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.

​Update on Project Activities
This week, we completed another draft of the survey and received feedback from Jonathan from the City of Salinas. We switched the survey from an online platform to a written platform for the accessibility of the volunteers who will perform the survey. Our draft thus far is a one page, cleanly laid out attempt at encompassing all the necessary components for the audit, such as type of housing, roof, walling, etc.

We will be speaking to Jonathan this week to go over the feedback he sent on the survey and to define our next steps moving forward with the training module.

What We Learned and Observed
From the feedback we have received thus far from Jonathan, we learned that to improve the survey we need to expand many of its current features. For example, we can move some text on the current survey to a cover page, and we can expand on the term "multi-family" for multifamily units. Deciding how to make the survey more concise while still containing all it's implications has been quite a challenge. Since we want the results of the survey to remain valid no matter who is conducting it, we need to be very careful with our language and how we define certain features. We will be speaking to Jonathan this weekend to discuss the issue of clarity versus brevity.

Critical Analysis/Moving Forward
Moving forward, we aim to put the finishing touches on the survey and consequently complete the training module. We are still processing the GIS data that was provided last week to decide how those variables can be included in the context of the survey. One of our biggest priorities is making sure the community groups can resonate with the survey and module, given they were created by an outside group. In the time we have left, we will be taking feedback from these various groups to ensure that it's a survey for them. Additionally, in our discussion with Jonathan we will analyze more critically the issues of sustainability and transportation that the results of this survey will entail. For example, as a consequence of evidence of overcrowding, how can the city sustainably provide more public services, high density housing, and parking space without compromising the environmental viability of the area?

Update on Project Activities
This week, we are moving forward on the survey portions that we can complete without being able to actually survey the community. During our last trip in Salinas, our meeting with the stakeholders (Building Healthy Communities and Code Enforcement) led us to realize that our survey previously was insufficient to capture the nuances of the housing state. Therefore, we spent the rest of the trip reassessing the neighborhoods with this new information in mind, but we were not able to collect any data. However, this was still useful because now we know how to better cater to the needs of the community. Although the process to build the best survey possible is very long, we want this project result to be as valuable as possible to the city and to be more than just a thought experiment. Therefore, we will take the time needed to adjust our survey.

Jonathan from the City of Salinas has also sent us some GIS data from the city’s databases on physical property characteristics for each parcel, which has structural elements such as the number of bedrooms, age of the house, and more that could be useful for an initial analysis of whether the Alisal could qualify for some of the grants they are interested in. This file also has the parcel boundaries for the Alisal area, so our data from the survey will need to fit within these boundaries for it to be integrated back into the database.

Additionally, Jonathan mentioned that he has been thinking about best practices around sustainability and would like us to consider more deeply issues like parking, transportation, affordability and their intersection with housing. If we were to build more high density, which is very sustainable, would this still be comfortable? With the lack of public transportation and parking in Alisal, how could the city respond with regard to these public services if they were to build more housing? How would this affect sustainability?

What We Learned and Observed
Because we did not have a site visit this week, there isn’t as much new information for us to absorb. However, we have learned that we need to consider all the factors at play when it comes to housing such as the issues of transportation mentioned above and also the overcrowding that can occur in public spaces if more housing is built. The trip to the Stanford educational farm was also informative as it helped us learn more about ways to make urban areas more sustainable through city gardens and the self-sufficiency that comes with planting your own food.

We observed that because of the historical inequities of the Alisal area, as Carol discussed with us during our trip to Carmel last week, we need to be sensitive of what the community really wants and understand the difficulties surrounding a very comprehensive survey of all the neighborhoods. Since volunteers will be surveying their own communities, and possibly their own neighbors, and given the current political climate on issues of immigration and deportation, there may be some nervousness on the residents' part to let other people assess their housing. If building codes aren't met, we want to make sure that residents who may be forced out still have resources to support them in finding another home. This will be a tremendously long process, since the City is limited in its capacity currently to help these residents, so we do not want to shake things up too much.

Critical Analysis/Moving Forward
In the next week, we need to fully process the new GIS data we’ve been given by Jonathan and decide if there are additional variables that we would like from the GIS team at Salinas. Looking over the data will also tell us what information they are missing and should be added to the housing survey. We might also make some summary statistics on what is in the GIS data since they will give us and the City more context on the overall state of housing. Because we did not collect survey data last time, we may need to schedule another field visit if possible. However, the requirements noted by the community groups (having Spanish speakers and community members accompanying us during surveying, and really having the community do the survey instead of an outside group) might make this more difficult. We would like to respect the community’s wishes, so we will do our best to provide some analysis to the City even if we cannot collect data now.

We will also be meeting to begin working on the final presentation and completing the portions that we can do now. Jonathan will also be giving us feedback on our first survey, so we will have to further make some changes on the survey before we hand it over to the community groups. Lastly, we will start incorporating the issues of sustainability and transportation into our final analysis and report, using the GIS data that we were given and also through our own research of the literature that already exists.

Update on Project Activities
This week we pulled our resources together to design the initial survey draft. We also took a drive down to Salinas to meet with other stakeholders including:

The Mayor
Deputy City Manager
CHISPA CEO
Building Healthy Communities Director
GIS experts

They provided unique perspectives/insights to the city of Salinas and further enriched our understanding of the socioeconomic and demographic paradigm in the city. With the input we have received so far, we are confident in moving forward with the second version of the survey and the database platform; they gave us a better idea of what to include and how to incorporate it. We are also excited to receive more data from the GIS department showcasing ownership of homes, bedrooms and sizes of houses, which he said he could provide. This information coupled with the data that we collect will provided for an in depth multilayered GIS enabled database that will be critical in the analysis leading to grant applications.

We will also be visiting Prof. Carol this coming weekend to further discuss the history of Salinas and continue to stay on the same page through every step of the project’s progression.

What We Learned and Observed
Today (February 10) we visited the Alisal and city council house to speak with the Mayor of Salinas, Building Healthy Communities, CHISPA housing management, and a GIS data collection expert. Our meeting with the mayor was an overall enjoyable and enriching day trip. Mayor Joe Gunter was lively and candid, clearly bewilderment on and proud to have been elected mayor of the city in November 2012. Given that Salinas is mostly composed of Hispanic residents, the mayor conveyed that he understood the implications of being a white male representative over his jurisdiction. Mayor Gunter cited low voter turnout as the reason behind his seat. With Mayor Gunter and the assistant city manager, we learned more about the hierarchy of city council (the mayor acts like a chairman over the city, while the city manager acts as the CEO) and we learned about the bi-monthly public city council meetings where residents voice their opinions and concerns, and how crucial yet restrictive an agenda is in terms of facilitating the city council meetings that leaves predetermined, strict time slots for each topic.

Our meeting the GIS expert instilled confidence in our current trajectories and gave us more data options to work with. We noticed that the Building Healthy Communities representative was reluctant and almost skeptical of our positions there, as outsider Stanford students attempting to make change in a city that wasn't ours. However, she was open to helping us develop a survey that would be simple, useful, and non-abrasive. We originally planned on presenting our survey through Google Forms, with the assumption that most people have access to have smartphones. Though the Building Healthy Communities representative confirmed that most do have access, she illuminated that they may have limited data coverage- an additional cost we did not anticipate. With this information, we collaboratively decided that a print-out version of the survey would be most effective.

Finally, we took a tour of the Alisal. We saw major overcrowding-- small houses directly behind small houses right next to small houses, all occupying one block without rest. Front lawns were cluttered in some spaces, and in others front lawns were kept meticulously neat. Sometimes, we would see small trailer park patches on the periphery of house clutters, adding to the crowd. There were playgrounds interspersed for children, and we passed a couple of small parks. Those small lots were, for the most part, the only green places the residents could enjoy. From our tour, we learned that we may need to have a more specific metric for exterior evidence of housing conditions. In mentally “rating” each home, as residents would have to for the survey, it was apparent that the lines between good, fair, poor, and substandard can be very ambiguous. The people we met with also helped us brainstorm that cars, parking spots, and converted garages are strong indicators of overcrowding- a variable we weren’t sure how to quanitify.

Critical Analysis/Moving Forward
From our meetings with CHISPA and Building Healthy Communities, we realized that resident input is important for our project to be valuable in the long term for the city. They discussed a previous program by the Visiting Nurses Home Association to collect health data from the residents that required six months of public discussion, but in the end, it was incredibly successful because it was community-led and community-based. Especially in our current political climate, in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, many residents may be suspicious of people walking around their neighborhood and conducting a survey. We need to ensure that we have community buy-in for us to be able to accurately gauge the housing conditions of the Alisal. Our next steps are editing our survey to take into the input we got today (including more measures of overcrowding for example) and building a training module for the residents. We will also be sending our survey to Building Healthy Communities and CHISPA to get feedback from them on what we can improve and discussing what features should be in our training module. The GIS team will additionally send us demographic data about the city that they already have so we can figure out what has been recorded previously and does not need to be in our survey. Our next steps include finalizing our survey and drafting a training module that includes how to respond to passerby that may question the purpose of our survey. It is very helpful that we now have a wealth of more contacts to receive advice from; this project is truly becoming a community initiative.