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.

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
On Thursday, Jackelyn, Celine, and I travelled two hours south to attend the Alisal Vibrancy Plan Visioning Workshop, facilitated by the City of Salinas. It was held in a school auditorium. The workshop was meant to allow for residents (both in Salinas and in Alisal) to be involved in the planning process for the Alisal Vibrancy Plan. This event was our first official introduction to the Alisal community, and our first form of contribution to the AVP. We are scheduled to talk with Carol McKibben this weekend and Andrea Jany the coming week. Talking with them will prepare us for when we conduct interviews with residents. We will also be debriefing the Visioning Workshop with Jonathan over the phone this week and we will hopefully be receiving scanned copies of the documents created by the attendees in the near future. We also received the long-awaited HTMA document today, and will be working on reading, dissecting, and translating that document next week. 
 
What We Observed and Learned
One of our worries was that there wouldn’t be any residents or only few residents at the Visioning session but there were actually many residents. Some not specifically from Alisal, some were from Salinas the city generally that had businesses in Alisal. There was pretty good representation of people, old, young, and disabled. They set up the workshop by three questions asked to the residents. Each overarching section had three parts they wanted to address-- strengths, weakness, and possible strategies to address the weaknesses. There were two facilitators per table and they seemed very well versed on how to facilitate discussion. They asked the questions in a way that wasn’t leading toward a certain answer. They accepted all answers and wrote them down on the large sheets of paper displaying was what said. The residents were pretty participatory and sitting with them gave us a lot of insight into their needs and wants. It was interesting to hear actual stories put to the general issues we had read about. For example, crowding was an issue we read about but sitting with the residents made it more real as one talked about how crowding was a big issue with many families living in a home and their kids wouldn’t have a place to do homework. Another example was a story of how one of the resident’s friend’s landlord continued to up their rent and that it had gone up from $1,900 per month to $2,100 per month over the course of three months. One of the biggest issues they focused on was the lack of rent control and the need for policies to control this. They also emphasized the need to inform the residents of their rights. This was a general issue as well of residents not knowing where resources are. Speaking to one of the residents one on one, she told me she got most of her information on community programing through Facebook and flyers. A younger students told me she learned about opportunities through school. They are required to complete a certain number of community service hours to graduate and this is how she got involved in many of the youth councils in the city as well as internships. Knowing this information, we know in what forms our infographic would be most useful. Some of the other things they focused on where getting youth involved with different programs and with businesses in the community to gain mentors and financial assistance. Keeping the youth focused and expanding their leadership capabilities would keep them from spending time on the streets and would therefore reduce violence. Another issue was the lack of childcare facilities. It was interesting to see they focused most on the housing and the youth. It seemed that it was a general consensus that caring for the youth would eventually result in the lowering of violence and poverty. The Visioning Session was a good experience for us, not only because it was our first experience with the community, but because we were able to each establish relationships with different residents, some parents, some students, some community leaders, watch their collective thinking process as teams, listen to their ideas and see the ones that meant the most to them. 
 
Critical Analysis/Moving Forward
As our next steps moving forward, we plan on meeting with Carol McKibben and Andrea Jany to get more background information and insight on how to conduct interviews with the residents. Each of us made connections with some residents and gathered contact information for the interviews. We will be working as a team to refine our interview questions and methodology, such as using video or audio recording when we speak with our interviewees. Celine took photos at the Visioning Session that we will use primarily for our presentation. We will review the photos and assess what other kinds of photos we want, such as photos of parts of neighborhoods in the Alisal. We were unable to get a tour of the area due to circumstances regarding the high amounts of traffic we experienced on the way to the session, but we hope to get a chance to explore a bit more of the area. Since we finally received the HTMA document, we are excited to comb through this information and identify any discrepancies we see, at first glance, from our experiences working with residents. We are now waiting for documents from the Visioning Session, including notes from each team’s table, to be sent to us. Once we have these, we can make more accurate comparisons with the HTMA document. Next Tuesday we will have a conference call with Jonathan to debrief and identify ways this community forum will be implemented in future planning for the project.

One of the things we enjoyed about the meeting is that the forum seemed overall very well-structured. Residents were seated at different tables to form small teams and work on answering questions together. The majority of tables were “Spanish-only” that composed of many bilingual residents and some monolingual residents. A few tables were designated as English-speaking so other residents could also participate. The majority of the event was run in Spanish and translations were always provided, even the main questions were asked in Spanish. This approach seemed very effective as monolingual Spanish speakers were given the power to express their thoughts and discuss these ideas in a low-pressure environment. We noticed that language barriers still persist, as ideas like “rent control” and “grants” were terms that bilingual speakers, who were often more highly educated, could not translate to Spanish. As this is something we will come across when we translate the HTMA document, we want to identify ways to best translate these ideas so that monolingual Spanish residents can be empowered by having the language to put towards these ideas. 

We want to hear about other ways residents are involved besides semi-formal settings like these. We noticed that there was an issue expressed by many residents about the means of spreading information, such as community forums, to the community. We want to know how much pubbing is done in schools, local businesses, neighborhoods, and places commonly frequented by Alisal residents such as super markets. We would also like to identify who was and wasn’t present because of this issue. A few families were present, but we noticed that many adults participating were community leaders, people who work in different nonprofits or welfare agencies. One participant was a Salinas resident who is a Stanford graduate. We want to ensure that more of the general public, including the working class and undereducated demographics, are getting information about these meetings and are able to attend them.

Update on Project Activities
On Monday we met with Jonathan Moore, Associate Planner and our community partner from the City of Salinas. We discussed some of the cultural and historical influences in Alisal that contribute to the economic and housing disparities residents face today. Since none of us are from Salinas or have visited the city before, we are mostly unfamiliar with the city, its infrastructure, its districting, its land use, and its people. 
 
Jonathan showed us a map and explained to us where Alisal is within the city and where agricultural fields are, which are actually not surrounding the Alisal area even though many Alisal residents work there. He also gave us insight on existing land use in Alisal. Most of the land is used for residences, which are mainly single-family units. One of the prevalent issues is that although these residences are meant for single families, the reality is that multiple families or extensions of nuclear families occupy single-family homes out of necessity due to financial and social circumstances. We discussed the issue of public housing options and private housing, which is usually operated by employers of migrant farm workers. In these private housing options, laborers are subjected to poor conditions such as overcrowding, no rent protection, and poor health and wellbeing. 
 
We want to look into the issues presented by various housing options and situations in Alisal to address the overall issue of affordable and accessible housing, and how transitioning from common housing types such as single-family units to multi-family units may relieve many of the issues Alisal residents face. We are also aware that development can be a major aggressor of displacement and gentrification in communities such as this one, so we want to discuss this issue with the Alisal advocacy groups and with residents to understand their needs and desires for their community and home. 
 
What We Learned: 
About Alisal 
The City of Salinas is commonly known as the capital of agriculture in the Central Valley of California. Our community partners refer to it as the “Salad Bowl of the World” as it’s the biggest producer of lettuce, artichokes, broccoli, and other major vegetable crops. Salinas has a rich history in California as not only a major site of agriculture and economy but as a site for migration, becoming home to immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines and Southeast Asia who sought jobs working as laborers in fields and farms. 
 
About the Project
The Alisal Vibrancy Plan was created in response to advocacy from residents of Alisal, in the east side of Salinas, encouraging a “shift to more equitable investments” in the city. In 2014, the City of Salinas drafted an Economic Development Element (EDE) as a planning document for economic policies and conditions in the city, but for many residents of Alisal, the document did not sufficiently address economic disparities within Alisal. The project is in partnership with the City of Salinas, institutional stakeholders, Alisal advocacy groups, Working Groups and a Steering Committee. Our role as a team is to read the Alisal/East Salinas Housing Target Market Analysis (HTMA), and synthesize and translate this information to Spanish, and create an infographic that is easily understandable and accessible to the residents of Alisal. 
 
Critical Analysis/Moving Forward  
Community Partner Relations
An interesting find from Monday, was that both of the liaisons for the partnership, Jonathan and his partner, did not speak Spanish. Being that over three-quarters of the population of the City of Salinas is Hispanic, we are interested in exploring how the dynamics will look like in terms of implementation and community input. 
 
Resident Participation
We were told we would meet some of the residents during our first meeting which is a bit worrisome because they are the real experts on the issues facing Alisal. We may have to explore ways to ensure and perhaps encourage resident participation to ensure we are addressing their concerns and using their input. 
 
Questions to research and explore:

• How involved have residents from Alisal been in these policies decisions? What is the makeup of Alisal residents on the board for the Alisal Vibrancy Plan?
• How successful has the City of Salinas been in engaging residents from Alisal?
• What are the community members doing to encourage engagement? 
• Who are the residents being engaged? Do they only make up a small portion of the demographic makeup of Alisal? 
• How do we encourage participation to get viewpoints of all different Alisal residents (age, language ability, race, income level)?
• In what ways is the City making information accessible to monolingual Spanish speakers from Alisal?
• How can the City address housing policy for Alisal residents who are migrant farm laborers, specifically those who live in private housing by their employer and are subject to poor conditions?
• How can the City address food insecurity in Alisal, whose residents are largely responsible for the major production of food in the Central Valley? 
• How has redlining affected the districting of Alisal and the unequal distribution of resources in Alisal compared to other districts in Salinas?
• How has the transition been from Alisal being apart of the county to Alisal being incorporated into the City of Salinas? 

 
Next Steps
Research

• Our team is planning on meeting in this coming week to share out what we’ve learned from some preliminary research on these issues, and create an outline for our project for the quarter--specifically curating an interview schedule with advocacy groups to understand the current situation of Alisal from a historical perspective, and with residents to see what issues/solutions look like for their community. 

 
Meeting with Community Partners

• Week of October 16-- Date and Time TBD
  • This is a meeting to get to know the stakeholders and partners, and maybe some residents. This meeting will likely be a Skype call, due to the fact that it falls on midterm week. 
  • Objective: provides context and insight on how to prepare for the Visioning Session.
  • Between the three of us, we will decide which date and time is optimal, and that will be shared with our community partners.
• Week of October 30-- Visioning session in City of Salinas on October 26
  • Session will begin at 6pm -- projected arrival would be 5pm, just so we can get settled and hopefully talk with a few residents beforehand.
  • This meeting will go over the plans with the committees and workgroups, and there will be residents in attendance. Our partners suggested that we do some interviews with residents before the session.
• Week of November 13-- Housing Work Group meeting on November 16
  • Session will begin at 6pm 
  • For this meeting, our partners want a draft of the deliverables. As a reminder, this will be a synthesis of the HTMA document translated into Spanish in simple language so it is easily understandable and accessible to the community we are working with.

Update on Project Activities
In the past week, we have been coordinating with our community partner, Jonathan, on varying our survey methodology based on his feedback. We are confident and proud to say that we have arrived at a satisfactory final version of the survey. Given that the survey will be conducted on paper, we were able to alter the survey format to allow for several houses data to be recorded on one sheet of paper.

Currently, we are working on a training module to accompany the survey. We are also almost done with our written report, funding analysis and presentation preparations.

What We Observed and Learned
While going through the funding analysis for the Choice grants we realized, that through our observations,The City of Salinas currently has much of the documentation necessary to successfully apply for federal grants to revitalize the Alisal NRSA. Whether the HUD Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grant will be a viable source of funding however depends on the City and the County’s assessment of the current state of public housing. A specific criteria for the grant application is that a public or assisted housing project within the neighborhood that is severely distressed must be identified to be rehabilitated. Because of the Housing Authority’s active attempts to maintain the state of public housing in Monterey County, most public housing projects are in fair conditions. The more feasible route may be to identify any federally assisted housing projects are in currently in disrepair within the Alisal area. Other eligibility requirements on the conditions of the neighborhood are in fact met as the Alisal suffers from high crime and substandard housing conditions overall.

Critical Analysis/Moving Forward
Currently our methodology is based on a paper model, requiring volunteers to physically write down their assessments. The data collected is then to be recorded on a map for better visualization. If done by hand on physical maps, then it should not be as time intensive. However, we are aware of the city’s ambitions to map out the data and layer it on top of an already existing GIS database. To achieve this, the survey data will have to be duplicated into an excel form which would cause additional labor; something that may not be as sustainable for the city in later stages of the project. To mitigate this, we will recommend to our partner that they migrate the methodology to a digital platform that is linked to their office’s GIS database, in order to automate a significant chunk of the process.

We do understand that there are budgetary constraints that may stymie the transition and as such do believe that the paper survey should suffice for now. We are looking forward to presenting our findings, deliverables and recommendation this coming week and are grateful for an awesome opportunity to partner with The city of Salinas on their community vibrancy plan in the Alisal.