ABSTRACT
Neighborhood design has come back to the inner cities through the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Hope VI Project and other sources. Starting in the late 1960s, the idea of building new neighborhoods began to lose favor with planners and reformers. A study of streets in San Francisco neighborhoods by Donald Appleyard demonstrated that the more traffic ran down the street the fewer contacts residents had with the families on the opposite side. Some rowhouses and apartments are needed to achieve the densities necessary to support neighborhood schools and services, while still preserving open space and creating a desirable diversity of places to live. Schools of around this size were often built in suburban and low-density city neighborhoods in the 1920s and 1930s. Michigan has managed to decouple school funding from the property tax and other states have equalization formulas that help overcome deficits and disparities in school funding.
