In November 2007, the city council approved a plan called The Peoria Urban Living Initiative. The goal of the initiative is to attract homeowners back to the Heart of Peoria. According to Chris Setti, the city’s Six Sigma black belt in charge of this project, “it has been a collaboration of the City, Caterpillar, OSF, Methodist, Bradley and the County. One method we are using to formulate our plan is to collect some feedback through a brief survey.”
The survey is online here. Please click on the link and take a minute to fill it out.
“The goal of the survey is to collect information on what people look for in a neighborhood, which types of incentives might be most attractive, and how much interest there is in certain areas of the City,” Setti tells me.
I’m not exactly clear as to why the Uplands and Arbor District neighborhoods were not included in the map of the “west bluff” on this survey. My guess is that they feel these are stable neighborhoods that need no help. I’d buy that for the Uplands, but the Arbor District is a different story since Bradley’s razing of two blocks of houses there to make way for a five-story parking deck. Dozens of homes there have turned from owner-occupied to rentals; that neighborhood will need as much incentivizing as any other neighborhood to get homeowners investing there again.
I haven’t done the survey yet but I think this is what came from the walk to Work idea – maybe they are looking at neighborhoods they consider close enough to downtown – or the hospitals in the case of the east Bluff – to be within walking distance.