Community Identity & Civic Life — Being More Than "The City of the Dead"
active• colma
Colma's identity as the "City of Souls" — home to more than 1.5 million interred residents across 17 cemeteries — is both a genuine source of community pride and a civic challenge. The town's 1,500 living residents are a tight-knit community that has built real civic culture around events, arts, and neighbor-to-neighbor relationships that belie Colma's macabre reputation. The Town's 2025–2027 Strategic Plan explicitly identifies Community as one of its five priority program areas, and the City Council has recently formed a second subcommittee as part of that work — signals of intentional investment in civic programming. The Town actively supports community engagement including clean-up events, a Culture and Arts subcommittee, and wellness programming — building a living community identity alongside its famous one. As housing production eventually delivers new residents under the RHNA mandate, sustaining the town's small-community culture while absorbing growth will require deliberate civic stewardship.
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Related cause: Quality of Life
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