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:
Next Steps Research
Meeting with Community Partners
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 was one of the less intensive weeks of our quarter so far, as we did not take another trip down to Salinas. However, we have not let the project out of our working memory; we have been fleshing out our final survey draft and working out how to incorporate our potential GIS mapping technology without using a digital survey (we decided last week to use a physical handout as opposed to a Google form due to potential lack of residents’ cellular data). Jonathan suggested that we may be able to organize a conference call with current planning in order to add to our wealth of knowledge regarding the housing layout and zoning of the Alisal. However, as we all know, it is difficult to coordinate schedules, so we may not end up having this conversation. This is not a large issue at all, though, especially since we have so fortunately spoken to a wide variety of stakeholders, community members, and officials already. Today, two of our group members (and Emmanuel) took a trip to visit Professor Carol’s home in Carmel, where we enjoyed refreshments, a scenic tour of the residential area, and a home-cooked dinner. What We Observed and Learned Though we didn’t visit Salinas, our visit to Carmel shed a lot of light on our understanding of housing trends, historical segregation, and further motivated us about the significance of our work with the Alisal. In our residential tour of Carmel, Carol narrated comparisons and contrasts between her hometown and Salinas, as an expert of both regions. Both Carmel and Salinas feature very dense housing conditions with minimal, if any, space between units. However, the population density can not equate. As a beachy, wealthy, heavily- tourist destination, many of the homeowners purchase their beautiful properties, but leave it vacant for a majority of the year to live in their primary homes until the summer season. Homeowners have the privilege here to purchase 10 million dollar properties, tear them down, and rebuild them to be “quirky”, unique, and custom-designed. There is no underdevelopment, the small and windy roads are deemed “adorable”, houses are built around standing trees, parking is easy to find, the downtown area is packed with expensive retail stores and exclusively local restaurants- all clearly different characteristics that are or have ever been seen in Salinas. Why? As Carol articulates, “White people lived here on purpose.” Schools were made to segregate white children away from Italians and Mexicans. Schools were made to segregate white children away from minority residents that get pushed to marginalized locations, like the Alisal. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward It is not fair that some communities, such as Carmel, can live in such luxury while residents, in places like the Alisal, work to pack multiple families in rundown, substandard structures. With our understanding of the historical segregation that prompted this division, we have that much more passion and empathy moving forward with our work assessing the current housing conditions in Salinas. Everyone in our group is invested in our project and in supporting our community partners, which is definitely a huge, if not crucial, element to its success. We are grateful to be working with people like Carol and Jonathan who have clearly laid out why Salinas is a location worthy of attention, worthy of research, and worthy of community-based service. Moving into Week 7, we anticipate several busy meeting times, as we have to actually settle on a final survey, training module, and funding analysis, but this is work that we are ready and able to see to fruition. |
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