The method is the product.

• Raw and weighted, side by side. You always see what we literally collected and the estimate after correcting for who showed up. Neither is ever shown as if it were the other.
• Sample, channels, and skew named. Every release states its size, where respondents came from, and how it differs from Portland.
• Neutral instrument. Questions are worded to read the same to a supporter and a skeptic; the opinion question is asked last so it can't color the rest.
• You see your own scoring. At the end, we tell you exactly how your answers classified you. Nothing is hidden.

People who opt into a survey are never a mirror of the city — they skew by age, income, and whether they own or rent. We correct for that with raking (iterative proportional fitting): every response is given a weight so that the sample's mix on each dimension below matches Portland's actual population. We rake all dimensions together, because they're correlated, and we trim extreme weights so one thin cell can't dominate. The result is reported as an effective sample size — the “real” N after weighting.

In progress: the benchmark targets currently use placeholder ACS figures. Before any published release they are replaced with exact City-of-Portland marginals — the results pages flag this until the swap is made.

The survey looks short because no one sees the whole thing — a single fork (own / rent) routes you down one of two paths that re-converge on shared closing questions. Here is what every question measures.

Cohorts are assigned by transparent, priority-ordered rules — no black box. When someone fits more than one (a Trapped Owner is often also a Defender by finances), the higher-priority, more actionable label wins, and every match is recorded so overlaps stay visible.

1. Speculator / Investor — Owns the home as an investment or second property rather than living in it.
2. Priced-Out Aspirant — A renter who wants to own but feels it's out of reach.
3. Aspirational Improver — An owner who has built or seriously considered adding a home on their land.
4. Active Buyer — A renter actively trying to buy.
5. Trapped Owner — Wants to move or downsize but feels they can't — a latent ally of more housing.
6. Uncertain Renter — Unsure whether ownership is in their future.
7. Nest-Egg Defender — Relies on the home's rising value for retirement — the core of scarcity politics.
8. Content Renter — Prefers renting by choice.
9. Pure Dweller — Treats the home as shelter, not an investment — the persuadable middle.

Weighting fixes demographics, but it can't conjure voices that never answered. So representativeness is won on the distribution side: we deliberately diversify channels — advocacy lists and Reddit reach the young and online; neighborhood associations, senior centers, faith networks, and culturally-specific community organizations reach the people every survey misses. Each response is tagged with its channel so the mix is auditable, and partner organizations receive their community's results first, free, to use as they see fit.

Because the survey is anonymous and deliberately low-friction, we protect data quality with light, layered checks rather than logins: a hidden trap field only automated bots fill, a minimum time-to-complete, and limits on repeat submissions from one browser or floods from one network — all tuned so they never block legitimate responses from shared computers at a library or community organization. Every response also carries anonymous signals (a hashed browser id, completion time, the channel it came through) so duplicates and anomalies can be removed before results are finalized. No check is perfect on an open survey; the aim is to make corruption costly and detectable, and to clean the data transparently.

• This is an opt-in sample, not a probability sample. Weighting reduces bias; it doesn't eliminate it.
• Weighting corrects demographics, not attitudes — so read opinion splits as ranges, with opposition a floor and support a ceiling.
• The most trustworthy findings are the ones that hold even in a favorable sample, like a stated barrier among people who already want to act. We lead with those.
• Until exact ACS benchmarks are wired in, treat the weighted shares as directional.