One of the most straightforward ways our project connects to urban agriculture is public health. When we visited Salinas, we noted that there seemed to be plenty of liquor stores and other establishments, but limited access to large grocery stores or fresh produce. Despite Salina’s being the “salad bowl” of the country, it also suffers from poverty and hunger on a large scale. According to California Institute for Rural studies, in 2010 Monterey County produced $4 billion in gross profit. However, nearly 25,000 individuals earn incomes lower than 200% of the Federal Poverty Level and as a result face dramatic food insecurity (Kresge, 2011). During our trip to Salinas, community members mentioned that there are no adequate and accessible grocery stores to choose from. It is without mention, that food deserts within low income urban communities have a negative effect on the city’s public health.
The homes in some parts of the city were very dense, and many of them housed multiple families at a time. Community members mentioned that the “green space” in some regions consisted of small, simple parks and only provided the bare minimum. The addition of urban agriculture pockets such as community gardens would provide access to fresh produce and healthier food options for nearby residents, as well as increase the amount of green space and variable (planning, spatial use, land use pattern things (sorry am looking for a good word right here lol)). This would also have a positive effect on residents’ health, whereas the larger commercial farms surrounding Salinas create a lot of negative health impacts (i.e. increased rates of asthma and other respiratory issues due to pesticide use). The rise of agricultural technology (AgTech) in Salinas and the urbanization of existing agriculture has created tensions between commercial farms and local farmers and growers. For example, Taylor Farms has a growing presence in the city and has plans to incorporate AgTech into their work. This incorporation would provide jobs for residents, but a portion of those jobs would involve operating machinery and working with agriculture indirectly, only furthering the divide between residents and their land and agricultural history. The educational aspect of urban agriculture could mitigate this loss of agricultural knowledge, and supplement the environmental learning that younger residents working with machinery may not otherwise engage with. Although urban agriculture could have a lot of positive impacts on under-resourced residents in Salinas, we struggled to weigh those benefits against the negative impacts that it could have on the community. An increased possibility of gentrification is one of the clearest impacts we noted. Green spaces are great additions to communities, but can also contribute to beautification and improvement efforts that drive up the price of housing in the surrounding areas and result in existing residents being displaced. We’ve already found that Salinas has a number of “redevelopment” projects underway, which oftentimes are either located in more affluent parts of the city or in regions with high populations of minority groups (which will then be at risk of gentrification). The addition of green spaces created through urban agriculture could be a potential gateway to more of these “redevelopment” projects. It also doesn’t make sense to expect many Salinas residents to start growing food on their own lots when many of the lots in the city would be too small to accommodate urban agriculture, and many people are renting rooms and living in very dense, overpopulated homes. Furthermore, a lot of them work in the agricultural industry daily, and may not be inclined to do agricultural work for free or think of it as an educational/relaxing space because their careers revolve around it. However, in a recent study, low-income employees in the agriculture industry wished they had employee gardens to combat farmer food insecurity. Another way could be to include farmworkers in urban planning and implementation of garden projects. By doing this it could potentially target specific communities by addressing their needs such as the elderly, children, large families within single households, and students. This potential co-creative process could allow a healthy and steady flow of information from community members to urban planners as mentioned in lecture. It is also suggested that wide-scale community gardens can reduce crime, improve neighborhood aesthetics, create leadership development and youth engagement (Kresge, 2011), not to mention create a more resilient community. Salinas is composed of diverse communities, and part of our project has been centered around understanding that diversity and the way sub-groups within the city interact with the environment. The ideas proposed in this study are applicable to the city’s unique sub-groups, especially low-income farm workers. This application creates a more resilient community, and demonstrates improvements in public health. Most of us didn’t have direct experience with urban agriculture, but we had some examples of ways we’ve seen it manifest at Stanford. For example, Arrillaga dining has a small greenhouse on the second floor, and a small community garden outdoors. Jasmin has also participated in gardening through her cooperative living space, which had a house garden that was integrated into the community. A point to note for the co-op garden is that it was created because they had the privilege and campus resources to make it part of their living experience. For a city like Salinas, with such a high poverty rate and many low-income residents, adding high volumes of small urban agriculture spaces would be much more difficult. Agriculture in Salinas has, up to this point, been a limiting factor on the city’s footprint. It isn’t necessarily something that’s been integrated into central parts of the city, as urban agriculture would be. Because of these space constrictions, we discussed the possibility micro-agriculture or greenhouses, that could potentially convert parts of existing green space (underused parks etc.) into community gardens to be used by residents. Sources Kresge, Lisa. “Food Insecurity among Farm Workers in the Salinas Valley, California.” Home, California Institute for Rural Studies, 2 Dec. 2011, www.cirsinc.org/rural-california-report/entry/food-insecurity-among-farm-workers-in-the-salinas-valley-california. Update on Project Activities
This week was also spent canvassing. Each group tried to diversify times in order to get a different response crowd. Michelle & Shikha: We plan on doing our canvassing shift this Saturday afternoon. We will be using two iPads and interviewing in the same area of Menlo Park (businesses along the Santa Cruz and El Camino intersection) as there were many small businesses whose managers and workers we didn’t reach in our last shift. A Saturday may have more foot traffic and constant streams of businesses, but it may not have a “peak” crowded time, so going back and forth between businesses will be easier. We plan to go back to two of our interviewees to get some first-person details about their ability to live and/or work near Menlo Park. We may also consider getting some responses from families who live in the area, as understanding what Menlo Park wants is also crucial. Yesenia & Sarah: We went canvassing along Santa Cruz Ave on Thursday, Nov 1 at about 1:40 pm. We split up because Sarah had the only iPad that was charged. Yesenia collected one last paper survey that was left during the previous canvassing round. Yesenia then decided to charge the iPad in a Starbucks, while Sarah finished her shift at about 2:30 pm. Yesenia continue surveying from 3:15 to 4:15 pm. She was only able to get one survey response as many store workers were either i) occupied with customers ii) talking with each other iii) didn’t feel comfortable filling out the survey while on the job. Sarah was able to collect around 7 surveys total, but realized that there was an influx of people from work/school who started to populate the area around 2pm. Next week, Sarah will be interviewing the people of Bow Wow Meow, whose owner has graciously agreed to have the workers in-shop next Thursday fill out the form, with the potential of a spoken testimony. Katie & Justin: We went canvassing along Santa Cruz Avenue Thursday, November 1st around 8:00 to 9:30 pm. We went as a pair since Katie had a hot spot on her phone and Justin needed to use it to administer the surveys as well. Our goal was to focus on restaurants and businesses that were winding down at this hour. In total we got under 10 surveys. We mostly wanted to experiment with alternative times to avoid major rushes. We surveyed Juban, a Japanese restaurant, Baskin Robins, and Walgreens, but had trouble getting ahold of folks who were busy working in the kitchen. We left surveys at Subway and an ice cream parlor. Katie administered surveys through the iPad and Justin administered surveys through an iPad and paper (when out of range from Katie’s hotspot). What We Observed and Learned In terms of connecting our work to the class readings, urban agriculture is not within the scope of our project. However, the idea of urban resilience brought up the idea of community trust and social capital, which is valuable to Menlo Park. When surveying managers in Menlo Park, many showed pride in their businesses and providing for their clientele, despite their complaints about the housing and transportation issues needed to get to the area. The downtown culture of Menlo Park may add to community familiarity, which may have this converse effect of not wanting to create seemingly drastic but necessary changes to downtown that accommodate more workers. There could be some extrapolations between urban resilience and transportation as well. Looking at the “organizational perspective,” a key factor of a well-operating system is one that takes into account public attitudes. Although it could still use more traction, public transport is integrated in the norm of Bay Area communities more than in other California communities, such as the Central Valley or Los Angeles. It’s also a topic of advocacy for TransForm, Friends of Caltrain, and other non-governmental agencies. Creating more accessible public transport therefore fits within social constructs of Bay Area workers and has the mixed use of governmental maintenance and NGO oversight. Our project directly ties into framing the need for improved public transportation, which operates within a resilient organizational framework. Michelle & Shikha: We have no new findings to report this week yet in terms of surveying, but will add our next shifts to next week’s reflection. Yesenia & Sarah: iPads are finicky! Yesenia ran into trouble with charging her iPad, which meant she had to recharge at the local Starbucks while Sarah canvassed. We also have found that people are less inclined to fill out a survey on an iPad due to the small font, hard accessibility for older people, and proximity of interviewers to them while they fill it out. Next week we will retry the paper copies, so that the people who want privacy when filling it out can do so. Since Yesenia had to charge her iPad, she canvassed from 3:15-4:15, which is not a good time because that is peak time for people getting out of work/school to go into Downtown Menlo Park for coffee/food/other goods. Katie & Justin * 8pm-10pm is actually a really difficult shift to do because most businesses are closed and many restaurants are in the process of closing up, thus are not interested in doing surveys (they probably want to go home). For those we were able to talk, we sensed a fatigued tone (in strict contrast to the enthusiasm expressed by people earlier in the day). Not only does this make people less likely to open up personally, but it also could reflect poorly on our study as people view responding as more of a chore. * We did not receive much verbal feedback. Nobody would be potential candidates for testimonies. * We need to print out more spanish speaking surveys/develop an approach that is inclusive of spanish speaking workers who work in the kitchen * Big box stores like Trader Joe's and Walgreens are easier to canvass, but we need to develop solutions to allow for our survey to reach a wide scope of audience. * Some restaurants told us to come back later after people left. When we came back, they would be closed. At first we thought that there was an elusive window just before official closing, but upon further inspection, this window does not really exist, as businesses really start the process of shutting down before they officially close, and have no desire to take an optional survey. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward We look forward to our final week of data collection. Our community partners have expressed quality interactions and data over a fixed number of surveys, though we still hope to get close to our original goal of 100 surveys. We will meet at the end of next week to review conclusions and move into a focused analysis face, though we’ve had preliminary discussions about our conclusions thus far. When we (Katie and Justin) were canvassing, we realized that restaurants in the downtown area like Chef Kwan’s had many workers but because of the fast paced work environment, asking workers, even for just 5 minutes, to fill out the survey was not realistic. We recognize that we cannot interfere with workers’ job duties. Restaurants like these would be better for dropping off a stack of paper surveys and collecting later (even if this has a lower response rate). Stores like Walgreens and Trader Joe’s have more worker flexibility. Katie and Justin plan to go back to Trader Joe’s at night to survey the night shift (before closing). Katie and Justin went to a Chinese restaurant around 9:20. Despite having a large workforce and no customers in the restaurant, the manager did not want us surveying. Katie pointed out afterwards that this response may arise from different cultural beliefs on what is expected at work. Katie spoke with her and dropping off paper surveys may be a possibility. I know from personal experience what it is like to be working late and having to close up. Workers are not happy to see people come in just before closing because it means that it will take longer to finish. There is really no reason for them to stay to answer an optional survey. People may be more than unenthused about helping, but may be actively resentful towards us because they see us as preventing them from getting home on time after a long day, which can fuel deep personal feelings (which challenges our integrity as researchers). In contrast, when going in the middle of the day between rushes, workers have more disposable time, and in fact may want to help. Looking forward to our goal of 100 surveys, we hope to survey about 50 people this upcoming week. This means that each pair has to survey 17 people at least. Using what we learned from our trouble finding available workers to survey this week, we are optimistic that we can achieve this goal by changing our canvassing times to earlier, yet less busy hours. Assessing Future Housing and Transportation Patterns in the City of Palo Alto | Week 6 Reflection11/3/2017
Current Work
This past weekend, our group visited the Palo Alto Caltrain Station and the Giltelman Farmer's Market to deliver our housing/transportation surveys. We spent two hours at each site, distributing paper surveys, conducting interviews, and receiving feedback. In total, we collected 43 surveys and 10 personal interviews. While we gained valuable insight, the total number of individuals we surveyed was below our goal. As a result, our group is planning a second distribution venture this coming weekend (discussed below). From our observations, people understood the questions and rarely voiced criticisms concerning the survey itself. Our experiences with locals and commuters were interesting to say the least. Generally, the elderly were more willing to participate in our survey, and provide verbal feedback. At the farmer’s market for instance, older generations were more opinionated concerning housing and transportation issues. Caltrain individuals were more likely to participate in the survey because they were stagnant until the train arrived. Unfortunately, we did not prepare properly, and ran out of surveys in the first hour. All people seemed to be aware of the low housing variation and high housing costs in the Palo Alto. However, their survey answers suggested a preference towards larger, cheaper homes in walkable neighborhoods. Our literature review suggested the answers would be contradictory. Though most of the responses and interactions were predictable, we did observe interesting behavior in a few individuals. For instance, a man described his non-profit organization, which happened to be conducting similar research. Though he mentioned how difficult finding survey participants was, he refused to take our survey and left without providing any valuable information. Plans We met with Deland and Elaine last Monday to discuss project progress and next steps. The following section describes the tentative plan for the next few weeks leading into Thanksgiving break. This weekend, our team is distributing paper surveys at the Stanford Shopping Center, and the California Avenue Farmer’s Market. We are hoping to double our current dataset, and expand surveyed demographics. The mall event is scheduled for two hours on Saturday, followed by a Sunday morning excursion to the Farmer’s Market. By the beginning of next week, we will have finished our in-person surveys and have given the revised online survey to Adina and Elaine for email distribution. Between the paper surveys, online surveys, and personal interviews, we are hoping to have surveyed over 100 individuals. Our team will begin developing our final products. As we approach Thanksgiving break, we are processing the data and drafting a final article for Adina and Elaine. At the latest, we would like to submit a completed draft, with personal vignettes, to both our stakeholders before break. Predicted Issues Based on our survey data, we are concerned that we have not collected a representative data set from surveyed individuals. We cannot derive conclusions at this time, but most of our local residents are skewed towards elderly. Hopefully, our work this weekend will expand our age and employment demographics. Our stakeholders mentioned that the age and racial demographics in the Cal Ave. Farmer’s Market are different than our previous two sites. We understand that Palo Alto, on average, is split between the elderly and youth. However, the extreme ends of these demographics are unemployed, and may not be the most valuable information sources for developing Palo Alto’s housing and transportation network. Also, a lengthy 23 question survey requires rather complex data analysis. As a result, we will have to deliberate amongst ourselves and stakeholders to decide what significant trends are of concern. Are we more interested in housing and transportation preferences across age demographics, employment statuses, or housing and transportation types? Most of our data is segmented based on individual completion rates. The significance trends we identify for some questions may not be observed in other questions with few responses, or different demographics. Update on Project Activities
This week we extended the deadline for survey responses to November 10 in an effort to solicit more feedback from business representatives and employees. We touched base with Alex and Julie, who will distribute the links again via Facebook, Twitter, and email lists. At Alex’s suggestion, our surveys will also be forwarded to members of the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce. Including the Chamber of Commerce members does alter our initial goal of surveying only downtown-based businesses but will hopefully offer a more holistic snapshot of the economic situation in Mountain View in addition to increasing the rate of response. We further revised the survey by making it accessible to users without Google accounts; hopefully no further changes will be required on this front. As of November 3, we have received 16 responses from business representatives and 14 from employees, which unfortunately is only four more responses than last week. We will be looking for more responses in the next week before we close the link to begin conducting analysis. What We Observed and Learned Since the survey link remains open, we have not begun analyzing the data. The response rate has been rather underwhelming; hopefully we have not lost valuable time and responses by continually having to check the link accessibility. We will be intrigued to learn how the inclusion of Chamber of Commerce businesses will affect our results, as Alex informed us that one-third of those businesses are registered non-profits, which tend to pay lower wages. We are also exploring the possibility of taking another trip to Mountain View to gather more responses from business representatives, as it is simple to overlook emails or not have time to respond to a survey. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward The team will meet Alex for brunch this Sunday at noon to discuss next steps, hopefully including more visits to Mountain View, and to refresh our project objectives. We hope that expanding to include more businesses in the Mountain View area will enable us to provide a more inclusive and accurate depiction of the current state of economic development. After November 10, we plan to close the survey and begin analyzing that data while including interview feedback to inform our conclusions. In terms of class work, we found Tuesday’s readings especially relevant to the project. It was interesting to note that of the Bay Area’s “low- to low-middle-wage” workers, which comprise over one-third of the Area’s labor force, a majority earn less than $12 an hour (SPUR Economic Prosperity Strategy, page 8). As the Mountain View ordinance shifts the city’s wage from $11 to $15, thereby raising workers above that $12 per hour standard used in this publication, the city could be a trendsetter for other local governments, which places even greater emphasis on the outcome of our analysis. Furthermore, we appreciated the class simulation and found the experience of learning how to enhance economic development from a policymaker’s perspective to be valuable moving forward. Update on Project Activities
We were fortunate enough to have members of SURI present during class this past week, and having them there really helped us better understand some concepts regarding earthquake preparedness. Specifically, their example of how soil liquefaction caused some of Christchurch’s residential and business areas to be shut off for years after the 2011 earthquake encouraged us to further our research into San Francisco’s own liquefaction zones. We are now gathering more knowledge about this topic and we hope to incorporate it into our charrette presentation or into the visualization/info-graphic we are to produce soon after the charrette. We also had the opportunity to meet with the SURI team afterwards to ask them questions about their experience working in community-based development projects similar to the Strong Homes campaign, and to see if they had any data or infographics that we could incorporate into our presentation during the charrette. This week we were also able to connect with our community partner through a webinar that all of our team members were able to participate in. We found the webinar to be very productive because it helped us better understand the structure of NEN and the goals of the Strong Homes Campaign. Additionally, the webinar gave us a much-needed opportunity to connect with our community partner and receive immediate guidance on matters that were unclear to us. As part of our project, we are expected to produce a visualization/info-graphic that makes use of our research and the information that we are able to gather during the charrette. This week, our team continued brainstorming new ideas of how we might be able to do this. One idea is that we can create a digital (printable) pamphlet that contains useful information that can help Bay Area residents after a catastrophic earthquake. To jump start our progress in the development of this part of our project, our team has begun designing templates that may be used for the info-graphic using Adobe Illustrator. What We Observed and Learned One basic lesson is one of scope. Talking with SURI we came across the question of what can be observed at the individual, community, and city level. SURI, focusing on the city level in terms of study and preparedness, recommended that we emphasize personal accounts and dilemmas framed by data at different scopes. This distinction is key in determining where to place our focus and navigate these different scope levels during the charrette distinctions. From our NEN webinar we got to clarify some basic information of where our work fit into the full vision of NEN. This was helpful in understanding how our work ties into the larger community oriented work of the organization and its mission. We are essentially working on developing resources based on a community-determined need, to then aid in the development of the toolkit at the neighborhood level. We are linking expert knowledge with the communities, and it's our responsibility to package it in an intelligible and productive manner. It was confirmed that our role is very much on the backend of the charette. This means preparing for how we are going to effectively condense and communicate the takeaways from the charrette. We thought about different communication styles and useful focus for the toolkit (should it focus on utility topics or on responding to specific scenarios?). We also began to prepare for how we will code and condense the notes in a systematic way. We reaffirmed the need for thoroughness and consistency in going through the notes as a team. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward In our meeting with SURI, we discussed the methods they use to gather probabilities of various events occurring based on a region’s geography and infrastructure. For example, we were wondering if with their current models, they have been able to calculate the most likely duration of time it would take for government response to reach a particular area of the city. While we were hoping that there could be some existing models for San Francisco that we could use, their research is currently in very early stages and no such numbers currently exist. Although such data could have enabled us to tailor toolkits to each region, we are going to stick with the original plan of making a worst-case scenario toolkit that addresses general severe lifeline interruption. Since we are working on a large collaboration with a limited time schedule, including such revisions could take particularly long. In our case, we will focus on fulfilling our clear and established objective of creating a framework for a general, worst-case scenario toolkit. In regards to the toolkit specifications, we had the chance to clarify our understanding of the exact specifics for our deliverable toolkit framework. As stated earlier, we envision it to be more of an informational pamphlet that can inform communities on the procedures and tools they could leverage to survive long durations on their own. Such a design could be easily presentable and engaging. Since we are hoping that the framework will be subject to further community review after it’s creation, having such a format will also make it easy to get feedback from stakeholders. Furthermore, it would serve as an excellent medium to present our findings during our culminating presentation on December 13th. We also had the chance to better understand our role in the scope of the project. During the webinar, Daniel mentioned that Strong Homes campaign stems from a direct community request for solutions to challenges that may arise during disasters. Referencing our earlier concerns regarding this project’s relevance to communities, we are happy to see that there already is a community desire for this product, and that we are working towards something that is already wanted by our stakeholders. |
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