I am writing to voice my serious concerns about Wednesday Journal’s Oak Park Rezoning Survey for these reasons:
(1) The survey requests an email address to prevent people from taking the survey more than once, but anyone could create multiple email addresses and take the survey multiple times from different IP addresses. Potentially a bot could be trained to answer the survey multiple times.
(2) The invitation to respond says: “Wednesday Journal is asking any and all Oak Park residents to share their thoughts with our survey,” when in fact the survey is open to anyone, not just residents of Oak Park. Even if the responses are analyzed by self-reported residency, literally anyone, anywhere could answer falsely as to their Oak Park residency status, their age, and their income level, to purposely manipulate the survey results.
(3) The survey’s questions about housing types are incomplete because they don’t encompass all of the housing types that are being proposed in areas that are currently zoned only for single-family homes. The survey only asks about 2-, 3- and 4-unit buildings in single-family residential districts and completely fails to ask about 5- and 6-unit buildings.
(4) The survey doesn’t ask the question that should have been posed to Oak Park voters in an advisory referendum: “Do you support the village of Oak Park’s rezoning of all of Oak Park’s current single-family-only residential zoning districts to allow 2-, 3- and 4-unit buildings, and in some instances 5- or 6-unit buildings, to be built next to existing single-family homes? Yes/No.”
WJ should publicly explain in detail the technical controls it employs to ensure, at a minimum, that the survey responses are from actual OP residents who are answering the survey only once, and also publish an explanation of why the survey questions did not encompass all of the housing types contained within the Village’s zoning ordinance amendment. Wednesday Journal owes Oak Park residents transparency and assurances as to why this opinion survey is reliable, or it shouldn’t be made public at all.
Diana Gordon
Oak Park resident for 23 years
