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April 20, 2011
The RDA Amendment Presentation
VERY QUICK UPDATE: The city has created a page on their website where you can download the RDA Plan Amendment presentation [8.7 MB PDF], Jason Simpson's letter of April 6 clarifying the proposal [2 MB PDF], and Jason Simpson's answers to the five most frequently asked questions [238 KB PDF].
The presentation for the proposed RDA Plan Amendment that was shown on Monday night and will be shown again on Thursday night (6 PM) and Monday night (5 PM) at the Carl May Center is available here [PDF on Scribd].
You may want to review it at your own pace. You certainly will be able to read it more easily here than projected on the screen. Let me show you a few of the slides from the "Economic Blight" part of the presentation that just put me up the wall:
This is labeled "Census Based Comparison of Household Population and Poverty Income Existing Project Area - Desert Hot Springs, CA." My suggested title is "Poverty Levels Comparison." The first thing you will notice, of course, are the colors. Those two yellows, which are nearly indistinguishable here, are certainly not distinctive projected on the screen. Had the computer run out of green, red or blue pixels on the day they composed this? While the legend was impossible to read at the public meeting, it is not much better here. This is how it looks blown up to 100%:
At least we know one of the yellows is the RDA area and the other is the entire city. You can bend your mind trying to analyze this graph. The vertical dimension is percentage of the population. The horizontal axis is "Income as ratio of the poverty level." Well, sort of. The four groupings, left to right represent:
- 50% to 99% of the poverty level;
- 100% to 149% of the poverty level;
- 150% to 199% of the poverty level;
- And 200% of the poverty level and up.
"Income" means household income. Now really, a bar graph is totally the wrong thing to be using here. What they've got is data that would make up three pie charts. One pie for the RDA area, one for DHS and one for Riverside County. Each pie would be cut into four slices indicating how the population falls across those four categories above. With only 3 pies and 4 categories, it should be easy to do a quick comparison to see that DHS and the RDA have a higher percentage of poor people than the overall county does.
Next, this one:
"Census based comparison of household occupancy existing project area - Desert Hot Springs, CA." I call it "Overcrowding Comparison." Vertical axis is, again, percentage of the population. Horizontal axis is "Occupants per room," and "room" for these purposes seems to be any room where you might conceivably put a bed: living room, bedroom, den, office (I suppose), but not kitchen, hallway, bathroom or garage. The four groupings are:
- Less than ½ person per room;
- ½ to 1 person per room;
- 1 to 1½ per room;
- And 1½ per room or more
The three colors, left to right, are the current RDA area, the entire city and Riverside County. The message doesn't look strongly significant to me. It says that slightly more people live in crowded homes here than in the county overall.
And the last one I'll share:
The title is "Incidence of Representation - 2008 Permits per 1,000 population City of DHS versus Southern California." I call it "Retail Business Comparison." Now, as soon as this slide came up they said "Ignore the dots." So do ignore those white circles which the key says represent "City Index of So Cal." I've no idea what that is, but we don't need any idea, because we are ignoring it.
Otherwise, the graph shows what we already know. It matches what was already presented by the Economic Development Committee. Very likely, it's the exact same data. We have less than the average of all varieties of retail except food & grocery, where we are very close to average. They did say that this graph excludes gas stations and automobile dealers, because they can distort the results distractingly.
The thing that put my brain into an infinite loop was the title. "Incidence of Representation." What in the world is that? It sounds like maybe the number of times Jerry Lewis visits the city or votes on something favorable to us in Washington. And "permits?" What kind of permits? One had to squint at the legends on the horizontal axis to see that they named types of retail businesses. Once you could read that, you knew the title referred to "business permits." The consultant was a long time talking about this slide before he used the words "business"or "retail," so if you couldn't read the legends at the bottom (and nobody could) you were without a clue.
So there you go. Review the presentation in advance, attend one of the two remaining meetings, and ask your now-informed questions.
Filed under California,Desert Hot Springs | permalink | April 20, 2011 at 06:07 PM
