Name Your Neighborhood: A new Eureka city council vision plan

Imagine your neighborhood was named for what it is known for. Say, if you live in the forest your neighborhood might be called Forest Universe. The City of Eureka is working on a new project called Name Your Neighborhood. 

“The name your neighborhood project is part of the city council’s strategic vision plan,” said Penelope Ponce, the Assistant Planner at the City of Eureka. “Their specific goals such as community pride and part of the community pride goal they would like the residents to name their neighborhoods and figure out district boundaries because the city doesn’t have official neighborhood names.”

In 2018, a similar project took place where commercial districts were named, for example, Downtown Eureka. The City of Eureka wants the community’s input to name their neighborhood because they know their area best. 

This project will work in phases. Phase one is data collection and this is the current state of the project. Phase two includes a community brainstorming session. Phase three will be presenting the final map to the city council with hopes for the council to adopt the neighborhood names.

“We ask people to list four streets to kind of give a general description of the area that they’re naming,” Pone said. “Once we collect all that data in our first phase, we’re going to draft up a map with like the most popular names and the most popular district boundaries.”

People have already submitted different name suggestions for their neighborhoods. For example, Sunset District for the neighborhood near E and C  and Hammond Park. Another one is, Lavender Lane because one neighborhood has a bunch of lavender growing near. 

“We’ve gotten the name Kaleidoscope Lane because there’s a bunch of colorful Victorian houses there,” Ponce said. “We also got a pretty funny one called Cookie Land because there’s this famous dog that barks there all day and they decided to name the neighborhood Cookie Land because that’s Cookie’s neighborhood.”

What would you name your neighborhood?