Towards the end of 2005 the Jack London District Association carried out a survey of district residents, business owners and other interested persons with two goals. Firstly to help it define benefits and fees for a paid JLDA supporter program, and secondly to find out the major issues that people in the district are concerned about.

At the January 2006 Board of Directors meeting based on the survey feedback, a supporter program was voted on and approved. Details of this program will be available soon (early February) on our supporter page along with instructions on how to contribute. Details will also be announced on our announcements mailing list and published by Jack London News.

JLDA is also in the process of defining several advisory committees to take on the major issues that were raised by survey respondents. In the mean time we are pleased to share with you the details of the survey regarding issues in the district.

How the survey was completed

Our survey had total of 57 respondents - 33 used our online form to respond, and 24 completed a printed form. Because the survey was anonymous with only voluntary identification of the respondent there may have been some duplication between online and offline responses. However for the purposes of these results they are all treated as unique.

In section 3 of the survey we asked respondents to lists up to five issues that they would like JLDA to be involved with. No examples of issues were given therefore all answers were complete free form and based on the opinion of the respondent. Some people only listed on issue, some five different issues, and some the same issue five times over. It was decided to count each issue only once and sort the issues raised into representative categories where possible.

Issues summary

Issue	Responses	Percentage
Parking	20	35%
Crime & Safety	17	30%
Growth & Development Planning	17	30%
Community Building & Events	12	21%
Attracting & Promoting Businesses	8	14%
Trash	8	14%
Construction Problems	8	14%
Street Noise Problems	7	12%
Representation for the neighborhood	5	9%
Historic Preservation	4	7%
Road safety	4	7%
Neighborhood Improvement and Beautification	4	7%
Promoting JLD externally	4	7%
General neighborhood coordination	3	5%
Traffic congestion	3	5%
Disaster preparedness	3	5%
Park improvement	2	4%
Transportation	2	4%
Faciliating communication	2	4%
Neighborhood issue reporting	1	2%
Grocery store	1	2%
Vagrancy	1	2%
Environment	1	2%
JLDA Promotion	1	2%
Improvement of Broadway corridor	1	2%

Clearly there are several main issues that a large percentage of residents are concerned about enough to name with no prompting. Had these issues been enumerated we might have seen even more responses for them. Also looking at most of the issues raised by just a few or only one respondent, most of them are easily recategorized into a broaded group. Based on this the following breakdown is offered:

Issue	Responses	Percentage
Parking and Transportation	36	67%
Growth and Development Coordination	26	48%
Crime and Safety	21	39%
Neighborhood Improvement, Beautification and Preservation	20	37%
Community Building and Social Activities	16	22%
District Representation and Promotion	12	22%
Business Development and Promotion	8	15%

Note that in neither table do the percentages add up to 100%. The percentage column gives the percentage of all respondents who raised that issues as something JLDA should be involved in. Because people listed multiple issues the total is not expected to add up to 100%.

Other feedback

The survey also contained a section for respondents to give us free form feedback. Because the survey was effectively anonymous we are not sharing those comments verbatim here. However all the comments have been read and will be used to aid us in future planning of JLDA's direction.

Thank you!

The Board of Directors would like to extend its thanks to all those who took time to fill out the survey. The results were extremely helpful and will give us a good foundation for future growth of the organization and of course, effective representation of the Jack London District.

Labels: projects, survey