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Realities of Health & Income When Living Along the Cross Bronx Expressway

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I created two series of bracelets to visualize the correlation between median household income and air quality throughout the neighborhoods on either side of the Cross Bronx Expressway in Bronx County, New York. I chose to represent these findings by knotting bracelets, both because of my love of making them, and because I knew I would be able to use an array of colors and gradients to show a spectrum of changes through each neighborhood. The two bracelets depicting the median household income each represent five of the ten neighborhoods (separated by zip code) as they are located along the expressway. Since the national poverty line for a family of four is $26,500, I color-coded narrowed ranges of income: 

The three bracelets depicting asthma-related emergency department visits within these neighborhoods due to particulate matter (2.5) among children under 18 (per 100,000 children):

Since the coloring aligns with neighborhood placement, those within the same range beside each other are separated by a thin, black line to better visualize the five places. With the respective ranges from left to right being 2005-07, 2009-11, 2012-14, and 2015-17, this data shows alarming rates among children residing in these neighborhoods, as a majority of these bracelets are purple. In the middle of the map, there are five neighborhoods below the poverty line, ranging from $22,307-$25,979; these residents are subjected to dangerous air quality levels due to several polluting factors, namely the heavily trafficked expressway. These densely populated areas of the Bronx and throughout New York City’s boroughs are forced to live in environmentally hazardous conditions, oftentimes without the means to leave. High-risk residents, namely children, develop disproportionally high levels of asthma and other long-term health effects they cannot escape from, with government-funded highways and expressways clogging their neighborhoods and their lungs.

Sources:

Median Household Income: https://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org/10460/

Asthma emergency department visits (under 18): https://a816-dohbesp.nyc.gov/IndicatorPublic/beta/neighborhood-reports/crotona_tremont/asthma_and_the_environment/ 

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  1. Student Data Physicalization Projects Selby Hearth

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