To block with robots.txt or canonicalize?

[JonClark15]

I'm working with an apt community with a large number of communities across the US. I'm running into dup content issues where each community will have a page such as "amenities" or "community-programs", etc that are nearly identical (if not exactly identical) across all communities.

I'm wondering if there are any thoughts on the best way to tackle this. The two scenarios I came up with so far are:

Is it better for me to select the community page with the most authority and put a canonical on all other community pages pointing to that authoritative page?

or

Should i just remove the directory all-together via robots.txt to help keep the site lean and keep low quality content from impacting the site from a panda perspective?

Is there an alternative I'm missing?

[STPseo]

I think the canonical idea is better than blocking the pages all together. Depending on how the site is laid out you may try and make the pages more specific to location being talked about. Maybe adding header tags with the location information as well as adding that info to the page title and meta-description. If it is not too time consuming, I'd try and make those pages more unique especially since you might be getting searches based on a location. Location specific pages may help in that regard.