Update on Project Activities:
Over the past two weeks our group has been working on:
What We Observed and Learned / Critical Analysis: As mentioned last week, there have been significant delays in distributing the survey. While the City of Milpitas and the Office of Economic Development are facilitating this grant, they have employed an independent financial agent, Enterprise Foundation to unbiasedly administer the checks. With these multiple parties involved, we have been able to witness first-hand the complexities of communication and coordination across multiple government and non-government organizations. We realize that this may cause extra stress for the business owners and therefore we have adapted our survey to be more sensitive to this issue. Now having distributed these surveys, we are very excited to gain insight into the extent this grant will help these small businesses. When reviewing initial documentation that these businesses sent in to the city, many noted that they were looking for grants that exceeded $50,000. Our survey addresses this critical issue. After discussing the Chinatown Shop Talk and hearing from Mei Lum in class, we realized some of the pertinent issues brought up there coincided with other comments we have heard regarding the City of Milpitas. Specifically, the point was brought up that sales tax wants to be maximized and large businesses (e.g. Apple Stores) drive this revenue. While this obviously could promote economic vitality in the city as a whole, there are larger concerns for smaller businesses, which we are surveying. The pandemic affects these small businesses to a greater extent — if some go out of business, they could provide opportunity for gentrification to take place. In Geographies of Displacement: Latina/os, Oral History, and The Politics of Gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District, Nancy Raquel Mirabal touches on this issue. She says, “In addition to the commonly accepted notion that spaces are defined and driven by capital and economics, these oral histories illustrated how those same spaces are also racialized, gendered, and rendered heteronormative.” While economics on the surface dictate the market of a city, culture and history plays a great role as well, especially for small business owners like the grantee recipients in Milpitas. In our interviews, we hope to gain a better understanding of how small business owners in Milpitas view the risk of gentrification along with the impact COVID has had on their businesses. Moving Forward: Looking forward, we are excited to collaborate with Gabi to form interview questions for a select number of survey respondents (5-6), which we will start doing this Friday. Over the next week as we begin receiving survey responses back, we will create our interview outline. This will enable us to quickly turn around and reach out to the 5-6 survey respondents to not only schedule a time to talk but also interview them in the following week. The survey responses will guide some of our questions as we will be able to gain knowledge on the hardest parts of navigating the pandemic and how Milpitas is — or could have — best serviced their constituents. We also have connected with David Medeiros from the Stanford Geospatial Center to set up a meeting time to discuss the necessary datasets that we will need to use for spatial analysis of grant applicants. As of now, we have identified (with Alex) that we will need datasets centered around sales tax revenue per capita, community spending capabilities, and retail leakage. The spatial analysis will be done through ArcGIS, which will then be visualized and presented through ArcGIS StoryMaps for clarity. Comments are closed.
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