I had a little discussion with Prof. Francoeur after our workshop and he followed up with this email for you:
I’m not sure it may be worth the trouble for your students to get too hung up on finding Census data for the exact neighborhoods they are researching. I think the Census data for something that roughly approximates or includes the neighborhood is probably good enough to give you rough portrait of who lives there. If some part of the story you are researching turns on key demographic changes, then it might be worth doing a little extra digging. Let me give an example.
In my presentation, I mentioned that on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I had heard that the number of children aged 0-5 had gone up dramatically in the past decade and that increase was one of the reasons why the elementary schools were so overcrowded. If I were in your class and decided to make my story tied to the crowded schools (or about the charter schools elbowing their way into public school spaces and how that was affecting the flow of new students into the district), then I probably would want to do the hard work of seeing exactly how the Census numbers had changed from 2000 to 2010. And I might also want to make sure that the numbers reflected the exact geographical area that I had in mind.
But I suspect that many of your students’ stories won’t require such detailed use of Census data. The “Community District Profiles” that can be found on the NYC.gov site that detail Census numbers for each of the 59 community board districts may be good enough for your class. While each community board might encompass two or more neighborhoods, they may provide a good enough yardstick for the needs of your class.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/lucds/cdstart.shtml
If anyone does want to dig deeper, though, I suggest that they schedule a research consultation with a librarian, which can be done with this form:
http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/help/forms/consultations.php
Stephen Francoeur
User Experience Librarian
Newman Library
Room 516
Baruch College
151 E. 25th Street
New York, NY 10010