Update on Project Activities
This past week we had the opportunity to travel to Los Altos for a coffee chat with local merchants and landowners, as well as to talk with leaders from the Chamber of Commerce over the phone. At the coffee chat, we were able to learn first-hand the sorts of wants and needs of small business/landowners in Los Altos. We were very happy to add a human experience to our project. An article had ran recently in the Town Crier about efforts on the behalf of our community partner, Jenn, and had briefly mentioned our involvement. A few of the coffee chat attendees had read this, and so welcomed our inclusion in the chat. The chat went well, as we were able to listen in to their discussions, as well as ask a few questions of our own. It was very interesting for us to listen in to their talk of issues; to this point, we had only thought of large-scale demographical issues. To hear them speak of wanting more light poles for public banner space was engaging. It reminded us that although Los Altos might have much higher than average per capita income and home sales prices, it’s residents still had to deal with everyday issues just like anyone else. A few days later, our group got back together for a phone interview wit, two members of the Los Altos Chamber of Commerce. They are familiar with Jenn’s work, and were kind enough to give us some of their time to answer questions. From them, we were able to glean more about what went on in the political/regulatory side of the economy. At the coffee chat, we learned what the merchants and landowners want. In this interview, we were able to learn how their wants were considered and dealt with by Los Altos leadership. One interesting point that we noticed during the phone interview was that there were a few times where they were expressing that they did not have data for a particular statistic but would be interested in knowing more information. For example, we asked if most employees of various businesses within the community took transit to work and where they were commuting from. They were unsure of the answer, but seemed interested in what the actual statistic for this question was. Perhaps our project can provide the answers to some of these questions. What We Observed and Learned One of the biggest things we learned is that there are often two sides to a statistic, decision, or plan. Before we actually visited Los Altos we wondered how we could help a city, that by simply looking at data, seemed to be in a very good economic condition. However, while this data may be for the city overall, it is clear that it is important to look at each part of the town to get a comprehensive view of the needs and areas for improvement. Similarly, while it may seem like a policy or planning decision is beneficial for all stakeholders, we learned that the details of the project or decision should be considered, as many people’s livelihoods are impacted by these decisions. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward On Friday February 5th, Carolyn and Sungmoon will be taking a tour of downtown Los Altos. We experienced Loyola Corners last week, which had a small town, rustic feel, so it will be interesting to compare the downtown to Loyola Corners. We feel that getting a better sense of the culture and atmosphere of the different parts of Los Altos will help us to get a better understanding of the data we are analyzing and how this fits into the narrative that Jenn is hoping we develop through this project. However, one question we are hoping to answer this upcoming week is how these field experiences can work into the final project. For example, the merchants at Loyola Corners were expressing different concerns they had to maintain their customers and businesses. One idea our group had was meeting with these stakeholders and gather information to help Jennifer and Los Altos officials make decisions that have positive impacts on the local business owners. For example, many of the store owners were saying that the current road construction is making it more dangerous for people to access their stores, due to lack of cross-walk and barriers. This could be causing potential customers to choose stores in a different location. We could help deliver this information, so these concerns could be considered in future policies and decisions. This week our group focused on narrowing down the focus of our project and trying to map out how we will complete each of the project deliverables. We met as a group on Wednesday and we discussed where we will access the data we are going to analyze. Evan also reviewed some basic Excel graph features so that we can have a structured, clean format for all of our tables and figures.
Another purpose of our meeting on Wednesday was to try to identify the main purpose of our project in relation to the class coursework and discussion. While we are trying to specify the scope of our project, we want to ensure that it complements the ideas of sustainability that we have been learning about in class. For example, one benefit of our project is understanding how the Los Altos can better prepare for a future recession by understanding the main economic drivers and areas of economic improvement within the city. The Los Altos Economic Development Project is a bit different than the other class projects, such as the Tenderloin project and the Friends of Caltrain project. Our work has been strictly off-site, and we lack many of the intimate conversations and primary resources that other groups might have. However, we also realized that since we are analyzing the data without any previous trips to the city, we are helping ensure that the ideas in the Economic Big Book will be based on objective, non-biased analysis. But we also collectively agreed that incorporating first-hand testimonies does have its benefits and can certainly strengthen and ‘humanize’ our project, so we decided to bring this up at our meeting. We then later met with Jennifer for our weekly meeting; we made sure that we identified exactly what our role would be for this project in regards to the City of Los Altos. In order to better prepare for the midterm presentation on Wednesday, we went over specific duties that each of us had. After voicing our concern regarding incorporating conversations and interviews to our project, Jennifer provided us with potential contacts that we could interview in order to provide different perspectives and insight on the City of Los Altos’ economic status: the President of the Chamber of Commerce and the Director of Los Altos Village Association. We plan on participating in coffee chats with them over this weekend and learning valuable concepts, which we will incorporate into our deliverable. Adding new inside perspectives will be highly valuable in helping us develop a project that will be beneficial to both our learning and the economic resilience of Los Altos. This realization allowed us to look at our data with a fresh perspective; because of this, we are able to humanize the data and look beyond the numbers. With this new sense of understanding, we are able to truly comprehend what the numbers that we’re working with mean. Afterwards, we spent time reflecting on the project objectives, and with our renewed sense of how we’re going to progress with this project, we ended the meeting with an agreement to regroup over the weekend after analyzing more data sets on our own. One of the largest take-aways from this meeting was the importance of understanding how analyzing this data would help the city of Los Altos and how our work would help the city move forward. We agreed that understanding the big picture helps motivate us and helps us understand how to take the next steps. We identified some main questions that we’d like to help answer with the data that we’ll be analyzing, including: what does having higher income mean? Does it necessarily mean lower crime rates? Is diversity impacted? Are better school systems an automatic result of communities with higher incomes? Next week, we plan to actively focus on answering these questions. We also plan on potentially attending a city hall meeting in Los Altos in addition to reaching out to community members and conducting chats and interviews. 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. |
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