OHNA's 2011 Neighborhood Survey Results

We polled and you answered... see the results here.

Dear Friends and Neighbors,

Working on the neighborhood board we get to hear from our fellow residents regularly... via email, phone calls and at the association's general meetings.   However, we felt that it was high time to take a more formal approach to gauging your interest (and concerns) on a number of topics.   So, with that in mind, we put pen to paper and worked up a number of questions we thought would be relevant and distributed the survey with our February newsletter.  147 of you answered (both online and via paper) which is about a 15% response rate.  Now, 15% may sound low to you, but it is in fact a pretty strong response rate.  Elections are often won or loss with less involvement, so we're not feeling bad about our turnout.   We plan to use the results of the survey to help us set board policy and assist in planning our agenda moving forward. 

Here's what we learned:

• 113 respondents were owner/occupants, 32 were renters and 2 are unknown
• We asked you to gauge your "concern" on five topics, with 1 being a low concern and 10 being the highest concern.  From highest average concern to lowest, the survey says:
  • Security / Crime - 8 - The 5th division, which covers our neighborhood, is actually the safest in the city, but we have a lot of small property crime as well as the occasional larger issue along the commercial corridors.
  • Litter - 7 - We do have an inordinate amount of litter in our neighborhood as anyone who's lived here for more than a month can attest to.
  • Traffic / Vehicle Speed - 6.9
  • Parking - 5.9
  • Bar Noise - 5.7 - Most complaints come from those living within a block of the corridor while those living further away are perhaps more insulated.
• Should the number of new bars (not restaurant drink licenses) now be capped - 82 said no, 60 said yes and 5 had no opinion.
• What is the ideal cut-off time for serving alcohol in the neighborhood - 18 said midnight, 67 said 2am, 51 said 4am and 10 had no opinion.  The OHNA's policy since October has been to fight for 2am limits on ABC licenses in the neighborhood and it looks like we were not out on a limb on this issue.  We'll continue to fight for 2am closing times on all future liquor license requests in and around the neighborhood and we appreciate the continued support of Councilman Owen on this topic as well.
• Are you in favor of traffic calming features (speed humps, bumps, rumble strips, etc.) - 75 said yes, 71 said no and 1 had no opinion.   Those in favor have just a slight lead on those who oppose traffic calming features, but traffic and vehicle speed are a large concern in the neighborhood.   Reconciling these results and how to respond to them them will be one of our challenges.
• Would you be interested in having parking permits for the neighborhood - 87 said no, 58 said yes and 3 had no opinion.   It's important to note too that this question was not asked strictly as a "parking issue" query, as some have imagined, but also as a potential tool to lighten the late-night negative impacts from the corridors.  i.e. If bar patrons can't park in the neighborhood it's unlikely that they're walking through the neighborhood to and from the bars.  We'll make this nuance more clear in future surveys.
  • RELATED: If the neighborhood pursued parking permits, would $30 per year be too expensive? - 75 said no, 70 said yes and 3 had no opinion.

This is the quick and dirty results, but we're making available the raw results of the survey, anonymized of course, for your own perusal and research.  In addition to these tabulated results there are also 71 comments, some quite lengthy, that were provided.  Be sure to check them out below.  Perhaps you will glean some insight that we missed or have suggestions for our future surveys:

• OHNA's 2011 Neighborhood Survey (PDF)
• 2011 survey results (XLS)
• 2011 survey comments (XLS)