what is her definition of an informal economy. is that the income of people who don't pay taxes???
How can Loretta sanchez justify being paid when such a large part of the economy in her area goes untaxed???
"DRILLDOWN builds on current, finely sieved, reality-based market information drawn from a spectrum of diverse commercial, proprietary and local government sources (e.g. tax assessor, building permit, commercial credit companies, realtors, utility and police). Rather than relying on any one information set, the DRILLDOWN looks for a set of findings that surface from the combined body of data. These findings are then tested against supplemental data as well as the intuitive knowledge of local market leaders. These findings serve as the foundation for an objective, systematic analysis of the business attributes of the markets.
"The foundation of the Santa Ana Neighborhood Market DRILLDOWN is a real estate inventory derived from three core sets of data: private and public tax assessor data and building permits. Addresses were further validated using first source credit data, utility data and home sales data.
"Supplemental information sources for understanding population trends included school enrollment data, utility data, market surveys and development activity in the market including property sales, building alterations and new construction. Buying power was assessed based on first source credit data reinforced by DRILLDOWN informal economy indicators including bill payment patterns, percentage of un-banked households and immigrant populations."
And then there's the "reality-based" marketing info regarding the "informal economy" and "intuitive" data of "unbanked households" within the large "immigrant" population ... aka, "underserved population":
"According to the American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2004, 76.2% of Santa Ana’s residents speak Spanish at home, the highest proportion recorded anywhere in the country. The ACS also found that 55.4% of residents were born in foreign countries, the second highest proportion in the nation, behind Miami. Many of the city’s neighborhoods, particularly those with large immigrant communities, are very densely populated. According to the National League of Cities, Santa Ana is the eighth most densely populated city in the nation.1 Combined, these powerful demographic traits are helping to drive the growth of small businesses in the city. According to the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a Boston based research organization, between 1995 and 2002 small business job growth in Santa Ana’s inner-city was faster than in the surrounding MSA2, one of only ten inner city areas across the country to have witnessed this growth trend.3 Nowhere are these demographic traits and trends more prominent than in the two areas of the city profiled in this report."
Also years back, Santa Ana hired another firm for image enhancement. Forget who that was, but it appears they were only successful in attracting more of the undeserved ... er, underserved.