Actually, one sneaky strategy you might consider is barricading every open building you can to VS. Not just buildings you stay in, every building you come across. Building to VS is much faster than going beyond that (barricading always works until VS, and then it's a percentage change after that) and so you can do a bunch in one play session. If you leave behind a trail of empty VS buildings the zombies will waste their time breaking into empty buildings.
More generally, if a suburb is mostly ruined then any newbies should be fleeing anyway, you can't worry about them in that situation. The unspoken rule with any barricade policy is "keep marked buildings VS unless there is a massive attack currently going on." Keeping resource buildings in survivor hands is a higher priority than making sure newbies can access them.
Also, repairing ruined buildings is one area where coordinating with other people helps a lot. Since ruined buildings can often cost a lot of AP to fix, usually you want to have several people working together as a cleanup crew, one person repairing and the others barricading the repaired buildings.
ADDITION: I just revived a guy whose profile mentioned that he was infected. I shouldn't ever need to do that since I always carry around at least one FAK to cure infections on myself, but that's a clever trick I'll have to remember. Since people will usually scan you and look at your profile before reviving, they'll see that message and hit you with a FAK before reviving you.