A majority of Baton Rouge residents say the Capital City is too slow to change, according to the CityStats 2016 survey, though nearly half of residents believe their neighborhoods are improving.
According to the latest annual survey on quality of life issues from the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, 59% of those surveyed say the pace of progress and change in Baton Rouge is too slow, while 32% say the city’s progressing at the right pace. Meanwhile, 4% say the pace of change is too fast, and 5% say they don’t know.
“Residents remain impatient with the pace of progress in Baton Rouge,” reads the CityStats report. “And a majority said their elected officials are unresponsive.”
More precisely, 51% of respondents say they feel as if they have little or no influence over leaders in the city-parish government, 37% say they have moderate influence and 10% say they have high influence.
As for the pace of change, Democrats are more likely to view it as too slow, the report says. Seventy-one percent of Democrats surveyed say as much, compared to 51% of Republicans and 43% of independents, who insist change isn’t happening fast enough.
Even though most of those surveyed expressed impatience with pace of change in the city, 48% of respondents say they believe their neighborhoods are becoming a better place to live. Twenty-six percent say they think their neighborhoods are getting worse, and 26% say their neighborhoods are getting neither better nor worse.
This year’s CityStats survey included 530 adults. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.3%. See the complete 2016 CityStats report.
