Assessing Future Housing and Transportation Patterns in the City of Palo Alto | Week 6 Reflection11/3/2017
Current Work
This past weekend, our group visited the Palo Alto Caltrain Station and the Giltelman Farmer's Market to deliver our housing/transportation surveys. We spent two hours at each site, distributing paper surveys, conducting interviews, and receiving feedback. In total, we collected 43 surveys and 10 personal interviews. While we gained valuable insight, the total number of individuals we surveyed was below our goal. As a result, our group is planning a second distribution venture this coming weekend (discussed below). From our observations, people understood the questions and rarely voiced criticisms concerning the survey itself. Our experiences with locals and commuters were interesting to say the least. Generally, the elderly were more willing to participate in our survey, and provide verbal feedback. At the farmer’s market for instance, older generations were more opinionated concerning housing and transportation issues. Caltrain individuals were more likely to participate in the survey because they were stagnant until the train arrived. Unfortunately, we did not prepare properly, and ran out of surveys in the first hour. All people seemed to be aware of the low housing variation and high housing costs in the Palo Alto. However, their survey answers suggested a preference towards larger, cheaper homes in walkable neighborhoods. Our literature review suggested the answers would be contradictory. Though most of the responses and interactions were predictable, we did observe interesting behavior in a few individuals. For instance, a man described his non-profit organization, which happened to be conducting similar research. Though he mentioned how difficult finding survey participants was, he refused to take our survey and left without providing any valuable information. Plans We met with Deland and Elaine last Monday to discuss project progress and next steps. The following section describes the tentative plan for the next few weeks leading into Thanksgiving break. This weekend, our team is distributing paper surveys at the Stanford Shopping Center, and the California Avenue Farmer’s Market. We are hoping to double our current dataset, and expand surveyed demographics. The mall event is scheduled for two hours on Saturday, followed by a Sunday morning excursion to the Farmer’s Market. By the beginning of next week, we will have finished our in-person surveys and have given the revised online survey to Adina and Elaine for email distribution. Between the paper surveys, online surveys, and personal interviews, we are hoping to have surveyed over 100 individuals. Our team will begin developing our final products. As we approach Thanksgiving break, we are processing the data and drafting a final article for Adina and Elaine. At the latest, we would like to submit a completed draft, with personal vignettes, to both our stakeholders before break. Predicted Issues Based on our survey data, we are concerned that we have not collected a representative data set from surveyed individuals. We cannot derive conclusions at this time, but most of our local residents are skewed towards elderly. Hopefully, our work this weekend will expand our age and employment demographics. Our stakeholders mentioned that the age and racial demographics in the Cal Ave. Farmer’s Market are different than our previous two sites. We understand that Palo Alto, on average, is split between the elderly and youth. However, the extreme ends of these demographics are unemployed, and may not be the most valuable information sources for developing Palo Alto’s housing and transportation network. Also, a lengthy 23 question survey requires rather complex data analysis. As a result, we will have to deliberate amongst ourselves and stakeholders to decide what significant trends are of concern. Are we more interested in housing and transportation preferences across age demographics, employment statuses, or housing and transportation types? Most of our data is segmented based on individual completion rates. The significance trends we identify for some questions may not be observed in other questions with few responses, or different demographics. Update on Project Activities
We had our weekly conference call with Diane where we updated her on our progress. We wrote up survey and interview questions for students and teachers as well as a blurb for the Challenge’s newsletter. We sent our questions to Diane so she could look over them and give us feedback. She thought the questions were great overall and gave us a few corrections to make as well. The team has been in contact with Ms. Thwaite from La Entrada Middle School for our teacher interview, and we are very close to locking a date for our meeting. Contacting Mr. Powell from Menlo Atherton High School has been a challenge, but we hope he’ll respond to us soon. What We Observed and Learned This week, we began to research social media strategies related to Instagram in hopes of revitalizing the Menlo Spark Instagram page. Creating and maintaining a recognizable color theme is important to drive traffic onto an Instagram account. Brands with a huge follower base tend to cultivate some sort of color scheme with their posts to create a mood and/or a sense of visual cohesiveness. For the Menlo Spark page, since the organization is concerned with the environment and sustainability, maybe using colors commonly associated with those topics, such as green (“going green”) and blue, could act as a starting point. When using hashtags, it is recommended to use a mixture of popular and non-popular hashtags; a single post will get lost very quickly on a popular hashtag page, whereas a post will get no exposure with a non-popular hashtag because few individuals will actually be checking the page itself. Additionally, researching banned hashtags is extremely important to prevent one’s account from being accidentally banned or marked as a spam account. Some common hashtags, including #tgif, and other random ones, such as #brain and #publicrelations, have been banned due to the nature of content posted on these hashtag pages (usually inappropriate or flagged). If an account accidentally uses a banned hashtag in conjunction with other hashtags, their post will not appear on any of the other hashtag pages, which drastically reduces engagement. When creating hashtag clusters for posting, changing up the hashtags used between each post is key to distinguish yourself from a potential bot or spam account. The first posts could use about 10-15 hashtags, for example, and in the future be increased to about 20-25 (never going over 30, which is the maximum allowed). It is also useful to post hashtags in your caption rather than in a separate comment, which can be perceived as bot-like behavior. The teacher interview questions are focused on how the teacher felt running the Challenge in their classes, how to increase student engagement in sustainable behavior, finding what motivates students to participate, and what areas of the Challenge need improvement. Diane felt that asking teachers to see if they could get us in contact with a family for our success story would be asking them to overstep their boundaries. Therefore, we won’t ask Ms. Thwaite or Mr. Powell to do that. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Moving forward into next week, we plan on having at least one teacher interview. We are planning on meeting Ms. Thwaite on Monday afternoon, and we’ll know if the meeting time and date are definitive once she gets back to us on her availability. We also hope to hear back from Mr. Powell. By now, we’ve sent three emails asking to see if he’ll meet us, but we have received no response from him yet. During our conference call on Wednesday, Diane said she could help in arranging that meeting. We also plan on using the what we have learned from literature on fostering sustainable behavior when we go out on the field in the coming weeks to survey students and families in Menlo Park. Update on Project Activities
On Tuesday Jonathan sent us the draft HTMA along with some comments from one of the Housing staff members. Each of us individually read through the HTMA and made annotations. Our schedules haven’t lined up very well this week due to midterms but we will meet Saturday morning to discuss our notes. Jonathan also sent us the scanned copies of the raw data collected at the visioning session from last week. The visioning session incorporated residential voices by having residents brainstorm solutions on giant sheets of paper. These documents were collected by Jonathan’s team, and copies of those documents were shared with us. We are concurrently reviewing those suggestions and the HTMA to determine the language necessary to to communicate the findings in the HTMA to the general Alisal community. Our updated version is due November 16th. We will also meet to discuss this data, review the notes, and make some general comparisons, then create an action plan to make more specific comparisons to see where discrepancies lie within the HTMA document. We were unable to contact Jonathan this week due to our busy schedules, but when we decide upon a convenient time we will contact him so that we understand which specific parts of the HTMA document, if any, the organization wants us to translate. Until then we will pick parts we feel are the most significant areas in the HTMA, based on what we observed at the visioning session, and Jackelyn will start translating them after we make our preliminary review of the document. We decided to split up the work in this way: First we will all work together to summarize the HTMA document. Once we have the summary in English, Jackelyn will translate the HTMA summary. Celine and Jennah will check over the translation and make any edits or suggestions for technical things like grammar and more important things like language use, then we will ask another student to check it as well for added perspective. We were unable to speak with Carol McKibben this week because of conflicting schedules but will attempt to reschedule again the week after the next. We are also going to schedule to meet with Andrea Jany. What We Observed and Learned This week we spent time reviewing the HTMA document. It’s a technical document but we were tasked with making it accessible to the Alisal community. We are deciding how to best split up the document so that we can all contribute equally. The three of us have varying degrees of expertise in language, writing, editing, and graphic design skills, and we want each person to contribute depending on their strengths. Something else that we are grappling with is how to make the HTMA as accessible as possible. Our original task was to translate the document into Spanish, but is that the accommodation that needs to be made? Alisal is a predominately low-income community, but a lot of technical jargon is being thrown around in this doc. We are discussing how we can best convey the ideas presented in the document, with terms such as “rent control” commonly discussed in academia and community organizations but not necessarily a word easily translatable in Spanish by colloquial terms. For example, we recall that at the workgroup session we attended in Salinas, these types of terms were usually triggers of “code-switching,” where bilingual residents slip in English words like “rent control” but monolingual Spanish speakers may not fully understand this idea. Likewise, gentrification and displacement are also big concepts casually discussed in academic settings, but these ideas are not very accessible in Spanish-speaking communities. The direct translation is gentrificación, however conveying the actual meaning and connotation behind that word is not as easy as a simple translation. For these reasons, we realize we have to be critical with the language we use when translating this document. We have decided upon first reviewing the document, annotating the information and synthesizing the information in English, then translating into Spanish. Since we all have the background and vocabulary that allows us to understand and analyze this kind of policy information, we would be used to using vocabulary like “gentrification,” and we most likely will when making annotations because that is how we understand these ideas. However, we need to keep in mind that for our process of translation, we need to come up with ways to simplifying the language so that the community can understand, while keeping the full meaning and context of the ideas conveyed. These dynamics can not be lost in translation because simplifying and minimizing the weight of these ideas does not serve this community justly. We will provide definitions to terms in order to empower residents by giving them the words they need to express their ideas, needs and desires. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Moving forward we will meet to discuss our annotations and create a summary of the HTMA in English. Jackelyn will translate the HTMA summary and Celine and Jennah will check over this. This was decided because Jackelyn does not have experience creating infographics while Celine and Jennah do. We want to divide our work evenly while making the best use of our respective skills and knowledge. In the weeks coming up Jennah and Celine will be discussing layout designs and ways to design an infographic that will best be interesting, relevant, and accessible to the community we are presenting to. We are inspired in part by the presentations by Mei Lum and Diane Wong on the ways they presented information to their community, and presentations by Deland Chan on community meetings about transportation and infrastructure. We remember specific comments about text being too small for elders and information being too technical for the general community. These are all concepts we are going to take into account. We will talk to Jonathan this upcoming Tuesday to get a clearer idea of what parts of the HTMA he wants us to translate, and what kind of infographic he expects or what other types of media we are able to create and present. Another question we have is whether our team budget is going towards printing the infographic, because we also need to know how many copies we would need to make or if the City of Salinas will produce print copies for their workgroup meeting. We will also discuss with him the summary we made thus far and get his recommendations. We will try to meet with Carol for more background on Alisal so we know more about the sensitivities the community may have. We will meet with Andrea Jany to get more guidance on the interviewing process. We got some contacts to interview at the visioning session that we will contact once we have a solid plan for the interviews. We will interview on November 16th and we will have to do more planning to develop strategies. Update on Project Activities
This week we extended the deadline for survey responses to November 10 in an effort to solicit more feedback from business representatives and employees. We touched base with Alex and Julie, who will distribute the links again via Facebook, Twitter, and email lists. At Alex’s suggestion, our surveys will also be forwarded to members of the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce. Including the Chamber of Commerce members does alter our initial goal of surveying only downtown-based businesses but will hopefully offer a more holistic snapshot of the economic situation in Mountain View in addition to increasing the rate of response. We further revised the survey by making it accessible to users without Google accounts; hopefully no further changes will be required on this front. As of November 3, we have received 16 responses from business representatives and 14 from employees, which unfortunately is only four more responses than last week. We will be looking for more responses in the next week before we close the link to begin conducting analysis. What We Observed and Learned Since the survey link remains open, we have not begun analyzing the data. The response rate has been rather underwhelming; hopefully we have not lost valuable time and responses by continually having to check the link accessibility. We will be intrigued to learn how the inclusion of Chamber of Commerce businesses will affect our results, as Alex informed us that one-third of those businesses are registered non-profits, which tend to pay lower wages. We are also exploring the possibility of taking another trip to Mountain View to gather more responses from business representatives, as it is simple to overlook emails or not have time to respond to a survey. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward The team will meet Alex for brunch this Sunday at noon to discuss next steps, hopefully including more visits to Mountain View, and to refresh our project objectives. We hope that expanding to include more businesses in the Mountain View area will enable us to provide a more inclusive and accurate depiction of the current state of economic development. After November 10, we plan to close the survey and begin analyzing that data while including interview feedback to inform our conclusions. In terms of class work, we found Tuesday’s readings especially relevant to the project. It was interesting to note that of the Bay Area’s “low- to low-middle-wage” workers, which comprise over one-third of the Area’s labor force, a majority earn less than $12 an hour (SPUR Economic Prosperity Strategy, page 8). As the Mountain View ordinance shifts the city’s wage from $11 to $15, thereby raising workers above that $12 per hour standard used in this publication, the city could be a trendsetter for other local governments, which places even greater emphasis on the outcome of our analysis. Furthermore, we appreciated the class simulation and found the experience of learning how to enhance economic development from a policymaker’s perspective to be valuable moving forward. Update on Project Activities
We were fortunate enough to have members of SURI present during class this past week, and having them there really helped us better understand some concepts regarding earthquake preparedness. Specifically, their example of how soil liquefaction caused some of Christchurch’s residential and business areas to be shut off for years after the 2011 earthquake encouraged us to further our research into San Francisco’s own liquefaction zones. We are now gathering more knowledge about this topic and we hope to incorporate it into our charrette presentation or into the visualization/info-graphic we are to produce soon after the charrette. We also had the opportunity to meet with the SURI team afterwards to ask them questions about their experience working in community-based development projects similar to the Strong Homes campaign, and to see if they had any data or infographics that we could incorporate into our presentation during the charrette. This week we were also able to connect with our community partner through a webinar that all of our team members were able to participate in. We found the webinar to be very productive because it helped us better understand the structure of NEN and the goals of the Strong Homes Campaign. Additionally, the webinar gave us a much-needed opportunity to connect with our community partner and receive immediate guidance on matters that were unclear to us. As part of our project, we are expected to produce a visualization/info-graphic that makes use of our research and the information that we are able to gather during the charrette. This week, our team continued brainstorming new ideas of how we might be able to do this. One idea is that we can create a digital (printable) pamphlet that contains useful information that can help Bay Area residents after a catastrophic earthquake. To jump start our progress in the development of this part of our project, our team has begun designing templates that may be used for the info-graphic using Adobe Illustrator. What We Observed and Learned One basic lesson is one of scope. Talking with SURI we came across the question of what can be observed at the individual, community, and city level. SURI, focusing on the city level in terms of study and preparedness, recommended that we emphasize personal accounts and dilemmas framed by data at different scopes. This distinction is key in determining where to place our focus and navigate these different scope levels during the charrette distinctions. From our NEN webinar we got to clarify some basic information of where our work fit into the full vision of NEN. This was helpful in understanding how our work ties into the larger community oriented work of the organization and its mission. We are essentially working on developing resources based on a community-determined need, to then aid in the development of the toolkit at the neighborhood level. We are linking expert knowledge with the communities, and it's our responsibility to package it in an intelligible and productive manner. It was confirmed that our role is very much on the backend of the charette. This means preparing for how we are going to effectively condense and communicate the takeaways from the charrette. We thought about different communication styles and useful focus for the toolkit (should it focus on utility topics or on responding to specific scenarios?). We also began to prepare for how we will code and condense the notes in a systematic way. We reaffirmed the need for thoroughness and consistency in going through the notes as a team. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward In our meeting with SURI, we discussed the methods they use to gather probabilities of various events occurring based on a region’s geography and infrastructure. For example, we were wondering if with their current models, they have been able to calculate the most likely duration of time it would take for government response to reach a particular area of the city. While we were hoping that there could be some existing models for San Francisco that we could use, their research is currently in very early stages and no such numbers currently exist. Although such data could have enabled us to tailor toolkits to each region, we are going to stick with the original plan of making a worst-case scenario toolkit that addresses general severe lifeline interruption. Since we are working on a large collaboration with a limited time schedule, including such revisions could take particularly long. In our case, we will focus on fulfilling our clear and established objective of creating a framework for a general, worst-case scenario toolkit. In regards to the toolkit specifications, we had the chance to clarify our understanding of the exact specifics for our deliverable toolkit framework. As stated earlier, we envision it to be more of an informational pamphlet that can inform communities on the procedures and tools they could leverage to survive long durations on their own. Such a design could be easily presentable and engaging. Since we are hoping that the framework will be subject to further community review after it’s creation, having such a format will also make it easy to get feedback from stakeholders. Furthermore, it would serve as an excellent medium to present our findings during our culminating presentation on December 13th. We also had the chance to better understand our role in the scope of the project. During the webinar, Daniel mentioned that Strong Homes campaign stems from a direct community request for solutions to challenges that may arise during disasters. Referencing our earlier concerns regarding this project’s relevance to communities, we are happy to see that there already is a community desire for this product, and that we are working towards something that is already wanted by our stakeholders. |
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