Passing through my old suburban neighborhood last week, I couldn't believe my eyes. There, smack down the side of one of the main streets, was a sidewalk.

A shiny white, new, concrete sidewalk, winding around the existing, mature parkway trees. The neighborhood's first sidewalk spanned about six blocks, from one end of the street to the other.

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Even though I had not lived there in nine years, I wanted to sing hallelujah.

In the early 1990s, a few neighbors and I tried to get our town to install sidewalks down that very street and several others.

Our main concern was safety. Our children had to walk in the street to get to school or to a neighbor's house. So did everyone else. People walked their dogs and strollers and old folks down the middle of the streets, while cars whizzed by.

Sometimes I would tell my children to walk in the neighbors' yards, especially in the more dangerous parts of the neighborhood. But that only worked a few months of the year.

 We had curbside leaf pickup service, which meant that the streets and parkways would be full of slippery leaves all fall. In the winter, the yards were snowy, and the edges of the street were slushy. Night and day, most of the year we walked about six feet from the curb, in the streets.

Meanwhile, most other neighborhoods in our town had sidewalks. Even though the neighborhood is within walking distance of the town center, our neighborhood was built in the mid-1950s, when the prevailing, post-war wisdom seems to have been that you would drive where you needed to go.

That was not just a phenomenon in our town, it was nationwide after World War II. New subdivisions sprang up farther from downtown areas and it became inconvenient to walk to destinations. And as people started driving more, it became difficult to justify the cost of sidewalks.

Some of us tried for years to get sidewalks along our streets but our very own neighbors stood in our way. Some thought, mistakenly, that the city would chop down their front yard trees. Others said that our leafy neighborhood was bucolic, and if sidewalks came in it would no longer be so. They argued, vehemently at times, that sidewalks would change the neighborhood. It was a little war, and we lost.

So what caused the neighborhood to suddenly get one sidewalk?

The teardown/McMansion phase. (Who knew there was something good about teardowns?)

Ten years ago, a new group of citizens took up the sidewalk crusade, using the town's first teardown-McMansion project as their inspiration. A new ordinance was passed requiring an annual assessment of the need for sidewalks along with a build-or-replacement plan, and new construction builders were required to install sidewalks or pay the city to have them installed later.

Previously, the city said sidewalk requests had to come from a consensus of neighbors; now it says that because sidewalks are part of the public parkway, it is not within a homeowner's rights to prevent them from being built.

Now if a sidewalk is planned for a particular street, the homeowners are notified, not asked.

In the past eight years, my old neighborhood has become rife with teardowns, and McMansions have sprouted all over the place. But due to the city ordinance -- voila! -- little pieces of sidewalk have sprung up, too.

On that one street, after several years of having a broken line of sidewalk, the city made it all one contiguous line.

I'm no fan of teardown-McMansions, since, unlike sidewalks, they really do drastically change the character of the neighborhoods in which they arise. They block the sunlight for their neighbors, they're obnoxiously tall, they're wasteful of resources and create class distinctions and an "us vs. them" mentality.

But in this case, on this one street, there was at least one good outcome.

Last week's column, explaining how you can find out if your neighbors are in foreclosure, has been going like gangbusters. In just 48 hours, it had 2,000 hits online, not to mention numerous printouts and e-mailed versions.

The topic was actually inspired by a friend of mine who wondered how she could find out about the house across the street, where the formerly chatty neighbors appeared to be sneaking out without a word. Because my friend's house is for sale, she worried that a foreclosure so close by would impact her sale, and she was worried the bank-owned house would not be maintained.

There is no question that a foreclosure nearby is worrisome, but if there is one near you, you are hardly alone. Foreclosures and short sales are everywhere, not just in modest or rundown neighborhoods.

It might impact your property value, or it might not. It's complicated. Don't let it keep you awake at night. And that moving truck beeping in the driveway next door at 3 a.m.? Probably just a delivery.

It's reporting week again, and once again we have been at the mercy of headline writers. Some pick out the high number, some pick out the low. That's just the way it's going to be while we pull ourselves out of a recession.

Illinois numbers show that sales and prices continued to inch up in May over the month before, but are still falling well below where they were a year ago.

According to the Illinois Association of Realtors, total sales were up 18.7 percent in May, to 5,634 homes, compared to 4,747 sales in April. And May 2009 sales are still down 18.7 percent from last year's sad numbers. In May 2008 the area saw 6,927 sales.

Prices followed the same graph line. The median home sale price in our region was $200,000 in May, up 4.2 percent from April's $192,000, but down 20.3 percent over a year ago, when the median sales price was $251,000.

Industry observers say the first-time buyers are still driving the market, inspired by low interest rates and anxious to cash in on their $8,000 tax credit before it expires at the end of November.

So, pick your statistic. Up or down, there is a little something there for everyone.