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Here's the Community News You Requested March 27, 2025 |
Please visit A Good Community: Making and Keeping One.
Many of us are experiencing glorious bursts of spring. Often that ushers in an energetic wave of spring projects in communities. It isn't too late to plan a cleanup or a beautification project. First, let's deal with cleanups. The website offers abundant ideas and tips for getting the gunk out of a stream, trash pick-up in a neighborhood-scale park, tackling large regional parks, and tidying up alleys.
If you are really on the ball and already have your cleanup planned or executed, you can help other neighborhoods by sharing your cleanup stories or questions on the website.
At the bottom of this newsletter, you will find some discussion and photos of filling those empty planters in your business district or at other commercial or nonprofit locations.
Lastly, remember to see the spring newsletter ideas if you need some more content ideas for your email blast or social media.
If you find our website too expansive to navigate through easily, here's an alternative way to find something that would be helpful to your community work.
I maintain that effective community development work involves many overlapping topics. We can only put a page under one heading, so you might be thinking of that page differently. That's why we created the audience-focused list of pages.
The pdf files linked below are alternative ways to find pages. If you are a planning commissioner, we have a list for you. Interested in how religious congregations can interface with community development? See the list. And so on.
Here are the files you can access directly through these links:
Community Development Corporations (CDCs)
International Developing Nations
Arts and Community Development
Working with Lower-Income Populations
If you don't want to keep this newsletter, bookmark our Sitemap page, where these links are found in the big yellow box.
(By the way, of course you can always use the search bar at the top of nearly every page, but like all searches, the effectiveness depends on you and I thinking about a topic in the same way. Might not happen.)
Maybe the best thing in this field we read all month was this article showing how urban cities are growing slower than suburban and rural locations since 2019, and digging into what the data show. To understand your own community, as well as how domestic immigation (moving) and international immigration impact population growth of different types of places, this is a great read.
This month you folks asked plenty of questions. Here are the ones we had time to answer:
Here's a great question: How will we know if we have enough affordable housing?
What if there is nothing for older kids to do?
One visitor to the website asked how to deal with conflict about whether a neighborhood should try to be upscale or not.
Another good question was about how neighborhood stability might be related
to personal health outcomes.
Is there an environmental argument to deter people from putting too much trash in and near the creek?
What can you do if church bells and traffic disrupt Sunday morning?
What if you can't afford a huge increase in condo fees?
Below are four effective and beautiful planter boxes. The bottom one is a little more problematic, but would work in some settings. There's a brief comment under each.
Large metal planters being used as traffic control. Way prettier than a Keep Out sign, don't you think?
Gorgeous tall flowering shrub brightens up a depressed railroad track and rather bleak buildings behind it. The height also is important to how well this planter works.
The ornate black iron planter in Jackson Square in New Orleans matches and enhances both nearby designs and the vibe of the whole place. But if your town is on the plain side, this would be a bad choice.
In small spaces needing a little color against a black or other plain backdrop, this small planter works well, with the color contrast to the red geraniums important.
Lastly, using planters that have seen their better days might play well with the image of an antique store or district, but without careful thought, this could read as simply a sign of a careless business district.
The next regular issue of Good Community Plus will arrive on a Thursday in April. Reply to this email if you have a comment. For questions, remember to use the public-facing page to ask your question. I will answer them on a page that becomes viewable on our website, but your email address won't show. You can be anonymous if you wish.
If this email was forwarded to you, you can subscribe by using the green box on the bottom of almost every page of our website.
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