Sustainable Cities is a service-learning course offered through the Program on Urban Studies and Earth Systems Program. Students learn and work collaboratively with Bay Area government agencies and community organizations to support their sustainability goals. Now in its seventh year, the class attracts undergraduate and graduate students from a multitude of disciplines, ranging from urban studies to civil and environmental engineering to law and public policy majors, to support clients on meaningful fieldwork-based projects. To see more information about the class, please visit: urbanst164.stanford.edu
The Winter 2016 class worked with four community partners on the following projects: 1) assessing equitable access to transit in San Mateo County (Partner: Friends of Caltrain); 2) conducting a community-serving retail analysis of the Tenderloin and Central Market Area in San Francisco (Partner: Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation); 3) developing economic drivers and development strategies for the City of Los Altos (Partner: Los Altos Economic Development); and 4) addressing local business displacement in the City of San Mateo (Partner: Urban Habitat). The final presentations took place on March 9, 2016 at Stanford University (Video). Update on Project Activities Maddie and Fidel went into North Fair Oaks on Tuesday morning and solicited surveys from Plaza Jewelers and Fiesta Auto Insurance. We tried to return to Elsa’s Salon but the owner was unhappy that we came back again. Matt and Fidel visited North Fair Oaks again on Friday morning for the last round of fieldwork, interviewing owners and employees of Piñata Surprise, Computer Repair, and Donut Depot. This time, each person with whom we talked was very welcoming and shared even more information than the surveys required. We had informative conversations, and have now collected a total of 6 written survey responses for Urban Habitat/Faith in Action. All of the completed surveys, as well as businesses who allowed us to take audio recordings, will be represented on the finished GIS map. We are also finalizing our literature review, as well as updating the appearance of our map and plan to rehearse for our presentation practice-run on Monday. What We Observed and Learned While two out of the three interviews conducted during the Friday morning visits corroborated the notion of rising rents contributing to small business displacement, we were surprised to learn that Donut Depot hadn’t been nearly as negatively affected as other local businesses. The owner, Chun Tang who immigrated to the US in 1985 from Cambodia, has operated the small coffee and donut shop with his wife for over 20 years, and proudly remarked that they were always the first ones to submit rent checks to the landlord, whose name or contact information he did not know. He explained that because he kept good relations with his landlord, he’s never had any problems with unexpected rent increases. Mr. Tang also maintained that business was still booming for him, and although his main clientele consisted of the local Hispanic population, recently he’s seen a few more tech employees frequent his shop. He’s neither noticed a significant change in the surrounding businesses or the clientele, and has served the same coffee and donuts since 1995 (which Matt and Fidel sample on a weekly basis).Though increasing rent has undeniably plagued the North Fair Oaks area, it’s interesting to see how some businesses soldier on unaffected, with little regard for the chaos ensuing around them. Below is a photo of some North Fair Oaks businesses, and one can see how similar they are to the San Mateo ones we visited earlier: Critical Analysis/Moving Forward As Friday concluded our survey collection, we now have all the information we need to complete the CartoDB website for our final deliverable. We’ve digitized the surveys and are displaying snippets of the responses on the interactive map. The weekend should give us some time to prepare for the presentation trial run during Monday’s class, and we’ve also begun work on the final written report. The workshop on Wednesday was very helpful for our website since we learned how to better use CartoDB. We received great suggestions such as implementing two buttons that when clicked will zoom in to the areas that we have surveys from (i.e. North Fair Oaks and San Mateo). We tried to connect the survey directly to CartoDB but it ended up not working due to the format that CartoDB uses, so we decided that we will clean the data ourselves. Update on Project Activities
As per the needs of Faith In Action and Urban Habitat, our focus area has shifted from San Mateo’s B Street Corridor to North Fair Oaks, a small, unincorporated census-designated area sandwiched between Redwood City and Atherton along Middlefield Road. Small ethnic, family-owned businesses line the street, similar to San Mateo, and its population is primarily Hispanic/Latino. All three of us plan to return to North Fair Oaks next Tuesday morning to try to get written survey responses from the business owners we’d interviewed last week as well as interview and record responses from a few more businesses. Tony suggested that we take a more systematic approach and go through the surveys question by question rather than have conversational interviews. He said Faith in Action would be pleased if we could get at least 5 responses from North Fair Oaks to add to their database. Regarding the interactive map, Tony thought it might be more beneficial to local business owners if we figured out a way to make the website bilingual. That way they would be informed of fellow proprietors’ grievances and realize that they are not alone in the concern of small business displacement. We were able to translate and digitize the most recent round of surveys we got from Faith in Action and are working on adding them to the website. We also plan on making the website more user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing, which we hope to do in class on Wednesday when we are in Branner library and have access to the Geospatial Center. What We Observed/Learned An underlying cause of the affordable housing crisis is that politicians have too much authority over regional urban planners. This also makes it hard to plan much of anything more than 4 years in advance, as it may be vetoed by the politician’s successor. The power to control public land use and transportation rests with jurisdictions that don’t want the density increase associated with affordable housing. Metropolitan transportation agencies in both Europe and Latin America don’t have to overstep political boundaries in order to facilitate a transportation network spanning multiple municipalities. Additionally, in talking to one of the small business owners, we found that a common problem is lack of communication with other neighboring owners. We hope that our map will be a tool that community organizations can continue to develop in order to connect small business owners with their neighbors. Our hope is that this additional networking will allow communication and enable collaboration that will ultimately strengthen the entire community. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Having almost completed the Literature Review, we are proceeding to start work on the project’s final deliverable. We plan to do a lot of work on the website this weekend, both updating its content and design. We plan to change our website’s language to Spanish since most of our targeted businesses are Spanish Speaking, and we want our website to foster a cohesive community by creating neighborhood awareness. Moreover, we plan to implement these new features by Wednesday since we want to take advantage of the Geospatial Center on Wednesday. We will also be adding the new surveys to our website and learn different ways on how we can render the information so that we can meet our goal of creating a tool that will help small businesses learn about their neighbors. Update on Project Activities
Matt and Fidel completed the first round of fieldwork in North Fair Oaks, an unincorporated area in San Mateo County adjacent to Redwood City on Thursday morning. We were able to conduct conversational interviews with six small businesses and gather information about businesses displacement struggles in North Fair Oaks. We also talked to a landlord, which was important for getting another perspective on the issue and understanding the pressure from both sides. Tony just sent us another set of eight surveys that Fidel will digitize on Monday afternoon and upload to our online map soon after. We are meeting with Tony at 9am next Tuesday at Kaffeehaus, prior to which we will send him a first draft of our Literature Review and summary of our experience visiting businesses in North Fair Oaks. What We Observed and Learned Like the B Street Corridor and E 3rd and 4th Avenues of downtown San Mateo, North Fair Oaks is predominantly Hispanic/Latino (>73%) which meant that most small business owners were catered to the Spanish-speaking community. Because this was our first real experience with fieldwork, the first few interactions weren’t quite as rehearsed as we would have liked, but after a few we were able to get the hang of it. As Fidel has spent a good portion of his life in Central America, he was well-suited to conversation with the owners, and a few even opened up and allowed us to record voice memos! We had conversations with the owners of Adrian’s Income Tax, Ana’s Beauty Salon, Tim’s Coin Laundry, Donut Depot, El Jarochito Taquería, and Elsa’s Beauty Salon, all of which provided us with valuable information to input into the online survey. Some of these businesses have served the community for almost 20 years and continue to employ local residents. Nearly all reported rising commercial rent, however not by an amount that wasn’t stipulated in the terms of the lease. The principal issue was loss of local clientele due to rising residential rent. The owner of Elsa’s Beauty noted that many Latino residents of North Fair Oaks and Redwood City were either moving to the East Bay or leaving California entirely. The owner of Adrian’s Income Tax argued that rent is increasing at a higher rate than salaries, which leads to people leaving the area. When people start leaving the community, businesses are affected because they start losing valuable customers. After speaking with Tim, the owner of Coin Laundry and the landlord for the building, we were able to garner a different perspective on increasing rent. He assured us that if small business owners develop a good relationship with their landlord, there is no incentive to turn the space over to different owner. The rents only rise because of business turnover and no one wants to perpetuate that situation, although the increasing rent often gets passed on to the consumer in the form of increasing prices of good and services. He argued that prices will always increase with the increasing CPI and that landlords have to charge a proportionally higher amount to offset the difference. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Next week we plan to conduct more fieldwork and digitize the data collected in the interviews this week and sent to us by Tony. Our fieldwork this week was very eye-opening. Most of the businesses we interviewed have been in North Fair Oaks for over 15 years and they are all currently suffering a loss of clientele. We are hoping to use the data we gather to really benefit the local community. Next week we hope to better prepare our interview questions since we learned that the more conversational the interviews are the more information we are able to gather. Moreover, we’ll dive more into CartoDB and see how we can use our interactive map to really show the stories of the small businesses. Update on Project Activities
Fidel and Matt spoke with Tony over the phone on Thursday afternoon. Tony assured us that he’d soon get the names of the businesses we are to survey next week from Faith in Action. We plan to begin the field work as early as this weekend and will likely engage in face-to-face interviews with the owners for the majority of the month. This has been our main roadblock to any significant progress, so we’re anxious to get started. He’s also working on scanning a few more completed surveys so that we can digitize the data and incorporate it into Fidel’s newly created website. Tony sent us a follow up email explaining that Urban Habitat and Faith in Action don’t have any data from Redwood City, another target area, so we will begin trying to collect survey and interview data there. We will be visiting businesses along Middlefield between Woodside Rd. and and St. Anthony’s Catholic Church and along Bay Road and El Camino. If the business owners are unwilling to complete the survey, we will still conduct and open interview and see if they are willing to share their stories and tell us what it’s like to be a small business owner now. Additionally, we will ask if they have any interest in free legal advice or a free legal clinic that The Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights is offering to put on. We have also been put in contact with Jennifer Martinez, the executive director of Faith in Action. We’ve also begun using the GIS mapping tools offered through the Geospatial Center to organize the data into a map, and utilize audio from the personal testimonies as well as survey data. More specifically, we’re using CartoDB to create and render an interactive map of the surveyed small businesses. Our plan is to humanize the surveyed data by creating personal stories of the small businesses. We are currently considering showing pictures of the businesses’ locations and facts like how long have they been in business, who are their target clientele, and what are their employees’ ethnicities. We are excited to have built the first version of the website and it currently shows three small businesses. The website can be found in the following url: fidelsalgado.github.io/urban-habitat What We Learned and Observed This week we’ve collected a healthy number of sources for the literature review. Both Professor Chan and Tony gave us ideas of what type of sources to look for and have really helped to steer our search for additional ones in the right direction. The Public Advocate for the City of New York released a document in 2009 titled “THE SUBWAY SHAFT: How Second Avenue Subway Construction Hurts Businesses in its Path” that summarizes efforts to preserve small businesses being affected by an ongoing MTA construction project. As with the N B St Corridor as well as E 3rd and 4th Avenues in San Mateo, the businesses on Second Avenue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side have served the neighborhood for generations and consist of locally owned and operated restaurants, bars, beauty salons, hardware stores, locksmiths, grocery stores, and bodegas. Mitigation strategies recommended by the Public Advocate include: establishing a fund to provide emergency grants to failing businesses, helping business owners renegotiate their leases, providing property tax abatements to landlords, suspending sales tax and on good and services sold by the businesses, improving advertising, and creating a “Lunch Bus” program for government employees to draw customers back to the avenue. The document also referenced the small business displacement mitigation strategies, each the result a transportation expansion project, of Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Phoenix, and borrowed heavily from these cities’ plans. In Portland, in addition to the many of the strategies listed above for Manhattan’s Second Avenue, the business owners of the at-risk area were invited to attend workshops teaching business management skills and were paired with personal mentors skilled in business strategy. The City also distributed seasonal newsletters and sponsored social media and events along the corridor to encourage residents to shop and dine. Many, if not all of the above tactics could be implemented in our areas of interest in downtown San Mateo. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Tony suggested that we collect personal testimonies of the small business owners in addition to the surveys we’ve already acquired. That would involve us returning to the some of the previously visited businesses and discussing general thoughts on the economic and cultural direction of San Mateo. These testimonies might allow us to fill in some of the survey gaps, as well as just get a better sense of how business displacement is affecting these owners. For the website, we are planning to keep familiarizing ourselves with CartoDB. We hope to start making the small businesses information more appealing by showing images of the location. Moreover, we would like to able to connect the google survey to CartoDB so that every time that a survey is submitted it automatically renders it to our website. We will first gauge the technical difficulty of accomplishing this feature and then decide to implement it. |
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