Back to Back Issues Page
Your January Useful Community Plus
January 30, 2024

Get inspired about making your community better.

Featured This Month: 2023 Top 10 Pages on Our Website, Starting Points for Walkable Suburbs


It's yet another Top 10 list!

For 2023, there weren't many surprises on our list of most-visited pages of our website. See if you share the same concerns as others. Here's the list, starting from 10th place.

10. Community Beautification

9. How to Start a Petition

8. Code Enforcement

7. Community Planning Process

6. Church Zoning

5. How to Start a Community Development Corporation (CDC)

4. Code Enforcement Officer in Backyard Without Consent

3. Community Development Ideas

2. How Far Can the City Go in Forcing Citizens to Obey Codes?

1. Rezoning Opposition


We are glad to see some discussion of making suburbs more walkable. This teaser of an article might help some of you bring up the topic in your suburb, although it doesn't give you any "how to" details.

For an understanding of the many steps that might be involved in getting more people moving by feet, we recommend this article about the menu of policy decisions needed to make Arlington, Virginia, a suburb where walking as transportation or recreation is very popular.

For a somewhat more wonky approach, dig into this article about a case study of four suburbs, which concludes that making a suburb walkable is a decades-long process and not something to be achieved in a couple of years.

Since the sum total of these and other articles is that it takes a long time, start in the dead of winter to strategize about how you can begin to make it happen. For further inspiration and information, check out these pages from our website:

Suburban retrofit

Traffic calming

Walkability

Parklets, which are temporary conversions of parking spaces to "parks"


This month we answered a question from a website visitor about transportation strategies for the disabled, a topic that should be of concern in every community.


We will return with the next issue of Community Development Plus on a Thursday in February. Feel free to reply to this email if you have a comment. For questions, please use the public-facing page to ask your question. We answer them on a page that becomes viewable on our website.


Back to Back Issues Page