different Areas Where Have more Chinese Population
Also, we chose a dataset about the poverty rate of different boroughs in NYC and we found an interesting thing.
Firstly, we select the other three areas that also have a large number of Chinese population. They are Flushing, Queens, and Queens village. By comparing the poverty rate in these areas with the average poverty rate of NYC. We found that only Chinatown has the poverty rate over average poverty rate of NYC.
