Understanding the extent to which “community engagement” is absolutely DOMINATED by older, mostly white homeowners is absolutely key to understanding why your city looks the way it does. Graphic via Boston Planning Department - ThreadSky

maxdubler.com • 198 days ago

Understanding the extent to which “community engagement” is absolutely DOMINATED by older, mostly white homeowners is absolutely key to understanding why your city looks the way it does.

Graphic via Boston Planning Department

Comments

janetdonavan.bsky.social•198 days ago

Ugh. Getting ready to teach a community-engaged civic engagement class at a predominately white university and have been losing sleep for months about how we do this in a way that does not further multiply the inequalities of engagement.

mayaenaise.bsky.social•198 days ago

📌

babewiththepower.bsky.social•197 days ago

55% POC? Wow. I was there for a few days, granted, in 2018 and definitely didn't see that. I'd say I hardly saw any.

solenodon.bsky.social•198 days ago

Served on a city climate committee. My city hired a consultant to manage community engagement on our climate plan. They engaged 60 people, out of 65,000.

areaman65.bsky.social•198 days ago

I suspect graphics like this explain why Massachusetts affordable housing laws are weighted so heavily in favor of the developers. No one is showing up in support of building, so the law does.

legalcat.bsky.social•197 days ago

The people who need the buildings the most are working multiple jobs to afford the poor living conditions they’re already in… we know the housing’s needed. This is just victim blaming. “If only you’d skipped your work shift to make your voice heard… oh then you’d be evicted? That sucks, anyways.”

areaman65.bsky.social•197 days ago

Thanks for walking into this conversation without any clue as to what it’s about.

legalcat.bsky.social•197 days ago

? I read the whole thread before replying. Your comment doesn’t engage with what I said at all, so I’m going to just wish you a happy weekend. Enjoy the nice weather.

areaman65.bsky.social•197 days ago

Am glad you feel I’m obligated to engage with a point no one was making and accuse me of victim blaming because I made an observation based on my extensive experience of reporting on zoning and planning issues.

legalcat.bsky.social•197 days ago

🏆 you win the exchange, babe. move on.

sainthomo.bsky.social•198 days ago

We need a word for wasp empty nesters with too much spare time

sainthomo.bsky.social•198 days ago

Backyard/Backstreet Boomers?

alttag.bsky.social•198 days ago

One of the major difficulties with getting involved (other than constantly feeling like an outsider) is these sorts of roles seem best suited to people financially stable enough to have free time.

Kudos to those that make time for it.

dreamerofstars.bsky.social•198 days ago

This is why we can’t have nice things.

bexone.bsky.social•198 days ago

As long as you acknowledge that the city frequently puts a thumb on the scale via the timing, location, and lack of functional zoom (or equivalent) access to the events that get credited as “participation”

bigkafka.bsky.social•197 days ago

In the same way you don't expect 18 year old to be involved here much, you should set the "Boston overall" stats to some meaningful age-mimimum and bostonian-since cutoff (5years?)

maxdubler.com•197 days ago

No 🙂

bigkafka.bsky.social•197 days ago

Bayes based

egall.bsky.social•198 days ago

📌

mattsiegel.bsky.social•198 days ago

adding alt text would make this information accessible

maxdubler.com•198 days ago

How would you write alt text for this graphic?

mattsiegel.bsky.social•198 days ago

i added some as a series of posts. they were the *actual* alt text attached to the graphic in Boston Planning Department's post on twitter

maxdubler.com•198 days ago

Thank you so much for this valuable contribution to the discourse.

catlinite.bsky.social•198 days ago

serious question, do you not have access to this button that makes image text machine readable?

skybrina.org•198 days ago

That's not a Bluesky feature. It looks like the icon that shows up on iOS and won't show up on desktop, possibly not on Android either

mattsiegel.bsky.social•198 days ago

that's not a serious question

mattsiegel.bsky.social•198 days ago

(muted)

catlinite.bsky.social•198 days ago

thanks for letting everyone know bro 👍

hearing-girl.bsky.social•198 days ago

In addition to iOS-only issue, OCR-ing this graphic will just give you a string of numbers and words read linearly, L to R, top to bottom. So, e.g., the bottom two graphs would sound like "70% 30% 16% 84% long-term vs newer long-term vs newer resident resident resident resident 20+ years 20+ years."

wonkish.bsky.social•198 days ago

It’s only an iOS thing.

catlinite.bsky.social•198 days ago

thanks for clarifying, I only see it in this app so I really thought it was a bsky feature

wonkish.bsky.social•198 days ago

It’s actually built-in throughout iOS/macOS, but you won’t always see the icon. If you open an image with text in Safari or the Photos app, wait a second, then try and select the text to copy/paste it and it should let you do it.

mattsiegel.bsky.social•198 days ago

Image description

Existing participants vs City of Boston Overall

Existing participants
WHITE (80%) VS NON-WHITE (20%)

Existing participants
HOMEOWNER (75%) VS RENTER (25%)

Existing participants
OVER 55 YEARS OLD (56%) VS UNDER 55 YEARS OLD (44%)

mattsiegel.bsky.social•198 days ago

Existing participants
LONG-TERM resident (70%) VS NEWER resident (30%)

City of Boston overall
WHITE (45%) VS NON-WHITE (55%)

City of Boston overall
HOMEOWNER (32%) VS RENTER (68%)

City of Boston overall
OVER 55 YEARS OLD (25%) VS UNDER 55 YEARS OLD (75%)

mattsiegel.bsky.social•198 days ago

City of Boston overall
LONG-TERM resident (16%) VS NEWER resident (84%)

mattsiegel.bsky.social•198 days ago

[link to original post]
https://x.com/BostonPlans/status/1826721729827291404

datafran.bsky.social•198 days ago

And they are engaged in order to protect the systems that benefit them, which they see as threatened by forces that are actually just the passage of time.

teeoh.bsky.social•198 days ago

@vanvidum.bsky.social

nonfinality.com•198 days ago

Do you have a link to the source? I’d like to share it with people here who serve in the zoning committee I chair and the commission we report to.

dariaphoebe.com•198 days ago

I’d like to see gay vs straight, trans vs cis also

bigkafka.bsky.social•197 days ago

I'd like to see left-handed vs right -handed, but this seems hardly relevant.

alherix.bsky.social•198 days ago

I seriously doubt this is Boston specific. Much to do with who has time and feels most invested.

solenodon.bsky.social•198 days ago

Of course it's not Boston specific and yes, old people on comfortable pensions or similar have more time. But it's not only that.

For example, meetings are held during work hours, meetings are poorly advertised, online meetings are held using MS Teams, which is often unusable for individuals.

5ch4u3rf31d.bsky.social•198 days ago

It's also planetwide best practice since the days of Arthur Dent tbh

alherix.bsky.social•198 days ago

I recognise all that here in England when it comes to local parish councils. Though the meetings are open to public we have really rarely any attendance save for occasion when an individual or group are affected by a planning application

5ch4u3rf31d.bsky.social•198 days ago

A Cambridge man wrote the textbook, no?

citygreenerstrategies.com•198 days ago

I appreciated that the BPDA made this public and basically said “When we take public comments moving forward we acknowledge we are not really hearing from the public.”

jessicapancakes.bsky.social•198 days ago

only 16 percent of boston has lived there more than 20 years?! wiiiiiiiiiiiiiild

haus53.bsky.social•198 days ago

Boston is still very dominated by all its colleges. That and the massive white flight that happened after busing in the late 70s made for a very transient population. Now gentrification and the boomers downsizing is making more old timers move out and up. Oh, and the winters.

jessicapancakes.bsky.social•197 days ago

oh shit yeah the schools! as a former providence resident I should have known better

dimcheff.wtf•198 days ago

wait you're telling me that these people aren't representative of the community??? https://bsky.app/profile/brandon.dimcheff.com/post/3kpdp6l3qg32h

bigkafka.bsky.social•197 days ago

They sure don't represent the digirati

meganwaples.bsky.social•198 days ago

📌

bettybarcode.bsky.social•198 days ago

Worst blind spot among my fellow Boomers is the inability to imagine life without their cars at their sides at all times.
#WindshieldBias

christinelsloc.bsky.social•198 days ago

I feel like the folks I get into it the most with on the design groups are my parents’ age.

bettybarcode.bsky.social•198 days ago

I am bound & determined not to become that kind of Boomer.

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