Update on Project Activities
This week was our first full week in data-collection mode. We have all started making calls and are beginning to better understand the challenges that we’ll be facing. We had a predictably low yield rate, with 4 interviews for the 20 calls conducted. We came into contact with some preliminary challenges, like phone numbers that are no longer in service and clients that felt uncomfortable speaking to us. The data that we collected helped get our creative juices flowing with regards to our end product. We consulted with David in the GIS lab about possible options for visualization on our project and he advised us on a few options. The first is to visualize the data in terms of cities; we would aggregate the data by place and show movement by showing change in population of one city and growth in another. The second option is to visualize the data as individual data points. The visualization on this option would be to make a distributive flow map [e.g. http://www.gislounge.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/network-flow-map.png] which is similar to what our original vision for the project would be. We also welcomed another member to our team this week; the CLS-EPA intern, Ashley. Ashley will be taking on some of our calls moving forward, and thankfully, will lighten Toni’s Spanish call load! We need to make sure to clarify with Jason & Ashley how involved she wants to be in our project. Deland suggested that we invite her to our final presentations, which we all think is a great idea. What We Observed/Learned Another task for this week was to begin engaging more with the existing community involved with mapping eviction on a broader scale. In thinking about the end products that we wish to create, we thought the natural first step would be to consult other projects such as the Anti-Eviction Mapping Projects (http://antievictionmap.squarespace.com/) and previous projects completed through this course. Our group was in awe at the depth of information and evidence of effort put in to projects such as the ones above. There is seemingly no way to make sure that our deliverables make an impact if our audiences don’t take the time to look at them and the more aesthetically pleasing the graphic, the more time we spent engrossed in it. This thus validates our need to make careful decisions in constructing our maps. In the beginning stages of data collection, we are already starting to prioritize which data is going to be the most important and impactful to showcase in our interactive maps. The trend that we are finding to be most pertinent so far is with rent comparisons. The clients that we have surveyed have indicated that after their eviction, they were forced into living situations with the same rent or higher. The unsustainability of high rent prices is problematic because the client could potentially face another eviction. We have also found that the majority of people are moving to places without rent control, where they could be subjected to substantial increases in rent without warning. Critical Analysis One surprising trend that we are finding is that people are not necessarily moving to different cities or far away from their previous residence. This could just be unique to the sample of people that we have contacted thus far, however, if it is a clear trend throughout the rest of the data, the implications and intent of our project could change drastically. If the movement of people as a result of evictions is not of particular interest, this project’s central question may not be “where are these people moving after their eviction?” but rather “are these people experiencing multiple evictions as a result of staying the in the same areas?” Our choice in visualization will ultimately come down to what the data looks like. If the data shows that people are moving into the Central Valley and out of the bay, it would be feasible to do it by city over time. However, if there is mostly just movement between the main cities, then it might conflate the data by showing no change. If that’s the case, the flow map would be a good option. The experiences from this week are teaching us to try to leave our biases out of the data. At the beginning of this project, we were so sure that we would see certain trends or get back certain types of information, but as we get further along, we realize that our expectations were a little off the mark. This, however, does not deem the received data as less valuable, but forces us to keep asking questions about why we are seeing certain trends and reevaluate the purpose and ideas of this project. Thanks to Pat and Royal, our class participated in an informative walking tour of the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building-- known as "Y2E2"-- where we normally hold class. We appreciated the ability to learn more about the thoughtful design and construction decisions that led to the building recently being awarded the highest rating for existing buildings: a LEED Platinum Certification for operations and maintenance. To view the building performance metrics in real-time, please visit http://sustainable.stanford.edu/buildings/04-070. Impressive!
Project Update
This week has been exciting for our team for many reasons. First, having the scope of work completed gives us a better timeline of our projects. Second, we are now sending out meeting agenda before each weekly check-ins as well as following up with minutes. We feel a greater sense of direction and ready to implement our projects. There are three main deliverables and the progress is as follow: 1) Survey to gauge how much people know or don’t know about household hazardous waste. We have written the first draft of the survey. In writing it, we realize that wording needs to be intentional. One word can give off one connotation while another can drastically change the way the question is perceived. In addition, we brainstorm the delivery of the survey itself. While interviews seemed to provide more in-depth answers, we finally decided on short written surveys because we want to reach a greater number of residents. In addition, we will translate the survey into Chinese, Spanish, and Vietnamese to target the San Jose demographics. What happens next with the survey? February 11th: Spend the afternoon surveying people at the San Jose Flea Market, San Jose Technology Innovation Museum, San Jose Public Library, and Spartan community meeting. We want feedback on the survey to see if we can improve for other outreach events. In addition, we want to start analyzing results as we go about generating more effective outreach materials. February 12th: Survey participants at the Immigration Reform Workshop at Orlinder Elementary School. February 28th: Survey fans at the Earthquake soccer game and then residents at the Tet Festival Celebration. Try out our multi-lingual materials with people at the latter event since many attending will be non-English speaking. 2) Generate more reader-friendly outreach material. After browsing through the current outreach materials, from videos to posters, we realize that many are effective and some can be quite intimidating to people who can’t read English(children and non-English speaking residents). The language can be dense. For this reason, we are looking to turn some of the visual videos into pamphlets with short phrases explaining the graphic. We will then translate them into Chinese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. One of the partnerships we are excited to expand is the San Jose HHW Facility-San Jose Technology Innovation Museum partnership. We will look to see if the outreach materials we will generate are appropriate for the Tech Museum workshops that we hope the Museum will host for young children. We will aid in creating the lesson plan. 3) GIS Map to consolidate all retail drop-off sites in one location. Right now, there are separate lists/websites for various types of hazardous waste drop-off sites. They are electronic waste, automotive, thermostats, paint, batteries and cellphones, medical sharps, motor oil and filters, medicine, and florescent light bulbs. While some of the websites are elaborate and well-designed, they lack the integration that we hope our GIS map will bring. We will condense all these nine separate resources into one map with filters for easy search. Each location will be noted with a pin and when a website visitor clicks on the pin, they will be given the following information: whether or not appointment is needed, website, phone number, hours, what type of household hazardous waste. We would like to embed this to the household hazardous waste facility website, if possible. We are in the midst of building our Excel database so we can coordinate with David from Branner Library for further actions. We understand that all these projects sound ambitious given the time constraint yet we are going to try to accomplish them. As our team gets to know each other better, we are better at gauging each other’s schedule and supporting each other. We learn that success will require a lot of discipline, organization, and initiative. With that said, we are adapting habits that are conducive to success. Having meeting times with concrete tasks as well as planning weeks in advance have been very helpful. This week our work on the Friends of Caltrain project was focused on two different goals: Make progress on our different case studies and design our field survey. We had a conference call with Adina and Charisse, our community partners. During this meeting, we discussed our literature review, analyzed a first draft of our survey, and discussed quickly the scope of work. We had an interesting discussion about some survey-related issues.
Our case studies now take into account many different projects: Haifa (Israel), London, Italy, Hong Kong, Seoul, Chicago, Washington D.C, and New York. We are looking for different things in those studies: what ticketing system is employed? What type of fares (zone or distance)? How integrated are the fares? What organization is dealing with the different agencies? Where does funding come from? How large is the system’s ridership? We discussed how to adapt what we learned about each case so as to make it relatable to our project, how these different systems deal with revenue, how they came into being, and more. Did they employ a pilot project to begin with, for instance? — a question highly relevant to the Bay Area, since some sort of trial will almost certainly be necessary here, in order to prove to the different agencies that integrated fares can increase ridership and bolster a variety of outcomes. Ultimately, we hope to compile leading recommendations for the Bay Area. Looking forward, our next step is to generate a matrix which synthesizes and summarizes the salient features of each case in a comparable way, and then to begin to conceptualize a pilot integrated fare project for the South Bay based on those findings. As for the survey, we discussed at length exactly who we are targeting. We have set a goal of 200 people surveyed; Charisse will provide a variety of contacts. We will talk to different kinds of people: students, unions,… We then discussed our first survey draft. Adina and Charisse provided us with excellent practical advice. We discussed the necessity of including a small paragraph at the beginning of our survey to explain to participants what the goals of the survey are. On the one hand, we were concerned that any introduction or context could bias the answers of participants towards what we seemed to be looking for, but on the other, Charisse explained that many of our interviewees may be marginalized populations unwilling to volunteer personal information without ample reason and motivation. We also discussed the importance of leading with the most crucial and basic questions and leaving the most awkward, personal, sensitive questions until the end, by when we have hopefully gained an interviewee’s trust. Lastly, we discussed opportunities to make the survey as concise and brief as possible. We then set to work on a second draft, which we are still struggling with, though it seems at this point many of our issues will have to be resolved by actual field testing. We wrestled with how our questions could possibly pinpoint the demographic we sought — those who would benefit from an integrated fare, including those not currently commuting by transit. We’re still unsure exactly how it’ll play out, but having put a lot of though into the planning stage, we feel confident we’ll be able to act on whatever results our work generates. Next week, we will have a conference call with Adina and Charisse on Monday and the goal is to finish the survey by the end of Monday. We will then begin to actually survey people. Simultaneously, we will begin to create the matrix for our different cases studies and gather resources for a local pilot project. Update on Project Activities
We arranged phone calls with Timothy Low, Oakland's building inspector, and Danielle Hutchings, ABAG's resilience coordinator. We started by letting them know our vision of the project and our intention to come up with vulnerability or risk-engineering factors that might be interesting to consider and to bring into our mapping efforts. Although they viewed it as an interesting idea – and said they thought our project would certainly be worthwhile and useful for them to have – they are more concerned with a more immediate question of which buildings should be exempt from the retrofit program and whether current exempt buildings comply with such criteria. Tim mentioned a database that includes addresses and key characteristics of about 300 exempt buildings, as well as pdf’s with more specific building information. On this call we had a green light to visit Oakland, get some of the documentation we might need, and possibly have a driving tour to identify features of exempt buildings. A highlight from our conversation with Tim and Danielle is that their interest in surveying exempt buildings might modify the orientation of our project in a direction in which policy recommendation based on holistic vulnerability metrics becomes less of a priority. The analysis of exempt buildings is, however, quite complicated since not much data is available. Tim and Danielle’s suggestion was for us to do some analysis on an average building, instead of one by one, and evaluate the pertinence of exemption measures. After class on Monday, Ryan spoke with Professor Chan about how best to approach the community meetings we will attending in the coming week. Professor Chan advised that we closely mediate “air-time,” or the amount of time each community members has to speak, as well as minimize community group size to an ideal 4 or 5 individuals. In addition, Professor Chan recommended that we encourage generative ideas instead of critical comments, and take careful field notes immediately following the meeting detailing our observations about community demographics, attitudes, and common comments. What We Observed and Learned After our multiple meetings with the Oakland Retrofit team, we believe we have a more comprehensive understanding of the Oakland Team’s approach to outreach and retrofit analysis, as well as a better understanding of how we might effectively contribute. In one such meeting, Sue Piper, the community coordinator, detailed how outreach for the project was primarily conducted with physical material, such as flyers and informational mailers, rather than virtually, with social media. She suggested to us that we try to improve their virtual media approach by rebranding and revamping their Yahoo groups page as well as potentially creating a Facebook page for the Oakland Retrofit Project. During our community meetings next Monday and Wednesday, we will be determining the best way to contact both the community represented at the community meetings and the communities not represented. In a later conversation with Tim and Danielle, we learned that the engineering and structural team on the Oakland project was in the process of re-evaluating soft-story buildings which were previously exempt. Although we previously knew of this effort, they gave us key background on how these buildings were initially exempted; through engineering evaluations to the ambiguous standards available at the time. With Tim and Danielle’s input, we collectively agreed that we would focus on using available models of typical soft-story houses to prioritize the vulnerability of the exempt locations, and that this would be a critical aspect of our GIS analysis. Critical Analysis/Next Steps Our most tangible next step is attending two community meetings in the next week. On Monday, Ryan and Gideon will be going up to assist and facilitate discussion at the first of these meetings, while on Wednesday Camilo and Luis – our resident Spanish speakers – will be doing the same at the Spanish-language meeting. The purpose of these meetings is to determine what aspects of the program are most concerning for the general public, and what aspects seem easiest to accomplish. Also, we are eagerly looking forward to putting faces and stories to the numbers that we have thus far been analyzing, and shifting our perspective to a more human-centered one. On Wednesday Camilo and Luis (and potentially Ryan and Gideon as well) will also be meeting in person with Tim Low and Danielle Mieler. The purpose of that meeting is to pick up the large amount of data the city has thus far collected regarding the 300 or so soft story buildings that were exempted for retrofitting. Danielle wished for us to comb through those exemptions and see which ones were “soft” exemptions (i.e. exempt because of number of units, not in high-risk seismic area, etc.) or “hard” exemptions (properties that were for some reason or another exempted by an engineer). In conjunction with this outreach work, we also plan on beginning our mapping project. First we will try and compile a list of all relevant engineering and demographic data relating to soft-story vulnerability. This will include USGS earthquake hazard data, Oakland’s open source data about soft-story location and Census information; all information we currently have at our disposal. Additionally, through our meeting with Tim we plan to get more in depth information about individual building’s seismic vulnerability as well as a spreadsheet from Danielle containing general information about the 1300 or so soft-story buildings they surveyed in 2008-2009. From here we will set up a meeting with David Medeiros to begin workshopping our mapping project. In this meeting we hope to get a spread of soft-story locations on our initial map and talk about how to input additional information based on a formula for vulnerability we plan on deriving. This vulnerability metric will describe vulnerability in terms of physical and social risk, but will need to be feasibly calculated using data we already have or plan on getting in the next few weeks. A meeting with some professors of Earthquake Engineering here at Stanford may help us determine the best way to create this formula. Our final idea for this week is to begin brainstorming how best to deal with buildings that were given exemptions from soft-story classification during the initial survey. First, we plan on organizing these projects by reason for exemption. Through this we will be able to eliminate buildings that don’t fit within the project scope (i.e. buildings with 1-5 units). The biggest issue the city currently has with regards to exempt buildings is a suspicion that privately conducted analyses may not have been comprehensive enough to determine if the building is truly soft-story or not. Because of this, our next step will be to determine what standard these buildings will need to be measured by. There are a variety of federal, state and local standards for soft-story buildings, so we plan on coordinating with Tim and Danielle to determine which one applies best for the current situation in Oakland. Our next steps for this aspect of the project are a little uncertain; a professional analysis will likely be needed, which is not really feasible for our group to accomplish given our abilities and limited time frame. And so, after our conversations this week, we feel as if our group’s focus has shifted slightly. We felt that Tim and Danielle had a definite idea for where our group could be very helpful, and we want to help them realize those ideas. We believe that after this coming week we will have completely nailed down what our project will entail. The meetings with the community and with Tim and Danielle will solidify both what they would most like us to help them with and what we are most interested in. This week will probably be the most formative one we have had thus far, and we are looking forward to it. |
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