I. Update on Project Activities
On Monday we met with Lorenzo Listana and Ryan Thayer, our community partners from the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC). Lorenzo and Ryan outlined good times to visit the Tenderloin and attend coalition and working group meetings within the community (second Mondays of the month during the early afternoon for steering committee meetings and every Thursday afternoon for the food justice working group meeting). Amabel and Jenai are bottom-lining contact with our community partners and have set up another meeting next Friday to connect with them and any other community members directly, as well as begin becoming accustomed to the neighborhood where we’ll be working throughout this quarter. The week after next we plan to attend the food justice and/or community steering committee meeting on Thursday and will update our schedule moving forward. Our group (Sonja, Jenai, Casey and Amabel) also met independently on Wednesday evening to get to know each other in our team context and begin on our project’s scope of work. II. What We Observed and Learned The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC) is an organization that manages affordable housing and provides other services, such as providing healthy foods, in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco. The TNDC works primarily on anti-poverty and social justice campaigns that focus on leadership development and capacity building within the Tenderloin neighborhood community. With around 39,321 residents, the Tenderloin is the most densely populated neighborhood in San Francisco. Among this population, over ¼ live on an income of less than $10,000 per year and ⅓ with a disability. Given these statistics, it was surprising to become aware of the conditions and resource restraints that many residents live with. One of the most surprising things we learned was that the Tenderloin does not have a grocery store, meaning that residents’ food shopping either takes place in corner stores or in grocery stores in other neighborhoods. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of Tenderloin inhabitants live in Single-Room-Occupancy residences, meaning that they lack access to full cooking facilities. There are three types of SROs; 1) Rooms with a burner and an oven, 2) Rooms with electric sockets and accessibility to rice cookers and kettles, and 3) Rooms with poor electricity and do not allow for any cooking inputs. III. Critical Analysis / Moving Forward Since the correlation between cooking facilities and healthy eating is strong, we have identified that the implementation of kitchens into the Tenderloin community is an area of focus. We plan to research the availability of kitchen spaces within buildings and the possibility of building community kitchens within high occupancy areas. Another area of focus is the availability of fresh produce and healthy food products within the Tenderloin area, specifically the food that is on sale in corner stores. We would like to increase the accessibility and selection of healthy foods within the immediate area in order to allow for residents to take up healthy and sustainable diets. This will require discussions with corner store business owners and partnering with neighbourhood revitalisation agencies in order to assist with the corner store transformation process. We will also converse with members of the community to gain a greater understanding of the changes they would like to see. The third area of focus relates to education and marketing strategies. Although it is essential for healthy resources and cooking facilities to become accessible to Tenderloin residents, it is particularly important to ensure that these resources are sustainable and will continue to be used by the community. We would like to identify methods with which we could educate the community, perhaps by creating cooking programs/classes for residents and also teaching residents the importance of eating a healthy diet to maintain a positive lifestyle. Ideally, we would be able to include the younger members of the population, such as students in high school, so that they will become involved and invested in the revitalisation project. In the past few years, the diverse Tenderloin neighborhood has undergone immense demographic shifts reflective of much of San Francisco. Although the influx of technological companies and workers has the potential to provide much needed resources, there is also the danger of gentrification as well as what Ryan called “mental displacement”, a phenomenon where residents who are safe from physical displacement no longer feel at home in an area due to the cultural shifts and retail changes taking place. One of our major tasks in this project then is to work to determine community needs around retail spaces and businesses that serve these needs. After talking with Lorenzo and Ryan about the work that the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation does within the community, it became clear how dependent their work is on strong interpersonal relationships with locals. As we move forward and begin to clarify our scope of work, it will be important to keep our work and outputs grounded by the voices and opinions of those who live within the Tenderloin. Update on Project Activities
Our team is having weekly meetings at 10:00am on Fridays, most usually in TDX. In this week’s meeting we got to know each other and worked on the warm-up exercises included in the scope of work packet. We also took a virtual tour of the B Street Corridor using Google Maps street view in order to help familiarize ourselves with the neighborhood before our first visit. We are still waiting on an email response from Mr. Samaro as to when and where we are meeting in the next two weeks. We would like to meet with him (either on campus or at his office) this upcoming week to discuss the specifics of our project involvement and determine how and when we can be most helpful and effective in collecting surveys. We would then like to be able to start collecting survey data on the week of the 25th, requiring us to go into San Mateo and start doing fieldwork. Both Matt and Fidel speak Spanish, which will be particularly helpful for communicating with business owners for whom English is not their preferred language. Matt has a car and has offered to drive us to San Mateo for the fieldwork, but the Caltrain is also an option if we need to split up. Matt also has some experience working with urban planning as an intern for New Urban Communities, a small real estate development firm based in Delray Beach, FL. Madeleine will be primarily responsible for emailing Mr. Samaro, but all group members will be copied on each email. What We Observed and Learned Mr. Samaro introduced the class to the project and his involvement with Urban Habitat. He discussed the issues with gentrification in the B St Corridor in downtown San Mateo, and some of the strategies he and his colleagues were implementing to try to prevent some of the negative impacts on the area. We learned that four organizations - Urban Habitat, Faith in Action, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the San Mateo County Health Department - are collaborating to help the owners of small businesses in the neighborhood, but convincing the local government to amend legislature in favor of these businesses is difficult without hard data. In addition, surveying the owners proved to be a challenge because of either language barriers or lack of spare time. In some cases, they also felt hesitant to give personal economic information to strangers. We learned that small, often minority-run businesses in San Mateo are being pushed out because of the high rent and a diminishing number of patrons, also caused by increasing rent in the nearby residential areas. Moreover, small businesses have a difficult time hiring since many of the qualified candidates cannot afford to live near the downtown area of San Mateo due to the rising market price of housing. We learned that it is illegal to establish any sort of rent control over businesses, which makes business displacement even more difficult to address than housing justice. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Survey collection in San Mateo can begin as soon as Urban Habitat revises their survey, which is currently too long for many owners to fill out. Thought should also be given to the manner in which these surveys are presented, as in the past both length and content have been hindrances to successful data collection. Business owners are understandably hesitant to take an hour out of their work day to fill out the surveys, as the immediate need to work in order to keep the store afloat can outweigh the perceived benefits (or lack thereof) of the survey, especially if owners don’t believe the data will actually help create real change. We believe it will be important to establish more intimate relationships with local business owners in order to communicate their grievances more effectively to city officials. Mr. Samaro told us that Urban Habitat had more success when reaching out to business owners through their congregations, as religion plays a prominent role in many of these people's’ lives. In addition to helping with survey collection, we will plan to support the businesses directly by having a meal at one of the neighborhood restaurants or shopping at one of the convenience stores. Updates on Project Activities
This week we got the ball rolling on our project. We met with Adina Levin, the Executive Director of Friends of Caltrain, who told us about a couple of other people we’ll be working with: Jessica Manzi, from the Redwood City Transportation Department, and Wendy Silvani, of the Palo Alto TMA. We set a meetings with all three for Friday the 22nd, as well as a meeting with Adina for the 29th. So far, our progress on the project has been limited by what we know about our partners and their goals. Because we have not met directly with Wendy nor Jessica, we don’t know where we need to focus to achieve maximum value. We’ve begun working through the Scope of Work packet and have completed the warm-up exercises, and plan to meet this Sunday to start work on outlining the Scope in earnest. We are excited to start working on this project together. Between the three members in our group, we cover a diverse array of backgrounds, interests, and strengths. There is huge potential for us to inspire each other and for our thinking styles to complement each other in productive and surprising ways. Second, we look forward to working with a community partner who has a very clear idea of what they want as an outcome. From some of our experiences in the past, it can be difficult to work with community partners who have vague or unclear expectations and desires for the project. Steps moving forward: clarify with Adina what the vision for the project is, and determine what information we need from her and our other partners in order to carry out that vision. Hopefully most of that will be resolved in our upcoming meeting on the 22nd. Before then, we’ll be exploring the past projects from this class, and any other resources Adina gives us, in order to prepare for that meeting and hit the ground running. What We Observed and Learned Even though we have not started the project, we have already observed dynamics that indicate the important aspects of a good partnership. When we set up our appointments with Adina, Wendy, and Jessica, we reserved our whole Friday for potential appointments. We realize it is important to be flexible and accommodate the needs of our partners; our partners may be very busy, so we should be mindful of that. This mindfulness has been reciprocal: Adina provided helpful directions for navigating to our meeting spot. In the first two weeks of the quarter, we have read numerous articles to gain background information and help us better serve our partner. One of the readings, Moving Silicon Valley Forward, is pertinent to us because it deals with transportation in and around the valley. According to the article, in 2010, 36% of greenhouse gas emissions in the valley were from transportation. Just five cities, Palo Alto, Redwood, Menlo Park, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, all which provide stable jobs but high housing costs, contribute to 98 thousand out-of-county commuters and of those commuters, 80 percent of them drive alone. While these commuters are saving on housing costs by living in relatively more affordable locations, their daily travel to and from work adds to traffic in Silicon Valley. With the strong job market, Silicon Valley’s ratio of jobs to houses is 3-to-1 compared to the Bay Area’s 1-to-1. Because there are more jobs than homes in Silicon Valley, the need to offer various forms of transit will become increasing important. It is estimated that over 67 percent of Silicon Valley’s job growth will be in the low-wage workforce with sectors paying less than 50 thousand annually. At that income, it will be critical of cities to subsidize transportation to encourage commuters out of their cars. As Silicon Valley grows, the need for public transportation takes unprecedented heights. Critical Analysis / Moving Forward This project, “Equitable Access to Transit in San Mateo County,” fulfills much of the purpose of service learning. By allowing for us to engage with groups and individuals from other communities, this project will help us develop character and citizenship skills. In most education courses, students are not required to engage with communities, so this project will provide an enriching experience that most other courses cannot. Moreover, by working on a tangible project, we get to learn about sustainable transportation while working on a project that can possibly advocate for exactly that. At first glance, the project seems to incorporate different aspects of the four types of service learning: direct, indirect, research-based, and advocacy. Direct: we will interview members of the community that this project will benefit the most; by engaging with the actual community member, we are directly connected with the people that we are trying to serve. Indirect: we will work with Redwood City Transportation Department, Palo Alto TMA, and others in order to improve the sustainability of transportation, creating benefits for the community. Research-based: we will be conducting literature review, analyzing data sets, and conducting additional interviews and focus groups. Advocacy: using the data and analysis, we will pursue opportunities to build a sustainable transportation system. Looking further into it, the four types of service learning seem to be fundamentally connected and complementary to each other. Direct and indirect approaches can connect the low-income. Today was our first meeting to discuss the scope of our project and what exactly we’ll be doing for the next nine-ish weeks. We’ll be helping in developing economic drivers and development strategies for the City of Los Altos. While Jennifer, the Los Altos representative, couldn’t make it due a scheduling conflict, she was able to join in for a conference call to guide and help us with any questions that we may have.
Our project will likely be focusing on analyzing demographic trends within the Los Altos community and the greater Bay Area; we’ll compare and contrast data and see how we can use this to determine future trends and the economic security of the city. After initially meeting with Jennifer in class earlier this week, we were given access to data sets regarding demographics, real estate, and consumer preferences in Los Altos. By analyzing the data, we recognized the importance of understanding these trends and its role in making crucial decisions for both the public and private sectors. As we’ve discussed in class, resilience is an important aspect of sustainability. Each of us spent some time on our own experimenting with and familiarizing ourselves with the data; we all agreed that a big component of this project would be driven by data. We also considered and talked about our vastly different backgrounds in academics and in our extracurricular interests. Because Carolyn is originally from the Bay Area, she will be able to provide valuable insight in understanding the real-world impacts of these economic trends and how they’ve affected other cities in the Bay. She also has experience with economics and understands general economic concepts, which we’ll be able to apply to our findings. Evan is interested in using systems thinking processes to help solve policy issues. He also has experience with Java and MATLAB, and has used Excel for numerous projects. Sungmoon likes working with numbers and has experience in quantitative and analytical research. Her interests in economic trends and developmental economics will also help in understanding the meaning behind the data. We concluded our meeting by discussing our weekly meeting schedule and agreed to individually gain a little more familiarity with Excel and the data that we’ll be using this quarter. For next week, our goal is to create several different charts illustrating the data. The purpose of this is to get used to the specific format that we’ll be using for the final project. By doing so, we’ll not only gain experience with Excel, but we’ll also be able to understand how data is used and interpreted in a professional setting. Our Winter 2016 Sustainable Cities officially kicked off today with our first Meet and Greet with Community Partners.
Now in its seventh year, Sustainable Cities is a service learning course offered through Stanford University’s Program on Urban Studies. Participants in the course engage in hands-on, experiential learning while they work collaboratively with Bay Area government agencies and community organizations to support their sustainability goals. The class is open to advanced undergraduate and graduate students from a multitude of disciplines, ranging from urban studies to civil and environmental engineering to earth systems and public policy, to support clients on meaningful fieldwork-based projects. This year, we are working with 5 community partners throughout the Bay Area! The projects will involve the following: 1) working with Friends of Caltrain to assess opportunities for equitable access to transit in San Mateo County, 2) conducting a community-serving retail analysis in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Central Market with the Tenderloin Community Development Corporation, 3) developing economic drivers and development strategies for the City of Los Altos, and 4) collaborating with Urban Habitat to address local business displacement in the City of San Mateo. Follow our adventures here on this blog throughout the quarter! |
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