Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Good news, everyone!

The results are in, and everything is swell in Mountain View. A city-sponsored survey (cost: $25,000) shows that 96.5% of residents are either "somewhat satisfied" or "very satisfied."

Some other highlights from the report (available on-line here):
  • People in households earning less than $20,000 a year are, on average, less satisfied than everyone else.
  • Men feel safer walking at night than women do. Men also make up 52.5% of the city's population, plus or minus 4.5%.
  • 26% of residents do not know where Cuesta Park Annex is.
  • 63% of residents, counting the "probably yes" crowd, support a half-cent sales tax to bring BART-to-San-Jose. I wonder if they realize it won't be coming through Mountain View.

One interesting part of the report documents the distribution of household incomes (page 73). Assuming the numbers are statistically significant (please feel free to check my math) and the number of people who decline to report are evenly distributed, it appears that Mountain View's middle class has shrunk since the 2000 census. The number of households earning under $40k appears to be about the same. There are substantially fewer people in the next few income brackets, while the number of people earning above $120k has increased quite a bit.

It would be nice to think that all those middle class people simply got rich, but I have a feeling they just got priced out of the housing market and moved to Tracy.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You bet the middle class has been shrinking in Mountain View, a lot. According to MVWSD, 2003-4 elementary school enrollment was 4418, falling to 4313 this school year. Over the same period, free lunch-qualified students rose from 1375 to 1898.

Kathy Schrenk said...

It's supposed to rain again this weekend.

Kathy Schrenk said...

Nice Futurama reference, btw.