With the support of The Seattle Foundation, Sustainable Seattle conducted 92 community interviews in our 10 partner neighborhoods to get at the stories behind the data—peoples perceptions, opinions, and ideas for building stronger and healthier communities.

In August 2005 we held a Neighborhood Dialogue with representatives of our SUNI partners to better understand shared neighborhood priorities. The Healthy Neighborhoods Survey is an effort to build on the findings of this event through one-on-one interviews with additional stakeholders from each of the SUNI neighborhoods. The goals of the community interviews were threefold:

• To better understand community perspectives about neighborhood health and quality of life
• To explore whether findings from the Neighborhood Dialogue resonate with a broader range of citizens
• To identify additional community members to interview

For the most part, the broad set of priorities that came out of the Dialogue was echoed by the community interviews. However, community interview findings illustrate a difference in the relative importance of these priorities, depending on the neighborhood and particular frame of the interviewee.  In particular there were several concerns voiced much more strongly through the community interviews than the Dialogue, such as affordable housing, diversity and open space.  Results from the community interviews show affordable housing to be the most pressing neighborhood concern. Diversity and adequate open space were two additional priorities voiced much more strongly in the 92 citizen interviews than at the Dialogue.  Many of the interviewees, especially in the south part of the city, viewed the availability of affordable housing as critical for sustaining a healthy and diverse mix of residents and businesses. One possible reason for differences between the findings of the Dialogue and the community interviews may be that the community interviews were designed to understand localized priorities, while the Neighborhood Dialogue was used to gather a more generic set of priorities that transcended all 10 neighborhoods.  Thus some of the more localized concerns may have been filtered out during the prioritization process of the Dialogue

Sustainable Seattle is very excited to share the stories and opinions of citizens that emerged from our Healthy Neighborhoods Survey. These data will be used to further our understanding of what matters to citizens in their local communities. We plan to share these findings with each of our neighborhood partners, city staff, elected officials, and the local media.

You can read the Healthy Neighborhoods Survey Final Report by downloading the Adobe Acrobat PDF file.  This 93-page report covers the purpose, methodology, executive summary, neighborhood-specific findings, and cross-neighborhood findings.  

Alternately the chapters can be downloaded individually:

Introduction, Admiral, Ballard, Capitol Hill, Columbia City, Greenwood/Phinney Ridge,
Chinatown-International District, Lake City, North Beacon Hill, Uptown, Wallingford, Cross-Neighborhood Comparison, Appendix

If you are unable to download this report and would like a copy, we are looking into making the report available for a small fee to cover expenses.  If this is an option that you prefer, please let us know by sending an email to info@sustainableseattle.org.