SANTA MONICA—According to a report released on Monday, April 27, Santa Monica residents are more satisfied than people living in France and Spain.
This encouraging news comes from Santa Monica’s “Wellbeing Project,” an undertaking that aims to combine innovative data analysis with city management to improve the quality of life for city residents.
The product of more than a year of work, the Wellbeing Project was made possible by a $1 million award from the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ first inaugural Mayor’s Challenge—a competition that promotes bold solutions to serious problems.
The City of Santa Monica used the proceeds to partner with the RAND Corporation, the New Economics Foundation, and experts from around the world to gather and assess data from three primary sources: administrative data from the city itself (including crime rates and transportation statistics), a thorough resident survey, and social media.
“Nothing like this has been done before,” said RAND senior policy researcher Anita Chandra. “Other wellbeing efforts have mostly focused on the subjective experience alone and have not merged in city data with survey and social media information to capture a more holistic view of the wellbeing environment.”
This holistic view is necessary to get a complete picture of resident satisfaction. Despite the overall high levels of happiness, 20 percent of Santa Monica’s young people said that they felt lonely all or most of the time, and 41 percent of residents felt that they didn’t have an impact on local politics.
With this new, complex understanding of how residents feel, the Wellbeing Project will strive to “get the community and the city government together to take action on what needed to be improved.”
