This is the project of Ray Hsiao, Brian Zamora, and Sam Karakas for Asian American Studies 191A, taught by Albert Kochaphum.
- Objective
- Who is being empowered
- What technology was used
- How it can be repurposed
- Features and Screenshots
- Room for improvement
- Acknowledgements
Our project’s goal is to create a space where community members can share their experiences with and knowledge pertaining to tenants’ rights, forms of landlord harassment, and ways to resist. By creating a spatial visualization, users will be able to see that they are not alone in their experience, and activists will be able to see where gentrifying activities have been happening over time. We plan to offer the survey in multiple languages so that people can use the language that they are most comfortable with, and hopefully create a space where underrepresented communities can participate in a struggle that affects renters throughout the city. Privacy is a serious concern as users could potentially face retaliation by going public with their stories. We will explain this concern in the survey description and do our part to protect privacy.
We aim to address communities in the broader Los Angeles area, with existing or incoming tenants unions already in place. To this end, we can work in conjunction and collaboratively with communities with concerns about gentrification in their area. In an effort to establish a timely effort with this objective, we intend to use internet services in order to share real-time notifications and updates. The website we envision creating would alert people of available properties, rises in pricing, and available resources as tenants. Due to Los Angeles’ diverse atmosphere, we plan to implement a service platform that caters to multiple languages to increase use and engagement across nationalities and ethnicity. In the city alone, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center reports that 3.3 million of Los Angeles residents speak Spanish while 925,000 speak an Asian or Pacific Islander language at home, or 38 and 11%, respectively. These represent a total 36% of the population in Los Angeles. Being that renters in Los Angeles are often economically deprived, we aim to address the role of capital as a direct concern of attention for both researchers and renters alike. We believe that the updating of gentrification activities on a real-time basis will establish real opportunities for otherwise low-income communities to become conscientious about the resources that surround them.
- assignment 5
- explanation of file structure here?
We are using Github Pages for free website hosting and our code is displayed publicly on Github. The survey is in Google Forms and responses are stored in Google Sheets. We geocoded the zip codes with Google Apps Script.
We plan to share our project with other tenants' rights activists who we could help learn to help maintain the site.
We are using free services so money will not be a concern in future maintenance. Long-term maintenance issues include updating resources to stay relevant and also making sure that what gets added to the site is within the spirit of the project. We will be keeping documentation of how to maintain the site for people to reference. We can make the code and process public so other communities can use it for their own purposes, but keep editing privileges to a smaller group of people to make sure people within the community are the ones who can directly modify the project.
We may try to offer a function for users to be able to make their own survey translations, but this could prove difficult to accomplish due to the necessity of proof-reading and potential sustainability concerns.
- Many thanks to our professor Albert Kochaphum for all the time and hard work he has put into supporting and guiding us
- Thanks to @flynerdpl for the README cheatsheet