POLL UNCOVERS HUGE MARKET FOR SMART GROWTH
The Question
If you could choose, would you prefer to live in a MIXED-USE neighborhood where you can walk to stores, schools, and services OR in a RESIDENTIAL-ONLY neighborhood, even if it means you have to drive a car to stores, schools, and services?
Executive Summary
A majority of Long Islanders (53%) would prefer to live in purely residential neighborhoods than mixed use areas in which residents could walk to stores, schools and services. Nonetheless, a sizeable 43% expressed a preference to live in mixed use areas. Residents of Nassau (49%) were more likely than Suffolk County residents (38%) to prefer a mixed-use area.
A majority (52%) of individuals between 18 and 35 years of age expressed preference for a mixed use neighborhood. In contrast, almost two-thirds (64%) of individuals aged between 35 and 49 would prefer to live in purely residential areas. This was not simply a function of having children, since parents with children under 18 living at home were not that different in their preference from others. It may, however, reflect the residential preference of individuals with young children.
Interestingly, political proclivities are also reflected in residential preferences. Fifty percent of liberals preferred a mixed-use area whereas 63% of those calling themselves conservative preferred a purely residential location.
Methodology
The Stony Brook University Center for Survey Research conducted this survey by telephone between April 9 and May 20, 2007. A list-assisted method of random-digit-dialing (RDD) was used to obtain phone numbers in the sample. Within selected households, individuals 18 years and over were selected at random for participation. Up to 5 contact attempts at various times of the day and week were made at each household phone number. In order to assure a representative sample, all households and individuals who initially were not willing to participate in the survey were contacted again, and an attempt was made to persuade them to participate.
1011 interviews were conducted with residents of Nassau and Suffolk Counties, including 505 completed interviews with residents of Nassau County and 506 completed interviews with residents of Suffolk County.
The results were weighted on gender, age, educational attainment, and race/ethnicity, based on the 2005 U.S. Census American Community Survey county-level data. Weighting was done using an iterative raking process developed to estimate joint weights for any number of demographic variables for which population percentages are known only individually, not jointly. The margin of error is plus/minus 3 percentage points.
Want more details? Check out the cross-tabulation tables (pdf).