Neigborhood

Cities are divided into districts. I'm fairly sure there's voting for representatives and such based on district. I live in Cats' Pants. Well, Kattenbroek, which literally means Cats' Pants, but was probably chosen because it's someone's last name. Or possible named after a tavern in Belgium.

We're fairly far from the center of Amersfoort, and this neighborhood was only built about 20 years ago. It was an entirely pre-planned neighborhood and is set up nicely with an open-air shopping mall (winkelcentrum) on one edge. The roads are nice and wide and divided with trees in the middle, and there's never traffic problems. Well, sometimes teenagers ride their bikes side-by-side in the road where the bike lane ends, but we turn onto our street after a couple blocks so that isn't too unbearable.

Every neighborhood has multiple elementary schools, and there's usually high schools/ROCs in neighboring neighborhoods at the very farthest. The closest train station from our 'hood isn't in walking distance, but is in easy bike-riding distance. There are also bus stops in walking distance.

The page explaining the design for Kattenbroek is here. Translated to English thanks to google translate. The hype on it in pretty well-founded. The architecture is always interesting, usually in a good way. Some of the color combinations are a bit odd or dated, but never boring or dull :-P There's a lot of small parks scattered around and it's a pretty kid-dense 'hood.

It's also a nicely mixed-income neighborhood. When looking at houses, funda.nl would list the percentage of low and high income residents. Every neighborhood in the cities we looked at has a moderate low income population, but rarely a very high low-income population (usually in areas with a lot of high-rise apartments). This is significant because it helps avoid the slum problem that happens in the US. So Kattenbroek is about 1/4 high income, 1/4 low income, and 1/2 in between, which looks good both on paper and on the street.

Most people take care of their little front gardens, which is usually just a few square feet. Of course, if they get too unruly, the front door is blocked, which probably helps. All in all it's a very nice atmosphere, though sometimes it feels a little too orderly and quaint :-P