The Final Narrative

Catherine & Jen

Objective:

We’re wrapping up our process and thinking about our final presentation narrative. Internally, we have been thinking thinking about how aspects of Northern Manhattan have changed overtime in relationship to the most recent rezonings. We’re working to ensure that the maps we’re making are starting to connect to each other and tell a story.

Thinking about the final narrative structure and creating more maps for learning:

Our research question: We decided to start off with our research question and some context for why we believe this specific question is important.

Broad Research Question

What does the phenomenon of energy insecurity look like for low income communities of color in Northern Manhattan relative to the rest of Manhattan?

Learning Goals

Understand the phenomenon of energy insecurity and the dimensions that make up this phenomenon [a] through a spatial lens [b] over time, and [c] comparatively between Northern Manhattan and the rest of Manhattan.

Compounding Effects of Environmental Racism on Energy Insecurity

Communities most impacted by energy insecurity are low income communities of color who face poor housing conditions and high energy expenditures and as a result develop strategies to cope with existing conditions. Unfortunately, community members facing energy insecurity face compounding pressure due to climate change. Extreme heat for folks facing energy insecurity leads to increased adverse health effects like heat stroke, hospitalization due to asthma attacks, and other respiratory or cardiovascular issues because there is an inability to adequately cool.

This extreme heat in communities of color is then compounded not only by existing energy insecurity but also by environmental racism which is seen with the disproportionate placement of toxic facilities in these communities which leads to poor air quality and an exacerbation of existing health conditions. Indoors remains unsafe because of the extreme heat and inability to cool in the home, and the outdoors is also an unsafe space to go to because of poor air quality and extreme heat. What are community members supposed to do?

Maps to be included: racial demographics, poverty rates, toxic facility placement. We believe these maps will help provide a picture of what the Northern Manhattan community.

What is energy insecurity?

In the next section, we thought about what dataset we chose and why we chose these datasets. This is more about their assumptions, limitations, and proxies.

Definition of the dimensions of energy insecurity:

We’re limited in the information we have regarding if/how people have trouble paying their energy bills (also known as energy burden). Therefore, we’re using rent burden as a proxy for this. Also, quite often energy burden is embedded within rent burden.

When looking at the economic dimension of energy insecurity, we’ll be using maps that convey: severe rent burden (used as a proxy), poverty rate, Area Median Income (AMI). To further explore energy insecurity’s physical dimension we’ll be mapping housing code violations (class C violations–peeling lead paint, inadequate supply of heat/hot water, rodents, etc.)

We’re using data from:

The NYC Department of Health
American Community Survey

We’re also thinking about including some information from the pre-surveys that Northern Manhattan community members filled out during our four visioning workshops conducted in Inwood & Washington Heights, West Harlem, East Harlem, and Central Harlem. If we move forward with this data, we’ll pick questions that represent the current condition as experienced by these community members (no more than 4–5 questions).

What effects energy insecurity in Northern Manhattan?

In this portion of the presentation, we hope to discuss our method for how we’re going to frame how Northern Manhattan is a hot spot for energy insecurity.

In addition to the maps we’ve previously showcase, in this section, we’ll be including: Particulate Matter 2.5, heat vulnerability, and asthma emergency department visits (children 5–17 yrs old, adults 18+). We’ll be looking at asthma emergency visits to begin to look at health disparities

At this point in the narrative, we believe that we have a solid foundation of data, maps, and charts, to convey that Northern Manhattan is an energy insecure hot-spot.

Zoning

Here, we will briefly explain differences in zoning designations in Northern Manhattan. The main types of zoning we’d like to discuss are: manufacturing, commercial, residential, mixed use, and green spaces.

Then, we will discuss the most recent rezoning efforts in West Harlem, East Harlem, and Inwood. For this, we’ll provide maps of zoning from 2009, 2012, and 2017.

Rezoning efforts & its effects on Northern Manhattan communities

We believe that rezoning may exacerbate housing pressure and accelerates tenant displacement. To convey this hypothesis, we’ll show maps of At Risk HUD Subsidized Units, and the number of housing units receiving low income housing tax credits.

Next steps

For our next steps, these are a few things we’d like to think about:

A rezoning’s effect on behavioral aspects of energy insecurity
The community’s response to rezoning–have their concerns been addressed?
Documenting community members’ narratives about rezoning initiatives
What is the relationship between rezoned areas and rent burden over time in West Harlem and East Harlem?
What has the change in racial demographics and economic demographics been overtime post rezoning in Northern Manhattan?
What has been the change in affordable housing in Northern Manhattan overtime in West and East Harlem overtime post rezoning?

Community demands:

We believe that community demands are important to include in this final narrative, as it shows some of what community members are thinking regarding the rezoning of their neighborhoods. The demands are as follows:

More affordable housing that can be guaranteed under the city’s new Mandatory Inclusionary Housing Policy
That the City require 100% affordable housing on any upzoned property
Account for demographic shifts before they happen, and ensure there is a process in the environmental review that accounts for unintended consequences– require racial impact studies to show the effects of rezoning on communities of color

Our process:

In this section of the narrative, we will discuss the roadblocks we encountered and addressed during our journey.

Using data from many different sources where the datasets were not measured at the same scale (NTA, PUMA, etc.) This caused issues with technical skills in Tableau regarding spatial joins. we tried to work through this challenge by doing some overlays in photoshop, in order to see which parts of each maps were overlapping and which weren’t.

Cleaning data and finding definitions for acronyms used by NYC government agencies

We conducted a lot of secondary research to better understand datasets and content that we hadn’t worked with previously. This was mostly regarding zoning designations and initiatives.

And lastly, we’d like to address the conceptual limitations of our work.

There’s no comprehensive measurement for energy insecurity, so we developed and utilized proxies.
Lack of data on energy usage given the fact that most information is held by Con-Ed and doesn’t need to be disclosed (with the exception of NYCHA facilities).
Thinking about how we define energy insecurity for the purposes of our map.