City website seeks neighborhood stories

Friendship Park in the Nevada-Lidgerwood neighborhood is good for dog meet-ups. There’s a house near Corbin Park with an attic specifically built to watch horses, bikes or runners race around the oval track. Lincoln Park in East Central has views of east Spokane not easily seen from any other part of town.

That’s just a few of the items on a new website created by the city of Spokane to “give voice to the neighborhoods.” The site, ShapingSpokane.org, is part of an update of the city’s primary planning document, but the city is inviting residents to help write profiles of Spokane’s 27 neighborhoods.

“It’s kind of a bragging piece,” said Boris Borisov, a city planner who helped create the project. “Neighborhoods are the city’s backbone. We want to hear why you love your neighborhood. What makes you proud?”

The site has an interactive map where people can mark favorite locations and describe places they use daily, a defining feature of the neighborhood or a hidden gem, among others.

For those with a little more to say, there’s a feature called “My Neighborhood Story,” which lets people give longer answers to specific questions, such as “Why did you decide to live in your neighborhood?” and “How would you describe the people on your block?”

Brian Coddington, the mayor’s spokesman, said the site was designed with the idea that not everyone has the time to visit City Hall and speak at public meetings.

“We know that people are busy,” he said. “There’s a whole large audience that doesn’t have a ton of time. We tried to make it … so people can invest as much or as little time as they want.”