The Data-Driven Car
Data based on numbers is great. It can compare things before and after changes to answer questions like: Does it take less time to apply for a new employee now than it did before the process was revamped? It can be used to build a bigger picture of the present moment like answering: What % of the city’s money is being spent across departments? Data based on numbers can even help drive you toward the goals you want to achieve. For example, if you want to improve air quality across the city, it would help to be able to measure air quality in different neighborhoods and plant trees where they would make the most impact. Number-based data is a car, pointing in different directions and driving toward progress.
Data based on words is also great because it often challenges us to ask "But where do you want to go?"
Over the past year, the quality of life project has sought to understand what direction our residents want to see the city drive in by asking “What matters most to your quality of life?”. The idea here is that the city is currently in a car in the middle of a parking lot with 360 degrees of directions to go in. The car is made of numbers, and the parking lot is made of the stories we hear from residents every day. By learning more about quality of life from constituent perspectives, we hoped to narrow down from 360degrees to just a few roads to choose to drive down.
Choosing a Direction
When we started this work in March 2020, we approached it by thinking that improving the cleanliness of Syracuse would significantly impact and improve life for residents. We took our typical avenues to try and understand where we should put our starting line - talking to community leaders who were already engaged with the city, asking city employees about their experiences, and listening to cities across the country talk about the work that they had done regarding beautification, quality of life, and cleanliness.
Through these discussions, we quickly realized that:
The people we talked to were just guessing about what would matter to their constituents, and they might be right, but what if there was a gap?
If there’s a gap between a community leader’s perspective of resident needs, we don’t know how big that gap is - we had not recently talked to Syracusan’s themselves about what direction they wanted the city to drive in to improve their lives.
So we asked.
A quick aside: Working for city government is a pretty cushy gig. The retirement pension is prime, even if the pay isn't. And even though the pay isn't prime, it's pretty reliable (until there's a global pandemic). All this to say that not a lot of city employees, (especially the ones at the top, making decisions, and deciding what roads to drive the city down) are living in neighborhoods with high crime or poverty rates. It's only human, really, that the most frequent and glaring life challenges seen by city employees are the ones they see outside their own homes… Not the homes of their neighbors.
Building a road
We spent a lot of time making sure that we were asking the right questions when we set up tables in the four quadrants of the city and even set up a test table to see if the questions we were asking made sense. We asked our City Planner friends in Neighborhood Business Development to suggest neighborhoods that could tell us what was missing from quality of life for them and went to each location twice, at different times of day to make sure that people with different work schedules would have the chance to run across us. We provided drawings for kids to use while we talked to their parents and water and snacks for anyone who walked by and wanted them. (We also set up remote translation services, but those weren't used, so we want to make sure those are easier to access next time we do something like this).
It was often cold and raining, but we would still get people walking by interested in talking to us in the rain. What we heard was not what our numbers said we would hear. Nor was what we heard surprising. We talked to 31 people, recorded six hours of conversation, (when written consent was given), and turned that audio into almost 300 pages of text. We looked at what was said, and we tried to understand: What are the barriers to improving quality of life for these people, and what can the city do about it? AKA What direction do Syracuse residents *need* the city to drive in?
Where the Road Goes
After listening deeply and looking to understand quality of life needs in the parts of Syracuse we went to, we’ve found four specific opportunity areas for the city to directly address:
Violence in and on Communities:
It won't come as a surprise to people who've lived in Syracuse for even a short amount of time that observing, violence, or being around acts of crime, negatively impacts your ability to achieve a quality of a good quality of life. Feeling that it is impossible to believe that improving your quality of life is just a matter of asking for a city service is reasonable If you don't feel safe where you live.
Social Services and Social Capital:
Another unsurprising desire we heard a lot about was access to basic needs. The somewhat surprising and closely related finding was that those basic needs include emotional support, strong family, and close community. Having emotional support, a close-knit family, and interwoven community, improves access to basic needs. To put it succinctly: having contacts in the neighborhood who know where you can go if you need a place to crash is just as important as knowing where to go if you need a place to crash.
Youth Support and Opportunities:
Speaking of community, from the small number of people we talked to, there was a lot of talk about kids in neighborhoods. Even if the person we were talking to wasn't a parent themselves, they were worried about the kids they lived next to. Communities take care of their kids, and the communities we heard felt like their kids weren't being taken care of.
Access and Reliability of City Services
Finally, we did some self-reflection. During our time working on this project, we tried to hunt down the numbers that could tell us where we had been driving in the past, to see what about that path was and wasn’t working for constituents. In our hunt, we discovered a great lack of numbers. What we learned from this was that if we want constituents to know that they can come to us in a time of need, we can't just improve the services themselves - we need to improve customer service for constituents from the moment they experience a barrier to quality of life all the way to receiving the service that moves them past that barrier.
Foot On The Gas
Since calling out these four potential longer-term projects, we’ve started to talk with some of our coworkers in other departments to get a sense of whether they agree with these findings. We heard a resounding “yes!” and can’t wait to partner with people inside and outside of city government to work on fixing these problems. We’ve also presented these findings (in much more detail) to the Mayor recently and hope to make them city-wide priorities very soon.
We haven't found solutions or answers to these big problems, but some of the fog has cleared on our road. Now we can start pushing the gas and have greater confidence that the direction we have the steering wheel in is the direction that the people we talked to want us to go. We’ll make sure that the people driving this car aren’t just city employees, too. The next time you see a group of people sitting at a table on the sidewalk in your neighborhood, come say hi and let us know what matters to you. Let’s drive this car together.