Community Development
Creates Great Neighborhoods

Community development in your neighborhood, town, or city is exciting detective work. At least the four of us who write for this site think so! We're all seasoned urban planning professionals who love the subtle art of discovering how to create better communities one step at a time.

We still come home from our day jobs and work hard to make the communities where we live more attractive, functional, and prosperous.

Our whole goal here is to share honesty, a definite point of view, and a sense of humor as we talk you through thinking about neighborhood issues.

If you're impatient to find something, you can search the site right away:

We hope our community improvement tips and concepts will be practical for people who suddenly find themselves appointed or elected to a planning commission, board of adjustment, town council, neighborhood association board, or water district council, as examples.

We get right to the point in lampooning the silliest things that are recommended to everyone from mayors to small town chambers of commerce in the name of community economic development.

We're not interested in repeating theories about city planning or urban development, but we do try to explain the jargon that professionals use so you can apply your common sense to the advice you receive.

We're conversational in sharing our experience and research.

Our Favorite Community Improvement Topics

So please explore the site. Some of you will need to start with our very broad definition of community development, which perhaps you associate more narrowly with just housing policy.

If you want comparatively simple community development projects, you could begin with some community beautification. Perhaps you want to form community organizations, or make them more effective. We have ideas on that!

These days almost everyone is concerned about some form of economic development. We try our best to persuade you to concentrate on real increase in the community's net income inflow. Lingering unemployment increases the need to work on crime prevention too.

Sooner or later you'll benefit from sound, but not slick city planning, which many people associate with land use zoning. We try to simplify that complex topic, while explaining where code enforcement fits in.

You might want to know about us, as they say in Internet-land, or you might want to even contact us. If you browse through the pages, you'll see we might use affiliate sponsorship to help you buy important books.

To contribute or argue back (we haven't had much of that yet--we would welcome it), you can add to the community development ideas or ask a community development question.

And to see what's new at any given time, go on over to the so-called blog, which is more like a running tally of what we've all said.

Last and importantly, we've included a group of pages about environmental sustainability because many neighborhood associations and city governments are talking about how to apply such ideas locally. Chief among worthwhile sustainability strategies may be containing suburban sprawl and encouraging redevelopment.

Let's get going. If you're a thorough person, you can review the sitemap.