Updates on Project Activities
We are making progress! This week we scripted two surveys, one for employers and one for employees. Because the surveys will be orally administered, we are making sure not to ask any personal details. We worked to ensure that the questions are concise and scripted dialogue at the beginning of each survey informing about voice-recording permission and participants’ right to decline any answer. Most of the questions in the survey are simple and can be answered with a quick one or two word response. For questions that require a numerical answer or questions that necessarily impose choosing from a scale, we have scripted broad ranges to help participants. A few of the questions involve thinking back to commute patterns and times and we have discussed at length how best to phrase these questions as simple as possible while still making them sufficiently detailed. We aimed to keep the surveys around ten to fifteen minutes in length. However, since we haven’t administered a survey, we don’t yet know how long they might take, neither do we know how long of a survey an employer or employee is willing to go through. Wendy and Adina suggested slight modifications to the surveys. The most crucial change is to modify a few questions regarding how much the employers would be willing to pay for the transit subsidy after the TMA pilot program ends. We will implement these changes in the next day and will finalize all Spanish translations as well. In order to respect the privacy of participants while still garnering useful data for PATMA, we have written a separate survey questionnaire in which both employers and employees may enter sensitive demographic data. The idea of separating the sensitive and general information into an oral and written portions comes from the Wednesday’s guest speaker, Vivian Chang. The questionnaires will be identified with a random ID number so if one ever gets misplaced, its content cannot be traced to a specific person. We will store a table that matches the questionnaires to the oral surveys in a secure, offline location to prevent accidental sharing on Google Drive. We have begun preliminary comparison of the Redwood City Employee Survey and the Palo Alto Downtown Mode Split survey. This Redwood City data is the most comprehensive study out of all the studies that Jessica Manzi provided us. We now have a broad notion of what exactly one dataset surveyed that the other did not. From here we can springboard into figuring out which metrics Redwood City must address in future surveys. What We Observed and Learned This week, our meeting with Adina was extremely informative and helpful for our next steps, and also addressed and assuaged some concerns we had with the survey. We were struggling with how to ask questions about the hypothetical subsidized passes in a way that was both easy to understand and would provide us with the sort of answers we needed. We had settled on naming a cost in the middle of the range spanned by the various transit carriers around the Bay, but of course that is not realistic for everyone since the carriers people use and the cost of passes will vary depending on where people commute from. Adina helped us solve that problem by suggesting we use Google or Apple Maps to investigate people’s commute options on the spot. If a person gives us an intersection or landmark near their home, and we know the time they need to arrive to work, we can easily show them what transit carrier they could use, how long it would take compared to driving, and how much it would cost per trip. This would be pretty simple to implement during the survey, since we will have at least two people interviewing at a time. While one person covers the earlier part of the survey, another person can search what transit agencies the employee would use, since transit agencies have different pricing structures. This feeds into another discovery: the difference between qualitative and quantitative surveys. Since these surveys are very qualitative, customizing questions for each respondent and having more of a conversation is fine, as long as we are able to get at the information we need one way or another. Adina told us we should expect to tweak the survey after administering it once or twice, and that making changes at that point is not only okay but best practice. This is very different from a more quantitative survey, where the questions must be standardized and no deviation from the script is allowed because it would affect the data. As we move into actual surveying, it will be important to be mindful the qualitative nature of the survey and not get bogged down in trying to get “clean” responses like we’d need for a quantitative study. Adina also helped with how to pick businesses to survey. She suggested choosing those that Wendy suggested (which we have done) in addition to picking other business more-or-less randomly. She also clarified that two weeks ago when she said we should aim for 6-20 surveys, she meant surveying 6-20 businesses. While the lower end of this range shouldn’t be a problem, 20 business each with two to five employees might be a stretch since we are time limited. Once we start administering surveys, we will get a better sense of how many businesses we can survey, and adapt our goals based on that. We do have a couple survey meetings set up already though; we are surveying the manager of the Philz Coffee on Forest on Tuesday, and are in the process of arranging a survey of one of his employees as well. Our group has also determined time slots when our team can conduct fieldwork in a pair or trio. In order to make the best use of our time, we will try to conduct fieldwork for at least two or three hours at a time, since it does take a while to back and forth between campus and downtown Palo Alto. Finally, as we’ve begun our analysis of Redwood City’s data, we’ve found that comparing it directly to Palo Alto’s is like fitting a round peg in a square hole. The surveys get at many of the same questions, but do it in very different ways, so it’s difficult to draw direct comparisons. Also, Redwood City has five different surveys to Palo Alto’s one data set. We may have to rethink our strategy for comparing the datasets, and approach it less by looking at what variables each survey covers and more by what questions, broadly, each survey addresses. Critical Analysis / Moving Forward We have a lot of momentum going forward on the Palo Alto project. This is good, since we still have a lot of work to do, and we have more clarity on how to approach the project. There are still some key changes that we will make to our surveys’ content. First, we still need to translate the employer survey to Spanish. We had assumed that business owners would most likely speak English; however, we realized that some owners may be more comfortable speaking in Spanish rather than English, and perhaps even open up more if they were speaking their native tongue. Either way, it would be good practice for us to prepare for different scenarios, no matter how unlikely we may think they are, since we would be acting on assumptions. Moreover, we realize that there are some employees who would be extremely difficult for us to help in this sort of program. Some employees may live in areas with poor transit options, which would make public transit unreasonably slow. We realize that the scope of our project is indeed limited; one TDM program cannot be a silver bullet. TMA doesn’t have the power to make decisions that would change the coverage of transit in underserved communities; this is more fit for a long term project that is outside the focus of this project. Moreover, we realize that given how new the PATMA is, we need to be clear and intentional with how we introduce the TMA to employers and employees. We can’t assume interviewees know what a transportation management association is. For the majority of this week, we will be conducting interviews in downtown Palo Alto. It may be challenging to implement the first few surveys, but those surveys will provide the most valuable information about the quality of our surveys and what areas need to be reworded. Moreover, we will need to adapt our strategies for approaching employees with the survey, contacting the managers/owners, and how to implement the survey comfortably. As for the Redwood City project, we will continue to work on data analysis. It is challenging to manage both projects at once. Since the trajectory of the Palo Alto project is clearer, we naturally gravitate towards working on that project, so we will need to address this imbalance in attention. What we did
With Jennifer out of town this week, we focused our attention on demographic research and the literary analysis. We are hoping that we can use the case studies we find in the literary analysis to give us ideas to help ‘humanize our data.’ We found Vivian’s presentation to be very relevant to our project because she discussed how shopping locally can help improve the economic development of a city. We can apply this concept to Los Altos because we learned through our various visits with merchants and officials that one of the biggest challenges to retail in Los Altos is leakage. Leakage occurs because many residents go to the Stanford Shopping Center where they can find many big name stores, such as Nordstrom or Neiman Marcus, rather than patronizing smaller, locally owned stores. While we recognize that the Stanford Shopping Center is very convenient and enjoyable for the community, we think we can develop some strategies to increase the number of residents staying within Los Altos to shop. We spent an afternoon over the weekend exploring downtown Los Altos to better understand what types of retail dominated the area; this field experience helped us better understand this issue. In class, Vivian mentioned that Chinatown had a Noodle Fest where festival goers could try different dishes from various restaurants within North Beach and Chinatown. Maybe Los Altos could do a community day that emphasizes the historic aspects of the city, as many residents find the historic part of the city to be integral to the culture of the community. Additionally, after talking with Deland during class we realized that a big part of humanizing our data and finding the social equity part of the project is to take the data and find where the gaps are. For example, she mentioned that there is a homeless shelter around Los Altos, are people in Los Altos going to this shelter? Maybe not all residents fit the affluent stereotype we assumed when beginning this project. What we learned After speaking with Los Altos locals, our peers, and Deland, we realized that one of our greatest challenges was incorporating social impact into our project. We’ve been given large amounts of data to sift through and analyze, but were not quite sure how to add a humanizing element to our project. In light of this, we’ve decided that searching for underserved, or “invisible” portions of the Los Altos population will allow us to develop social impact within the scope of our project. We will aim to understand how certain groups might have fallen through the cracks in Los Altos, and how they might be better served. Next steps Next week our strategy is to begin compiling our sources we individually researched for the literary review. We also are hoping to meet with Jennifer and review her feedback on the charts we sent her. We also plan to discuss the format she would like for the final report so we can begin to prepare for the final deliverables due in a few weeks. So far, we’ve been studying economic development plans for cities with similar demographics/economies. Examples include Menlo Park, Marin County, and Foster City. We plan to focus on how their plans deal with existing or potential income inequality, housing prices, and frail retail sectors in order to understand how they might make their respective economies more resilient. Update on Project Activities
Fidel and Matt spoke with Tony over the phone on Thursday afternoon. Tony assured us that he’d soon get the names of the businesses we are to survey next week from Faith in Action. We plan to begin the field work as early as this weekend and will likely engage in face-to-face interviews with the owners for the majority of the month. This has been our main roadblock to any significant progress, so we’re anxious to get started. He’s also working on scanning a few more completed surveys so that we can digitize the data and incorporate it into Fidel’s newly created website. Tony sent us a follow up email explaining that Urban Habitat and Faith in Action don’t have any data from Redwood City, another target area, so we will begin trying to collect survey and interview data there. We will be visiting businesses along Middlefield between Woodside Rd. and and St. Anthony’s Catholic Church and along Bay Road and El Camino. If the business owners are unwilling to complete the survey, we will still conduct and open interview and see if they are willing to share their stories and tell us what it’s like to be a small business owner now. Additionally, we will ask if they have any interest in free legal advice or a free legal clinic that The Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights is offering to put on. We have also been put in contact with Jennifer Martinez, the executive director of Faith in Action. We’ve also begun using the GIS mapping tools offered through the Geospatial Center to organize the data into a map, and utilize audio from the personal testimonies as well as survey data. More specifically, we’re using CartoDB to create and render an interactive map of the surveyed small businesses. Our plan is to humanize the surveyed data by creating personal stories of the small businesses. We are currently considering showing pictures of the businesses’ locations and facts like how long have they been in business, who are their target clientele, and what are their employees’ ethnicities. We are excited to have built the first version of the website and it currently shows three small businesses. The website can be found in the following url: fidelsalgado.github.io/urban-habitat What We Learned and Observed This week we’ve collected a healthy number of sources for the literature review. Both Professor Chan and Tony gave us ideas of what type of sources to look for and have really helped to steer our search for additional ones in the right direction. The Public Advocate for the City of New York released a document in 2009 titled “THE SUBWAY SHAFT: How Second Avenue Subway Construction Hurts Businesses in its Path” that summarizes efforts to preserve small businesses being affected by an ongoing MTA construction project. As with the N B St Corridor as well as E 3rd and 4th Avenues in San Mateo, the businesses on Second Avenue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side have served the neighborhood for generations and consist of locally owned and operated restaurants, bars, beauty salons, hardware stores, locksmiths, grocery stores, and bodegas. Mitigation strategies recommended by the Public Advocate include: establishing a fund to provide emergency grants to failing businesses, helping business owners renegotiate their leases, providing property tax abatements to landlords, suspending sales tax and on good and services sold by the businesses, improving advertising, and creating a “Lunch Bus” program for government employees to draw customers back to the avenue. The document also referenced the small business displacement mitigation strategies, each the result a transportation expansion project, of Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Phoenix, and borrowed heavily from these cities’ plans. In Portland, in addition to the many of the strategies listed above for Manhattan’s Second Avenue, the business owners of the at-risk area were invited to attend workshops teaching business management skills and were paired with personal mentors skilled in business strategy. The City also distributed seasonal newsletters and sponsored social media and events along the corridor to encourage residents to shop and dine. Many, if not all of the above tactics could be implemented in our areas of interest in downtown San Mateo. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Tony suggested that we collect personal testimonies of the small business owners in addition to the surveys we’ve already acquired. That would involve us returning to the some of the previously visited businesses and discussing general thoughts on the economic and cultural direction of San Mateo. These testimonies might allow us to fill in some of the survey gaps, as well as just get a better sense of how business displacement is affecting these owners. For the website, we are planning to keep familiarizing ourselves with CartoDB. We hope to start making the small businesses information more appealing by showing images of the location. Moreover, we would like to able to connect the google survey to CartoDB so that every time that a survey is submitted it automatically renders it to our website. We will first gauge the technical difficulty of accomplishing this feature and then decide to implement it. Update on Project Activities
This week we heard back from one of the developers we reached out to who gave us specific information on the development that his company is proposing in the Tenderloin. Additionally, he pointed us in the direction of a an incredibly useful resource - San Francisco Property Information Map. On this website, one can plug in the address for any property in San Francisco and get public information on ownership and site specifics. We plan on using this resource as a means to fill in holes in our proposed development database, given that not all developers are keen on offering up details on their developments. In our weekly meeting we discussed our progress on our literature review, figuring out how to make it most comprehensive by identifying subject areas that we had not yet read up on. Since most of our sources on community serving retail are focused on food, we plan on shifting toward research of other possible forms of community serving retail. What We Observed and Learned In addition to receiving and beginning to analyze the information/data we received from the developers (from which we will continue to glean valuable knowledge), we are continuing to find and review articles related to community-serving retail. In particular this week we looked at some descriptions of projects in the context of providing potential ideas and models for use of commercial space in the Tenderloin. One such project is the Kitchener Oakland which is a fully-operating commercial kitchen for fledgling food entrepreneurs. The Kitchener Oakland rents out a clean, communal space for startup food businesses to cook/bake and store food at affordable rates as they build their businesses. In the Tenderloin, this model could also work to provide cooking space for residents with limited access to these facilities. However, we would potentially need to find funding or help subsidize rates for people not selling their goods, as the food justice organization Phat Beets Produce does in Oakland for their Farmers’ Market business incubator program. Another such example is Third Place Books in Seattle, WA. This bookstore is much more than just that, providing a community space for everything from family game nights and exercise classes to health screenings and school plays. The Project for Public Spaces analyzes this project on their website, drawing important connections to sociological theory around community such as those from Ray Oldenburg as well as lays out helpful and practical description and analysis of making businesses that intentionally serve residents into not only beneficial but also financially feasible additions to communities like the Tenderloin. Critical Analysis / Moving Forward On Friday, February 26th, we will be going as a group to the Tenderloin to see in person some of the new mixed-use projects in the Tenderloin, as well as to speak with current corner store owners and customers. When visiting the mixed-use projects, we hope to fill in any gaps we can’t gather from the data we have already been given. Many of these mixed-use projects plan to use the ground floor space for retail, and we are unsure at this point how much of this data we will be able to gather remotely. We also hope to get a better idea about what other retail options are available in the Tenderloin. Most of our research and field work to date has been about food justice issues focusing on the corner stores, but we need to start thinking about other kinds of community serving retail that might be missing from the Tenderloin. During our first visit to the Tenderloin, the community leaders we met with shared a few things that are missing--dry cleaners, shoemakers, notaries, printing services, salons--but we would also like to explore existing community centers with access to computers and career services. Update on Project Activities We met with Tony in San Mateo at Kaffeehaus last Thursday morning to discuss plans for the week. Our partners are currently under a lot of stress trying to decide whether to put rent control and just cause measures on the 2016 ballot, but they were able to get us a shortened survey and previous surveys. Fidel is in the process of translating the existing survey data into English so it can be submitted to the Google Form created by Maddie. We have identified a few more articles for our literature review, including an extensive look into causes of business decline and strategies for revitalization. Unfortunately, we have had some difficulty finding papers that focus on business displacement, despite there being a wealth of reports on housing displacement. However, we plan to continue our efforts this weekend before going into San Mateo next week to begin surveying businesses. What We Observed and Learned Walking through downtown San Mateo really painted a clear picture of the situation. On the one hand, you have the chic western blocks of 3rd and 4th Avenues, housing upscale restaurants and coffee shops like Kaffeehaus, our place of meeting. However, crossing the train tracks to the northeast exposed quite a different side of the city. We saw fast food chains, convenience stores, gas stations, taquerías, and other services clearly catered to a different demographic. Very similar to the small, ethnic businesses along N B St, these sections stand in stark contrast to the rest of downtown which gave off more of a Palo Alto California Ave vibe. Although we didn’t have the time to actually go into any of the businesses on the blocks, it was nonetheless interesting to see the disparity between the two distinct sections of the city. In our meeting with Tony, he was able to describe in further detail what he expected of us as well as prior issues he’s encountered in his work with Urban Habitat. I think we were all particularly surprised when he explained the difficulties of his line of work, including what it’s like to collaborate with other organizations and how often one is unable to proceed with their work until others complete theirs. Beyond inter-organizational struggles, communication between the owners and surveyors is also a prominent issue and has hindered progress in the past. In general, the timescale for which noticeable improvement is made is much longer than we would have hoped, but we figured that was to be expected when dealing with governmental agencies and nonprofit collaboration. Below are some pictures from the B St Corridor between Baldwin and Tilton Ave. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward
The next time we visit San Mateo, we hope to begin field work. This would involve us talking to the individual business owners about their experience with economic pressures from increasing rent and decreasing customer base. Tony has suggested we take an open approach to interviewing, as people tend to talk about what they want to talk about anyway. In looking at the previous surveys, many of the questions that asked for an elaboration on the state of things were left blank or very brief and often did not give us the information we were hoping to get. Consequently, one main focus of our interview and survey will be trying to decipher the business owners’ intentions to figure out why they aren’t saying more. Hopefully we will be able to figure out whether it is due to a lack of time, trust, understanding, or otherwise. Tony has also outlined a few question for us to consider in preparation of our Literature Review. He wants us to look back and identify some of the bigger historical and structural issues that have shaped the current conditions of San Mateo and that will shape the responses of current owners. What explains the present day-to-day happenings but is grounded in the historical and structural context of the area. Tony also understands that there are, unfortunately, insurmountable barriers to small ethnic business displacement, and hopes we can identify a few. |
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