County officials question housing survey data results

“I don’t know…”

Preliminary results from the county’s March housing needs assessment survey are in and they’re raising more questions than they’re answering for the county’s municipalities.
Crested Butte town planner John Hess pointed to the data in the survey that suggested only 5 percent of the Crested Butte population worked in the ski industry.
“I’m just surprised to see the survey show such a low percentage of people in Crested Butte connected to the ski industry,” said Hess. “The perception is that more than 5 percent of the people in town work in the ski industry. But maybe they don’t, I don’t know.”
But Gunnison city planning director Steve Westbay expressed the same concern over the survey data that showed only 2 percent of Gunnison’s population were students, especially since the survey was conducted in March during a Western State College semester.
Westbay said he was pretty sure that the data was off and that the percentage of students in Gunnison in the winter months was closer to 30 percent. He suggested that BBC Research and Consulting, the firm conducting the survey for the Gunnison County Housing Authority, provide a link on the college website to the next survey so students can be better represented in the results.
Those concerns started a conversation about the survey strategy among the county commissioners, town planners, county manager Matthew Birnie and Housing Authority director KT Gazunis, who were hearing a presentation Tuesday, June 9 on the preliminary survey results from Heidi Aggeler, one of the survey’s lead researchers.
The preliminary results of the survey analysis show data on area household characteristics like whether or not the respondents were married or have children, the ages of respondents, employment and respondents’ housing costs.
Aggeler said she was hoping to dig deeper into the county’s housing needs during the next survey period, which will be in mid-July. But the firm hasn’t even had an opportunity to analyze all of the data that was collected in the first survey.
Countywide, 924 surveys were completed; more than half of those surveys were done via phone. Of the thousands of mail-in surveys that were distributed around the county, only a fraction were returned, which was another cause for concern for Hess.
Hess told Aggeler that he had a much larger response to a land use survey he had distributed to town residents in a similar fashion several years ago. But he conceded that town residents had no other way than mail of responding to the survey, while the housing needs survey was available in two other formats.
“Is it possible that people didn’t feel the need to return the mail-in survey after they had already participated in a phone or online survey?” asked Gazunis.
Aggeler said not getting the paper surveys returned was not a concern because so many people participated in the phone survey, which was community specific and much more valuable in a housing needs-type survey.
“Being able to target neighborhoods or communities with a phone survey gives us the best information, better than either a mail-in or online survey,” Aggeler said.
Another survey will be conducted in the county during the second or third week of July and Aggeler is hoping to find more of the working population in the county on the next survey.
She asked everyone at the meeting for input about potential places to find the working population of the county when a team of researchers returns in the summer.
Suggestions ranged from the bars and coffee shops of Crested Butte and Gunnison to the RTA bus and softball games.
Aggeler and the researchers from BBC are now waiting to get data from the county assessor’s office to fill the gaps they have in their analysis of home ownership. They are also hoping to find a large property owner who would be able to provide rental data for the county and get existing data on housing in the county to compare with the results of the current housing needs assessment.
Aggeler asked that all suggestions about how to better reach a more representative sample of the county’s population be forwarded to her through Gazunis. Those suggestions will be reviewed before the next round of surveys starts in July.