Ragging on Volunteers

During the early eighties, the City of Chicago should have invested every spare dollar in Intel stock.  In 1993, one of you supposedly intelligent Hyde Parkers should have registered the pizza.com domain name, so that you could have sold it in 2006 for $2.6 million.  In the 1999 Amateur Draft, the White Sox should have used their 12th round pick on Albert Pujols.  That's some 25 years of Chicago failures, right?

Oh, I know what you're probably thinking.  I bet you're wondering why I kept this great advice to myself instead of acting on it at the appropriate time-- in 1983 or 1993 or 1999.  You probably figure that hindsight's 20-20 and any yoyo can look back now and know these things.  And you might point out that the city has still done very well and most Hyde Parkers are reasonably comfortable and the White Sox won a World Championship, so where do I get off using a word like "failure" to describe something that's successful but somewhat shy of perfect?

Well, C-Pop over Hyde Park Progress avoids such introspection when criticizing the HPKCC Harper Court survey.  He published a Rossi "satire"-- and I use that word loosely-- just before the survey was shown publicly and then a few days later on February 23rd he himself provided a link to the survey.  In neither article-- nor in either's comments section-- did he critique the survey methodology.  Nor has he ever volunteered to help HPKCC put together a survey despite numerous accusations that the Conference and other neighborhood organizations are unrepresentative of the community.  Yet now that 1697 responses have been generated and the results have been tabulated and published, he's finally ready to critique the survey methodologies employed by the volunteers who put it together.  Great timing, C-Pop!

For what it's worth, I agree that the survey would have been better if respondents had been asked to rank relative preferences.  But that imperfection in no way invalidates the results or the work these volunteers put into this.  The survey was never meant to be the last word on Harper Court, but rather to help understand the desires of the community  in combination with other evidence.

For instance, on the simple question of whether Hyde Parkers would prefer more restaurants or more clothing stores, the survey suggests that food is more important.  If my own observations differed sharply from that, then I'd wonder if I was missing something important.  In fact, I don't believe we Hyde Parkers tend to spend much money on clothes.  Food & drink is another matter.   Besides, the potential shoppers for the new development will be a particularly diverse group.  People are more adventurous with food than clothes-- we might try an Ethiopian restaurant, but it's unlikely that a sizable number of us will be buying Ethiopian-style clothes.  Food & drink has a better chance of drawing us together.

Since C-Pop managed to use photos from Girls Gone Wild parties in his post, I thought I'd provide equal time.  Please enjoy this photo of George Rumsey shirtless, taken a couple years before he foolishly volunteered to become president of HPKCC.

Comments

[Slywy]

In fairness, Hyde Park doesn't represent "C-Pop" and friends' personal vision of Utopia. Until it does, anything is fair game at any time. Just bow to their collective will. Of course, by then they'll be long gone to some other city or neighborhood in need of their infinite wisdom and taste.

[Jennifer]

Critique both the methods and the respondents! Yeah, shame on all of us young women who can't afford to live where we belong with the rest of the trixies for botching the survey results! Will we never hear from the real real residents of Hyde Park?

I'm about two blog posts away from concluding that it all comes down to us being a neighborhood full of grumpy pessimists (myself included, of course) and leaving it at that. I do hope somebody proves me wrong soon...

[SR]

"I'm about two blog posts away from concluding that it all comes down to us being a neighborhood full of grumpy pessimists (myself included, of course) and leaving it at that."

I liked how c-pop mentioned in comments that failure to be amused by the post could only be caused by wrongthink. (Who knew feminism was just an artefact of NIMBYism? Though perhaps the point was just to make anyone who was offended feel there was no point in responding. If so, mission accomplished!) The HPP crowd and the NIMBY crowd really are mirror images of each other sometimes. The idea of commissioning an independent neighborhood survey HAS come up on the HPP blog periodically, but was shot down the last time because of concerns that not everyone had been “educated” to give the correct responses to such a poll just yet.

[Slywy]

Can't really say I'm a grumpy pessimist with regard to Hyde Park. Can't really say I belong to one group or the other. Just take it all as it comes.