Community Sentiment of Little Tokyo Towers / Miyako Gardens
- Objective
- Who is being enpowered?
- Technologies
- How it can be repurposed
- Future Implications
- Screenshots
- Room for Improvement
- Acknowledgements
- Contact
Objective: What social problem is being addressed?
Little Tokyo, one of the last-remaining historic Japantowns in the U.S., is situated in Downtown L.A.. As of 2015, 25% of the population consists of adults aged 65 years or older. Currently, the only two Section 8 housing projects in Little Tokyo are the Little Tokyo Towers and Miyako Gardens Apartments which offer housing to qualifying low-income seniors 62 and older.
For our project, we hope to map out the places and neighborhoods of origin of residents in these projects in order to visualize the displacement of low-income non-native English-speaker seniors, specifically Japanese elders in the Little Tokyo Towers and Miyako Gardens housing projects. On these markers, we will have another tab that describes the experiences of those living in these homes and the impact that these residential communities have had.
Who is being empowered by your mapplication?
Our project will benefit and empower low-income, Japanese senior citizens and their caregivers, as well as several nonprofits that provide resources and community aid to elders in Little Tokyo. Residents in Little Tokyo, particularly Asian elders and tenants of housing projects, will be empowered to share their personal experiences related to housing, which would raise awareness of issues and problems they face when it comes to housing insecurity.
Technologies behind this mapplication
- Swoopy arrows- plugin, for swoopy arrows
- Papaparse- plugin, CSV parser
- Leaflet-interactive map plugin
Languages Used:
- HTML/CSS
- Javascript
Other Web Services not mentioned above:
- Google Forms: survey forum we used
- Google Sheets: where the data was collected, later converted to a .csv file
- Apps script: linked to google sheets in order to find the lat/long of locations answered on the google forms, and automatically adding that information onto sheets
- Google Doc: where our background/outline was written, that is hyperlinked
How it can be repurposed
It can be repurposed for any kind of project where user stores being highlighted would be the key objective of the website. Our interactive chart aims to be the focal point of the website outside of the map, showing a summary of user experiences, taken from the survey. More specifically, based on our code, websites with the goal of reflecting the orgin of different people who now live in a common area would be the easiest to repurpose. For instance, repurposing this mapplication to plot zipcodes of each student who attends UCLA and seeing "hotspots" of where students most often come from, and depending on the radius from the school, feelings about homesickness and overall wellbeing.
Future Implications
In the future, we would like community members to continue to add onto this website about their experiences and show the numerous stories on the same platform. Potentially in the future, we woud like nonprofit organizations in Little Tokyo such as Keiro, California based non profit organization aidig in housing to expand these housing projects outside of Little Tokyo and broaden its horizons to other areas in California, and even nationwide! As America's immigration population continues to grow, retirement homes should not only be catered to English-speakers only, and this project is the first micro-step to showcase that.
Screenshots of our webpage
Overall screenshot of our home page
This is a screenshot of our chart, which is unique in that it autofilters the map with the percentage of respondants for each factor that was a push/pull factor. In addition, having a percentage bar is user friendly while displaying information in terms of how often it was selected.
This is a screenshot of our map, which contains swoopy arrows. Swoopy arrows tell the story of there each user came from and their story of coming to Little Tokyo
Room for Improvement
- Optimize the code, especially or charting and swoopy arrows since it can be slow at times, overall simplifying the process down
- Further improving language accessability within all areas of our project
Acknowledgements
Our group would like to give a huge thank you to our professor, Albert for his consistent help throughout this course from the office hours to picking our brains after class. Another thank you to our classmates, seeing peer surveys, websites, etc are all great ways in learning and improving our own mapplication and seeing the potential that is there!
Contact
Here is the email address of the creators of this mapplication:
- Kristen Fu - kris10fu@g.ucla.edu
- Emma Hanson - emmahanson@ucla.edu
- Keri Chen - kerichen@g.ucla.edu