A Simple Test of a Great Neighborhood: You Can Walk in the Street

When pedestrians can take the street—even briefly—you know a neighborhood works.

The other day we looked at sidewalk construction in my neighborhood.

Sidewalk construction! Sounds so boring. It’s the type of thing that never enters the minds of most people when they’re walking around.

But this isn’t the most boring Substack ever! Bordering on nerdy maybe, but hardly boring.

Because we get into the seemingly mundane that matters when you consider where you live or where you might like to live.

My background gives me a slightly different lens on where we live and why. It’s a trajectory that started when I officially fell in love with cities in 1999, followed by six years studying urban planning and design, and nearly three decades of writing about them.

So, today let’s tie two seemingly mundane and disparate things together: quality of life (a phrase people either ignore or throw around too loosely) and walking in the middle of the street.