Week9 Interview from contact1 (Conducted on March 11th)
Interviewee
1.Lorrie Pearson(L)
Title: Planning Manager/Zoning Administrator
2.John Schneider(J)
Title: Community Development Director
Summary
Llory and John were very open about the challenges and issues they face.Although some of their challenges came from their limited resources of conducting an in-depth survey
in a timely manner, a bigger challenge they stressed was how they can ask the right questions, to the right person, in the right way,
to measure the real needs of residents, especially those who wouldn't respond to conventional census or survey.
This is a big challenge because it is often the case that those voices are underrepresented from various factors,
such as lack of relationship between residents and decision-makers. Consequently, this led to Llory's wish to know more about people's physical/environmental barriers that prevents them from involving in the neighborhood.
Knowing barriers would help them involve everyone around the table to raise awareness about what they are trying to get at.
As a result, Llory and John requested us to search the following topics for further research to help their work
- Needs assessment
- Quality of life plan
- Neighborhood capacity building
Transcripts
Q.Could you briefly describe the role of your department and yourself?A.Planning manager and zoning administrator.I help to administer a comprehensive plan for long term document. (L)
Day to day stuff. Implementing the comprehensive plan and facilitate future issue.
In a comprehensive plan, a variety of thing focus on sustainability, not only environmental sustainability but also
as a city as a whole needs to be financially sustainable. Social, which is difficult to quantify.
The other work in our scope is safe, affordable lives, public safety in general.
Good infrastructure, it is a broad range.
Q.How long have you been working for the city of Urbana?
A.I've here for 4 years. Before I come here I was in the city of Evanston, a very similar community. College town with high education. (L)
9 years in Champaign, and 13 years in Urbana. Before that, I was in the construction industry. (J)
Q.Do you see any particular changes in the community in the past few years?
A. Lately, there are conflicts between students and residents.
E.g. How to house the student body in a way that fits into the neighborhood. (L)
Traditionally, compared to Champaign, Urbana had older housings. As the economy develops,
people moved out those big old housings and move into a smaller apartment.
What's happening now from what I see is those big housing doesn't match the needs of students(J)
Q. Are there any conflicts caused by a growing diversity of residents?
A. I grew up in this community and there is always a international aspect,
and this brought different perspectives of quality of life. For example, we now have an African grocery store and market
since a few years ago. This means we have diverse business opportunities. (J)
This is not a conflict caused by diversity, but seasonality can also be a tricky issue.
Many students stay in the campus only for 9 months. (L)
I wonder how much technology affects too.
If you have 14 hours to drive home while having technology such as facetime or SKYPE to
connect family, they may stay on the campus during Summer. (J)
Q.To measure needs/expectations from residents, what kind of data are you using in your daily duty?
A. You're making assumptions that we're using data. To be honest, if we were truly figuring out the needs of
the neighborhood, what we likely do is have a better handle on census data, because we don't have a good handle
on demographics. They are infrequent and unprecise, especially many residents move in/out frequently.
To know the needs, we need to know who the community is. That is a big challenge when it comes to data.
I wish we had better data that people usually don't like to provide.
Plus we live in a transient community, so data becomes old unless we conduct a survey every year.
One community do a survey, but in my role, it doesn't occur frequently and comes in forms of the comprehensive plan.(L)
The biggest challenge is keeping accurate information.
Because a lot of our work is in action with a neighborhood. (J)
Q. How would measure impact of your project, if you say there's limited data source to rely on?
A. That's part of the struggle that we're facing, which is what we should be measuring.
So many potential options and it get so astronomical to do it. So sure there are certain things
we can start with, such as seeing employment late or income, even subjective survey.
That's we are discussing right now, what should be measured. (L)
In the grant management, There is a threshold, such as more than a certain percentage of income, needs services of the neighborhood.
Everything you do has to do one of those performance measures. (J)
Q.It sounds to me there's a lot of rooms for politics.
A. That's why I don't wanna depend on one source.
There's no 100&% clear answer for that. If we could get 50% accuracy, that's good. (L)
In my experience. Government comes in and do the measurement, people would react "you didn't ask us"
So I think the goal of the project involves residents and identify from there(resident's) perspective,
what their quality of life. (J)
Q. Is there any case outsource that type of measurement to the third party?
A. There is a planning consultant that do that type of work, such as tracking the quality of life.
But it's difficult to measure the capacity of a neighborhood if you don't know the needs of neighbors.
You don't wanna just go random housing and ask "what is your needs?". That may not work for the long-term.
So we are broke with resources, but the biggest issue is
Q. If there's magic institution or data that collects voice of residents, what kind of information would you expect?
A. I would like to understand what people's barriers are to involve more people in the neighborhood.
So whether they have no time or so. Are there any barriers which we city can help partners agency.
diminish to resolve our work. Not only physical barriers, (L)
If it's about time or they don't like neighbors... But (what we like to know is) what's keeping you from involved. (J)
Q. How do you select participants when you try to make decisions?
A. Certainly, if they establish organization, they are the one we want to reach out.
If there is no organization, we try to find if there's any institution represents their group,
such as churches or synagogues. Are there any major businesses to understand their needs.
But often, we are struggling. Even when we distributed tons of flyers, it is often the case that no one shows up.
Even if you want to have their opinion and say "Can you go and find 5 people.",
but otherwise, there is a big challenge.(L)
Typically in those cases that we have difficulty collecting voices,
they hate us. If we have 3 participants, that's good.(38:18)*Check(J)
Based on my experience, you may expect big crowd for project costs big money.
Q. Topics/Terms
A.
Needs assessment,
Quality of life plan
Neighborhood capacity building
(Data collection challenge)
QOL can involve numbers of thing.