Essay on Neighborhood Physical Boundaries
This section answers the question “where is your neighborhood?” Discuss which census tract(s) or zip code you are using to represent your neighborhood, and describe whether the neighborhood is central and easily accessible, where in the city it’s located (North, South, East, West), and what other neighborhoods it borders. Maps can be helpful but are not required.
· Simple Demographics – This section answers the question “who lives in your neighborhood?” Provide statistics for 1) total population, 2) gender, 3) race, and 4) age. (You’ll cover more demographics in the second community profile paper.) Except for total population, make sure to provide percentages, not just raw numbers. For each statistic, provide comparisons between your neighborhood and San Francisco as a whole. For example, how does the racial breakdown in your neighborhood compare to that in San Francisco? (If SF has 15% Latinos and your neighborhood has 38%, that’s a big difference!) Here and in the next section, tables or charts can be helpful but not required.
· Neighborhood Health – This section answers the questions “is your neighborhood healthy or not?” and “are there health disparities (differences in health status) between your neighborhood and SF?” Provide statistics about three major health problems in the neighborhood, and compare the statistics for your neighborhood to those for San Francisco as a whole. Can you find health disparities: Are the health issues in your neighborhood better or worse than SF as a whole? Make very sure you understand the statistics: 10% of the population has diabetes is very different from 10 per 10,000 went to the ER because of diabetes.
Note: If you don’t find health disparities—that is, if the your neighborhood’s health doesn’t seem worse than SF: 1) look at another health issue to see if you can find one where your neighborhood is worse, 2) compare your neighborhood to another SF neighborhood and see if your neighborhood is worse. You don’t need to do this if your neighborhood’s health is clearly worse than San Francisco.
Note: I recommend revising the headings to fit your neighborhood: “Physical Boundaries of the Mission” or “Chinatown’s Health.” Also subheadings (“Race in the Tenderloin” in your Demographics section, etc.) can help you stay on track.
Sources for Your Paper:
It’s crucial to get your information from reliable sources. Here is where you can look. (We use these web sites in our library lab.) These sources are just starting points; I encourage you to look elsewhere too:
· Neighborhood Physical boundaries: SF Find (http://propertymap.sfplanning.org/?name=sffind)
· Simple Demographics: U.S. Census / American FactFinder (http://factfinder.census.gov)
· Neighborhood Health: SF Health Improvement Partnership (SFHIP) / Health Matters in SF (http://www.sfhip.org); SF Department of Public Health (www.sfdph.org)
· Etc: SF Planning Department, Healthy People 2020, newspaper stories, academic articles, course readings.
Required references: The paper must include at least 5 or more references in correct APA format, plus in-text citations to indicate where you are using information from these sources. The references at the end of your paper do not count toward the page count.
The neighborhood is San Francisco Chinatown
First paragraph：neighborhood location (on the file and with website)
second paragraph： basic neighborhood demographics (on the file and with website)
third paragraph：neighborhood health issues (this can talk about hepatitis as one, but needs at least 3health issues, just fallow instruction and look for others)
