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A recent community survey showed that while Pleasanton residents continue to highly praise the quality of life and safety in the city, the overall trends in those and other topics have trended downward over the past six years.
At the City Council meeting on July 18, consultant Miranda Everitt presented the results of the city’s 2023 community survey, which her firm conducted from May 24 to June 7 with about 700 residents filling out the survey undertaken primarily over text and phone calls,
“Many of my statewide surveys are 600 to 800, so (700 respondents) is very robust for a city of your size,” said Everitt, senior vice president of the public opinion research and strategy group Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates (FM3).
Some of the positive highlights from the survey presentation were that 91% of residents rated the quality of life in Pleasanton as excellent or good and 89% said the same for the city being a good place to raise children.
“Folks overall are quite pleased to live in the community,” Everitt said. “The name speaks for itself and continues to.”
With that said, there has been a slight negative trend down over the last few years — Everitt explained how that quality of life number was 94% in 2021. In 2017 and the few years before then, that number hovered at or just below 97%, with fewer people choosing the “good” selection rather than the “excellent” selection.
Everitt said that while there is a “slight erosion in the intensity”, the breadth of the number of people who give that top rating is still very high.
As for the city being a place to raise children, that number also slipped a bit, as it was at 94% before the pandemic.
In terms of safety, according to the survey 93% of residents said they feel very safe or safe, which is also a lower number compared to 2017 when 98% of respondents said that. This time around, 47% of those respondents said they felt very safe, which was different to in 2017 when 82% said they felt very safe.
“Again, that figure is not people saying they feel unsafe for the most part; it is much more moving into that somewhat category that that middling category instead,” Everitt said, attempting to reassure the council that the trends aren’t necessarily a bad thing.
“There are some trends that are a little more negative than in prior years, and we’ll see that kind of consistently across several questions. But compared to other neighboring cities, especially throughout the region, you guys are in kind of a cut above,” Everitt added.
She also said, in response to Vice Mayor Jack Balch’s question of why the city might be trending down in certain areas, that there are a lot of outside factors that could affect how people might feel about things like safety, crime and the economy.
But she said that Pleasanton’s numbers are still overall in the 80% and 90% ranges, which is much better than other cities she has surveyed.
“It’s gratifying to see that a lot of the same trends continue,” Councilmember Jeff Nibert said regarding the overall high scores. “Even though maybe the intensity has dropped down a little bit, it is heartening to know that we are in the top tier.”
But apart from several high marks, the survey also highlighted some areas for improvement and concerns from residents.
According to Everitt, some of the most serious issues residents are facing that they want the city government to tackle is crime (with 21% of respondents raising concerns) and housing costs or lack of affordable housing (with 15% of respondents raising concerns).
“I will note that in 2021 … housing costs were the top issue at 15%, which is where it is now,” Everitt said. “Crime was second then at 13%. So there’s been a bit of an uptick in the share of folks who name that as their top concern.”
She also showed how about one in 10 of the respondents said they were concerned about education in public schools. Other concerns she pointed out were regarding traffic on city streets, overall growth, jobs, homelessness, water and drought.
On the lower end of the spectrum of concerns to residents were air quality, government waste, lack of growth and taxes.
One other area that was just as serious for residents was the concern of cost of housing, with lack of affordable housing for working families having gone up from 48% in 2021 to 58% this year.
Another big area for improvement on the city side, according to the survey, is planning for future infrastructure needs in terms of designing future roads, water and sewer systems, bridges and traffic controls.
And while respondents also continued to push for ensuring the city is able to provide funding for police, parks and good streets, one result that surprised Councilmember Julie Testa was the level of support from residents in a $90 million bond for infrastructure needs, particularly one focused on water.
According to the survey, about two-thirds of the respondents supported the idea of such a bond, which according to Testa, was not the case during the last survey when they asked that same question.
“That they’re willing to support a bond for the infrastructure for water treatment and supply, that was a big surprise and really, I think, a very positive outcome,” Testa said.
Even so, Balch hammered down on the negative trends during his closing remarks, saying that he thinks the waning of intensity for choosing the higher, positive marks is concerning to him.
“We should strive, obviously, to try to increase that intensity and I appreciate efforts by all to do that,” he said. “We know we have our challenges in town and this is hopefully a good way to identify them and try to address them for a higher quality of life for all of us.”
One reason residents may feel slightly less safe is the sharing of experiences with criminal activity on neighborhood social media sites like Next Door. I think this heightened awareness is actually a positive in terms of crime prevention and overall community safety.