NEAR THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE

Just as all politics are local, to paraphrase the late House Speaker Thomas Tip O'Neill, so too are research surveys. That's why the ground-breaking study by UCLA, the New School University and the University of Illinois at Chicago, on day workers is so interesting.

It tells us as much about ourselves as it does about those workers.

Earlier, I had been the member of a team that held focus group sessions in a part of Houston that had failed to keep up with urban development. On numerous Saturdays, our team met with neighborhood residents from the near north side to learn what they wanted their community to become. In the urban planning vernacular this is called "visualizing."

The group I "facilitated" (jargon for listening and writing down what they said) referred to problems along Main Street. They complained about vagrants, drug users, panhandlers, the homeless and "immigrants." Most of the latter were migrants from Mexico and Central America who solicited day jobs from contractors.

Women felt menaced when they drove by. One reported being whistled at and remembered a mooching sound that sounded like salacious kissing.

The workers, coming from the surrounding neighborhoods, were also consumers at nearby shops, especially on payday. Many of them supported families in the home country. Often they had children back there. Mostly, they were law-abiding. Always, they wanted safety, security, fair play and normalcy.

We learned all this through the "hot chocolate strategy." By offering some guys at the site a cup of hot chocolate on a cold day from a thermos and a paper cup, they candidly answered all of our questions.

Subsequently, we also learned that the city of Austin, Texas, was a light year ahead of us. They had formed a center beside I-35 (easy on and off and close to transportation) but they had provoked uproar of protests, and even pickets.

Eventually, residents were won over after many of them inspected the facility and met day workers, or saw them wearing bright orange safety vests while conducting neighborhood improvements. An invitation to a barbecue at the site didn't hurt, either.

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