Community Survey

Why:

The objective of the community survey aspect of this project was to gain insight into the general public reception to the implementation of DADUs in the neighborhood that we chose, the Belmont/Hillsboro area in Nashville, TN and to see the effect that population density affected the family’s day-to-day life. The methodology that we used to conduct the survey was to use a variety of easy to answer, quantifiable, non-controversial questions in the aforementioned area. Before the restrictions imposed upon the survey due to COVID-19, we were set collecting data to analyze from at least n= 50 households. However, due to the fact that we could not physically conduct the survey the way we wanted to, we created an online survey and sent it out to dozens of individuals currently living in the Belmont/Hillsboro Area. 

Survey:

The survey structure began with a short explanation of DADUs, their benefits, and how they would affect the community at hand. We then asked the following questions and provided:

  1. How many individuals currently live in your household on a permanent basis?
  2. On a scale of 1-10, please disclose the extent to which your residential community is full (10 being the fullest)? 
  3. On a scale of 1-10, please disclose the traffic due to transportation in your residential community preferably during work hours (10 being jam-packed)? 
  4. On a scale of 1-10, please disclose the extent to which you are open to having individuals permanently reside in a detached dwelling on your property in exchange for rent and/or other services, if and only if the individuals were properly vetted by a governing council (10 being the most open)? 
  5. On a scale of 1-10, please disclose the extent to which you are open to having individuals permanently reside in a detached dwelling on a neighbor’s property in exchange for rent and/or other services, if and only if the individuals were properly vetted by a governing council (10 being the most open)?

Results:

After sending out the survey, we received 15 responses from families living in the area we sought to explore. Due to the low sample size of the survey, we could not make a statistically significant conclusion but did find generalized conclusions from the data that we had collected. There was an average of 4 individuals per household in the self-reported near-capacity residential community.  Responses indicated that there is extremely heavy traffic during work hours and many were apprehensive about having DADUs on their own property. Families seemed not to be significantly perturbed if their neighbors implemented, and housed individuals, in their DADUs.

In the free-response section of the survey, we had two of the families remark that implementing DADUs may be extremely beneficial for them as they had aging parents who needed to be frequently checked in on, due to healthcare issues. Although we cannot concretely come to any conclusions, this leads us to believe that DADUs have the potential to benefit families with higher disposable incomes due to the price of construction as well as those with aging, or ill, family members.

Ideally, we would have had a larger sample size of responses to come to a more statistically significant conclusion but we can still take away some major points and hopefully in the future others will be able to come to more justifiable conclusions.