Citywide Quality of Life Results

The quality of life experience among residents in a neighborhood can vary from person to person. Thus, quantifying a concept as personal as “quality of life” is a complicated chore. However, in order to assess all aspects of what makes a community a desirable, safe, and socially healthy place to live, it is necessary to reduce the complex idea into a manageable set of measurable information.

In Chesapeake, a community with widespread residential diversity, the concerns and issues surrounding neighborhood livability are closely linked to community character and form. Using the Developing, Sustaining, and Revitalizing categories to categorize these attributes, the analysis delineated 17 Developing NSAs, 80 Sustaining NSAs, and 20 Revitalizing NSAs. These results are presented on Figure 3 and the companion Table 2. Figure 4 provides a guide for the identification of individual NSA results.

Strong, livable residential communities are the backbone of a successful city. Acknowledging the interrelated issues of quality of life is the first step in creating a program to routinely assess progress toward healthy NSAs and focus efforts on addressing the individual needs of each neighborhood. The use of the Developing, Sustaining, and Revitalizing framework aligns NSAs with other communities facing similar challenges and dynamics. In this fashion, public actions to address neighborhood issues may be targeted throughout the city, based upon common concerns rather than local geography.