A comparison of the water quality between Chinatown and Bayside: two demographically different regions

To ensure the absence of environmental injustices in water quality disparities between two regions, it is imperative to research the correlation between each region’s accessibility of clean drinking water and its racial and economic demographics. We compared the water quality between Chinatown, a neighborhood with a majority low-income Asian population, and Bayside, a more affluent and well-funded region in New York City. We hypothesized that Bayside’s water would be safer to drink than Chinatown’s since Bayside received a 62.5 million dollar grant to renew its piping system. In addition, drinking water injustices have plagued communities with high rates of racial and economic minorities, as seen in the Flint Michigan water crisis. We selected 15 restaurants from each region and measured the pH and total dissolved solids in collected water samples. We then used DataClassroom to conduct t-tests and linear regression tests to analyze our data. We found that Chinatown’s water quality was not significantly different from Bayside’s water quality. Our study raises several important future research questions, such as whether the year a building is built correlates to the pH level of the water, as we saw a negative correlation between these two factors in our study.