Update on Project Activities
This past Sunday we met with Alex on campus to discuss our updates and thoughts over the past few weeks. We first discussed the two digital surveys that were sent out previously for both employers and employees. Although there were some technical difficulties for some participants to fill out the Google Forms, we customized them to ensure accessibility. Furthermore, we mentioned that we only have around 40 combined employer and employee entries so far. Assuming one business hires 2 employees, we have only heard the voices of about 13% of downtown Mountain View’s businesses. As a result of this dilemma, we agreed to extend our surveying out to the broader Mountain View Chamber of Commerce to capture the entire city. Although Alex did want to focus on downtown Castro Street, we realized that it will create a survey bias and there will be a disfocus on the holistic situation of Mountain View. Lastly, we will be outreaching to certain businesses that indicated that they would like to meet our team in-person on the Google Forms. These visits will be conducted during our Thanksgiving Break because of the convenience of schedules. What We Observed and Learned Last week Vivian Chang of the San Pablo Economic Development Corporation came to class and presented on her experiences dealing with community-serving retail and economic development in her city inside Contra Costa County. Although Alex has filled us in on his position and experiences, it was eye-opening to see a different perspective on economic development on the other side of the Bay Area. We learned that communities need to strike an appropriate balance between the development and catering towards independent and chain stores. Furthermore, we learned that to immerse ourselves into the environments of cities and towns in which we previously were not a part of, we should establish connections with various community nonprofits to provide a framework for the stakeholders involved with community development activities. Her visit to our class reassured our notions on the dilemmas associated with economic development and how we can focus our thoughts even more while we begin to produce our deliverables in the next week or so. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward On the surveying side, we mentioned previously that we will be outreaching to the entire city of Mountain View via their Chamber of Commerce point-person of Bruce Humphries and Tony Cyrus who are friends of Alex and Julie. We also finalized a time to present our findings to the Mountain View Downtown Committee on December 5th from 8-10am (they meet on the first Tuesdays of every month). Lastly, after Vivian's presentation in our class, we took away two critical thoughts as we continue our project. The first is understanding that without a clear leadership of policymakers that are accessible to the public, there can be no realistic changes to a community because they hold the political powers for tangible social change. The second is that we should understand what Mountain View’s “story” is (i.e. what is the current social, economic, and political situations in the town from a policymaker and a resident’s perspective?) and how can we market this story to make a compelling argument to Alex and our stakeholders? Update on Project Activities
We are a little behind on our goals, as we have not completed the social media research or all the interviews, but we have a plan to get back on track. We were able to go to Menlo Atherton High School and meet with Mr. Powell, and are in the process of setting up a meeting with Ms. Thwaite for Monday. On Monday we also plan to meet for an extended amount of time to begin putting together our deliverables. We look forward to picking up the student survey results from Mr. Powell next week, which will give us more insight as to what students want out of a website, and what incentives would encourage them to take climate action. Mr. Powell shared a lot of information and ideas with us that we are excited to share with Diane and integrate into our project package. Ideas shared include: Anchoring the school work in the Next Generation Science Standards, and finding a way to integrate more data analysis. Having a scavenger hunt and/or photography contest. Getting people to stay engaged with the website by giving continuous point-earning opportunities, perhaps by having a sort of “snapchat streak” system that rewards you for logging in every so often. Another insight Mr. Powell shared was that it might be helpful to allow kids the chance to be acknowledged in a real way, such as being featured in the newspaper, given a certificate, or earning an honor cord for graduation. Also, as Menlo Spark builds its social media following, a feature on our Instagram, for example, will be very attractive to students who are active on social media. What We Observed and Learned With this process we are learning how important it is to interact with people in the community you are trying to serve. While we had good ideas on our own, Mr.Powell gave us insight and answered questions that we could not have gotten off of Google. It is one thing to know statistics; it’s another thing to know the students. We look forward to reading the student survey results and talking with Ms. Thwaite to further our understanding of the students of Menlo Park, to help our community partner, Menlo Spark, reach the most amount of people most effectively, because that is the only way they will reach their goal of a climate neutral city by 2025. Critical Analysis and Moving Forward Moving forward, we want to integrate the information we already have into rough drafts of the social media strategies document and student project package. These will be updated as we gather more information from students and teachers. We have also put a notice out in the Menlo Spark e-newsletter soliciting for a family to interview to update the ‘Family Success Story’ portion of the Menlo Spark website but have not located a family yet. One big take away from last week was that we were a little ambitious with our initial timeline, but we also learned how to work with unexpected challenges and create a plan that reflects our realities. As we are all excited about where this project is going, we look forward to our long meeting on Monday as a time to sit down, discuss, and write together about our project deliverables. Update on Project Activities
This week, we had a chance to talk with Jonathan, Andrea Jany, and Carol McKibben. Jonathan’s call gave us more specific directions in regards to what our deliverable is to look like next Thursday, and what we should expect at the visioning session on Thursday. Andrea’s shed some insight on how to devise a questionnaire for the residents, that will be less in depth than the interviews we’ve planned, but allows for us to have a good survey of the residents beliefs in regards to Alisal housing/community. Carol’s call gave us background on the Alisal community in preparation for the interviews we wish to conduct on Thursday. We will be talking with her in person again this upcoming week to flush out more ideas for our interviews. In addition to these meetings, we started developing a survey on housing situations and housing preferences in the Alisal based on Andrea’s advice and recommendations. We are planning to have a short survey, at the most 1 page front and back, to pass out during the Housing Workgroup meeting on Nov. 16. We want to collect quick quantitative data on demographics of current housing in the Alisal as well as residents needs and preferences for future housing solutions. Along with one-on-one interviews we are going to conduct, this will give us a decent sample size of the Alisal and greater Salinas community. The survey will be in English and in Spanish. Andrea has also offered to give us feedback on our survey draft before Thursday. In addition to the survey, we also contacted the residents we made connections with at the last meeting and asked if they were willing to be interviewed at the next meeting. We already obtained approval from two of these residents. We will ask Jonathan if he can make arrangements for any additional interviewees he can identify. Lastly, we have divided the work for annotating and synthesizing the HTMA document and we met early on Friday to look over our notes and discuss what we have. What We Observed and Learned Meeting with Jonathan: Jonathan described the Thursday deliverable in detail during our phone call with him on Tuesday. What our partners are asking for is a high level summary of key findings and recommendations offered through the HTMA, translated into Spanish, and accompanied with graphics. By our next call on Tuesday, he wants the English version of the high-level findings, so he has time to make suggestions and edits before it is translated into Spanish. Our report will also include infographics that will, in part, beautify the statistical data on the Alisal community, but also focus in on topics like gentrification and overcrowding in a visually-appealing and educational way. When we asked him how the data gathered from the first visioning session will be implemented in the Alisal Vibrancy Plan, he said that that information is used to draft guiding vision statements and guiding principles for the plan. Right now, the team is operating on a high-level basis, but these sessions and further data collected with help with narrowing these vision statements into super specific solutions. On Thursday, we will be making another trip down to Salinas for another visioning session. This session will give us opportunity to talk directly with residents for 45 minutes on specific subjects, such as infrastructure, quality of life, housing, etc. This session coupled with Professor McKibben’s suggestions will hopefully be very fruitful. Meeting with Andrea Jany: It was extremely helpful to see the approaches being implemented in Austria to address the housing issues being seen across the world in large cities. Her talk emphasized on the 10 principles being used in the project which are: Awareness (of social housing in the society), Involvement (involve people so they participate in process of social planning, Diversity (diversity in city and of housing estates), Social integration, Environment (integrate into the existing environment, connect w/ rest of city and neighbors already there, have amenities within complex for the rest of neighbors already in estate, Land use, Renovation, Protection (protect residents w/I job), Higher quality, and Funding. We were able to meet with her very quickly at the end of the talk to talk to her about our project and goals. She said she thought it would be helpful to get more demographics on Alisal and she offered to help us on the questionnaire. Meeting with Professor McKibben: Professor McKibben’s focus is more on how Alisal got to be the way it is today rather than solutions. Her main focus during our conversation was for us to realize that we should not be fooled by the similarities in the racial makeup between Alisal and other cities in the United States. The story for most cities getting to the way they are in terms of racial segregation can be traced back to purposeful policies with the intent of segregation back in the 19th century. For Alisal however, the segregation was not purposeful. Alisal is different; it was not deliberately segregated. It was originally settled not by people of color but by whites. It was founded outside of the city limits, which is the reason for its lack of infrastructure. The city did not neglect Alisal on purpose as it was outside of the city limits. The people of color in Alisal were interspersed by whites and class was the big differentiator, not race. Professor McKibben emphasized that we show that Alisal developed in a unique way though it faces many of the same problems as urban Californian cities. The residents of Alisal need to be informed that the area has been this way for 100 years and that those houses were built by people trying to restart their lives, not by the city of Salinas. She suggested questions for our interviews to get a better idea of what the residents believe the reason is for the current conditions of the Alisal. She also gave us insight into what she thinks residents of the Alisal will want in terms of housing. She believes they will want single family housing as currently exists but just better conditions. She also recommended we ask residents: “Do you see Alisal as the community you want your children to live in? Or do you see this as a temporary space?” She thinks they probably don’t want to stay in the Alisal and so they don’t need more housing, just better conditions that allow them to eventually move on. She also talked about the general complications there would be with building more housing in Alisal as it is an area filled with pesticides so there were policies implemented that lead to the lack of housing development in the agricultural areas as they are essentially poisoned. Professor McKibben’s perspective was very interesting and informative. Some of the members of the group had also just assumed Alisal got to the way it is today in the way urban areas across the United States got to the way they are but Alisal’s story is truly unique. It was also helpful to remind us that it is possible the residents of Alisal do not see their future there and are only there temporarily until they save up enough money to move out. So it may not be the correct approach to simply get more housing in the Alisal, and in fact it may not be possible due to the policies against the development of housing in the area. However, the conditions under which they are living are not the most ideal in terms of allowing the families to move up and out of the Alisal and the community does not sufficiently prepare its youth for a future outside of the agricultural area. There is still change that can be made that is in line with Alisal residents’ needs and aspirations. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward This weekend will not only be spent drafting up the summary of the HTMA document and getting a draft of the infographic, but it will also be spent carefully analyzing the notes from the past visioning session and delving more into the history of Alisal’s creation. These observations will help us fine-tune the research questions we developed in the second week, and turn them into interview questions for this upcoming session. Summarizing the HTMA and cultivating the interview questions simultaneously will allow us to draw side-by-side comparisons of these two approaches to addressing Alisal’s housing crisis, and determine what recommendations can be offered and where. We are planning on presenting Jonathan with an English version of our HTMA summary and accompanying infographics by Tuesday so he can offer his comments, as well as answer any questions we have in regards to our interview process. After we make the necessary edits and get approval, we will translate the infographic to Spanish. The final infographic should be ready by the day of the next Alisal Vibrancy Plan Housing Workgroup meeting on Thursday, November 16. Professor McKibben will also be a resource for helping us with our interview questions. Professor McKibben said she would be willing to meet with us the day of the the next Alisal Vibrancy Plan Session (November 16) to discuss our work at that point. She also offered help on our final report. Assessing Future Housing and Transportation Patterns in the City of Palo Alto | Week 7 Reflection11/10/2017
Current Progress
Our team distributed the final round of paper surveys. We visited the Stanford Shopping Center on Saturday and the California Avenue Farmer’s Market on Sunday. The Stanford Shopping Center venture was of particular interest because everyone we interviewed was a service worker. The individuals most likely to take a survey were those that had to wait in a single spot to wait on customers. Therefore, in the cumulation of our surveying, employees and Caltrain commuters were our most willing survey groups. We collected an additional 36 surveys over the weekend, bringing our in-person surveys to 77. People seem to have a knee-jerk dislike of surveyors. The majority of people we approached expressed a clear disinterest or were hesitant around complete strangers engaging them. Unlike many other survey programs, we were fortunate, especially in the California Avenue Farmer’s Market, to meet Stanford-affiliated staff and students that had empathy for our cause. Though we recognize that the general wariness is a fairly natural response, our team has developed a sympathetic attitude towards survey-based research, and will likely try to contribute to the a few of the in-person surveyors we encounter. The following section lists some general statistics we derived from the survey answers. Over 53% of all employed individuals drive to work (mostly solo), but more than 63% of individuals would prefer to bike, walk, and take public transit to work. 85% of individuals live in either apartments or single family households (split 40%, 45%). We managed to level our age demographic with the two trips this past weekend. Older generations seem to be less abundant in modern shopping centers and the California Farmer’s Market. Beforehand, close to 40% of our surveyed individuals, especially the residents that could give deeper insights into Palo Alto’s local housing situation, were older than 60. The lowest ranked form of transportation in Palo Alto was surprisingly driving (40/100), with public transit close behind (60/100). Not surprisingly, housing cost was the lowest ranked attribute in Palo Alto (18/100), with housing diversity close behind (40/100). In contrast, safety and commercial access were two of the highest ranked attributes (82/100). These results suggest people would like to see changes in the housing and transportation sector. Housing costs are too high to support a growing job market, and often lead to employees having to commute long distances. Over 80% of individuals noted housing cost as one of their top three considerations for living in a particular region. Quite a few individuals mentioned the need for higher density, lower cost housing units. However, the majority of individuals want a large residence with plenty of rooms. Over 90% of individuals requested easy access to a grocery store above other neighborhood attributes. The elderly had a slight preference for drug stores and libraries, likely a product of age associated health issues and disuse of modern reading resources respectively. These attributes show the importance for planners and citizen groups who use our data to understand the needs of the large age range in Palo Alto and possibly to adjust amenities based on the demographics of the city. Next Steps We are waiting to hear back from Adina and Elaine on the success (or failure) of our online surveys. Ideally, we would collect an additional 30-50 surveys from individuals of a younger demographic. While we are waiting on those results, our team is analyzing the survey data and noting relevant trends. We are trying to derive a more statistical way of analyzing written comments, but will likely categorize them into housing or transportation, complaints and compliments groupings. We are beginning to draft our final memo for Adina and Elaine, but are at a stand still until the final surveys arrive. As of now, we can only work on the methodology. However, we can also begin crafting our final presentation slides for December 6th. 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. |
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