>Taking, Or Being Taken By, Valley’s Door-to-Door Survey
A young man came to my far-West Side front yard the other evening seeking opinions about the Valley expansion (always called “renewal”). The survey team has clearly been instructed to keep trying; this was at least the second and possibly the third or more time an attempt to do so had been made at my house. Last week I saw someone with a clipboard walking away after I’d decided not to answer the door, and this man also said he had tried earlier the same day, when no one was home. This time it was a lovely evening that had invited some time out on the patio, with no place to hide.
I was tempted to send him packing but felt that because I live far from Valley, it was important to put my views on the record. So we let him talk before we hit him with both barrels, in a refined sort of way. The information he provided was incomplete and inaccurate in many respects, and I called him on this. Either he truly didn’t know certain facts or he was deliberately misled. I won’t elaborate here lest Valley use any such tips to “improve” the process to its advantage.
When he seemingly innocently asked if we thought the hospital should be kept up to date, I said that everyone did, but that the 15-20% expansion previously requested was plenty–not 100%. I said everybody understood that hospitals needed to be upgraded sometimes. I don’t think he wrote any of that down. In fact, his notes were cursory compared to the amount that I was saying–maybe three sentences.
I asked whether he was a Valley employee. No. Asked who employed him: Data and Field Services, Brooklyn. The catchphrase on its website: Grassroots Mobilizing for the 21st Century. That fits right in with the faux-grassroots website that Valley set up. But however hard they try, Valley’s demands will never feel like a true grassroots effort because it is precisely the opposite, and everybody knows it.
At the end, with seeming nonchalance, he pulled out from under the other papers on his clipboard a list taken from the Village property tax rolls (a surprisingly difficult and prolonged task, since by then his hands were shaking badly) showing the owner’s name listed for my address, and asked for confirmation. I felt trapped and found this disingenuous in the extreme because the list should logically and fairly have been revealed at the very beginning. I was tempted to say “no” but that would have been stupid since these lists came directly from the Village. The unstated implication throughout the conversation is that he is just wandering around–not so.
I had kept him standing on the steps to keep him somewhat unsettled and didn’t turn the light on until I started to feel sorry for him when he kept flipping through his clipboard, looking for the right page. I also wanted him to leave before I slugged him, because he seemed nice, but my patience was wearing thin.
This survey is anything but anonymous, people. When it’s done, Valley will have obtained not only the opinions of many or most residents, as interpreted by professionals writing down whatever they please, but also who said what and where we live.