The results of the 2024 Hastings Community Survey have recently been released with residents grading the city on metrics like safety, transportation, affordability and confidence in governance. The study was undertaken by the National Research Center (NRC) in collaboration with Polco, an independent community engagement polling platform.

Methodology
For the survey, 3,800 Hastings households were randomly selected to complete the online survey. Mailings to notify the chosen residents began on March 4, 2024 and continued to those whom had not yet completed the survey until the five-week window to complete the survey had closed. Of those randomly selected households, about 5% or nearly 200 households were vacant, leaving 3,614 household to receive and take the survey.
Thirteen percent of randomly selected households, or 479 households, completed the survey. The margin of error based on this response rate is +/-4%, with a different of 7% between 2020’s results being a statistically significant change.
The study also points out several potential sources of error within the survey. Non-response error, or when participants’ views aren’t expressed in survey data because they did not complete the survey, is key among them. To that point, the survey was online, and therefore structurally excluded any resident without access to either the internet or a computer or smartphone.
Other sources of potential error listed in the results are coverage error, not including all Hastings residents in the survey, recall bias, respondents not perfectly remembering the previous year, and social desirability bias, respondents answering the survey in a way that they think will cast their responses in a more favorable light.

Results
The questions of the survey are all pointed towards metrics of “livability” within the Hastings community.
To that broad point, 83% of respondents rated the overall quality of life in Hastings as excellent or good, a benchmark that has stayed relatively consistent since 2016. Eighty-four percent of respondents would recommend Hastings as a place to live, and 72% of respondents called the overall image or reputation of Hastings excellent or good, a number that is up 11% from 2020.
Highest scoring areas were safety, access to recreational opportunities including paths and walking trails, mobility which refers to ease of walking, bicycling, driving and public parking, and experiences with local businesses including shopping opportunities, the vibrancy of Hastings’ downtown and overall quality and variety of businesses.
Lowest scoring areas were overall confidence in governance and value of services for taxes paid, affordability, and evaluations of K-12 education.
When reviewing both the highest and lowest scoring areas from the survey, it is worth noting that Hastings is not an isolated community. In many ways these trends reflect larger societal changes on both a state and federal level.
For example, national trends of confidence in governance have notably dropped in the past few years and affordability as it relates to inflation is an issue across the United States.

Results with the greatest change
The survey is quick to point out that minor changes in numbers year-over-year isn’t the focus of the data gathered from such studies. More importantly, the long-term trends of a community can be gleaned and therefore used to enact policy: “Deviations from stable trends over time represent opportunities for understanding how local policies, programs, or public information may have affected residents' opinions,” according to the NCR Report of 2024 results.
The areas with the biggest increase from the 2020 results are access to affordable high-speed internet, up 16%, shopping opportunities, up 16%, opportunity to attend special events and festivals, up 15%, vibrancy downtown, up 14%, and attracting people of diverse backgrounds, up 12%.
The areas with the biggest decreases from the 2020 results are reflective of the lowest scoring areas mentioned previously. They are K-12 education, down 17%, cost of living in Hastings, down 13%, value of services for taxes paid in Hastings, down 12%, and animal control, down 11%.
Again, it is worth noting that trends are not isolated and these changes specifically come off of data that was taken in 2020 during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Jumps in shopping opportunities, attendance of festivals and downtown vibrancy should be viewed with that context.

Quality and importance
One section of the survey allows respondents to rate metrics of the Hastings community by both their quality and importance. These two factors allow view to not only what is most important to respondents, but to how good the factors they think are the most important actually are.
“Every jurisdiction must balance limited resources while meeting resident needs and striving to optimize community livability. To this end, it is helpful to know what aspects of the community are most important to residents and which they perceive as being of higher or lower quality. It is especially helpful to know when a facet of livability is considered of high importance but rated as lower quality, as this should be a top priority to address,” according to the NCR Report of 2024 results.
The highest rated factor for importance of the Hastings community, rated essential or very important by 90% of respondents was the economy. Despite that importance, only 63% rated the economy as excellent or good.
Other major gaps between factors that were rated highly important but had lower quality were utilities, rated important by 89% of respondents with only 68% say they were good or excellent, and mobility, rated important by 67% of respondents with only 49% saying they were good or excellent.

Takeaway
Because the community survey is designed with a broad view in mind, pulling specifics from the data can be difficult.
“There are a lot of things that the survey doesn’t tell us,” said City Administrator Dan Wietecha.
For example, for broad questions such as rating the school system, respondents could be making judgments on a number of different factors including bussing, sports, nutrition, teacher quality and curriculum. Therefore when, as they did in this year’s survey, fewer respondents say the quality of the schools is good, it is unclear to what they might be referring.
Another takeaway from the survey came in the form of how respondents get their news. Sixty percent of respondents cited the Hastings city website as a major source of obtaining information about the city of Hastings.
“We are viewed as a credible source,” said Wietecha.
Other major channels of city news cited by respondents were official channels including the City of Hastings weekly e-newsletter and Facebook page, with the two largest non-city sources of city news came from Rivertown News City newsletter and the official newspaper of the city of Hastings, this esteemed broadsheet, the Hastings Journal.
The full results of the 2024 survey can be viewed online at https://www.hastingsmn.gov/residents/surveys