City officials are taking neighborhood planning to a broader level.

For about the past decade, the city has been divided into 10 sectors, and each one developed its own guiding plan to tackle neighborhood issues and priorities. Now, teams are using the sector plans to create broader plans covering the city's four quadrants: the northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest.

City officials declined to share details of the plans until City Council members have been briefed, which is supposed to happen this week and next. But Bob Genthner, president of the Browncroft Neighborhood Association, says that the southeast quadrant plan includes beautification, greening initiatives, public safety, and education.

One of the plan's goals, for example, Genthner says, is to help the BNA promote School 46. Good schools attract home owners, Genthner says, and School 46 has a good reputation.

"But we're tainted by the impression of city schools," he says. "The individual schools have difficulty overcoming that."

Each quadrant needs to be looked at as a separate market, says Carlos Carballada, the city's commissioner of neighborhood and business development.

"Let's not have 50 strategic issues," he says. "Let's deal with the five or 10 most important that we can see what we can do something about."

Three of the plans are already completed, Carballada says. The fourth, the northeast plan, is taking more time.

"It is the quadrant that has the greatest opportunity for improvement and also the quadrant that has the greatest challenges," Carballada says.

Helen Hogan, executive director of the South East Area Coalition, says the team that developed the South East quadrant plan has been open to input from the community.

The concept of quadrant planning is a work in progress, Hogan says, and it's too soon to say if it will work. One of SEAC's goals, she says, is to make sure that planning continues to be driven by the community.