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NCST’s work increases access to homeownership, promotes resilient neighborhoods, and advances racial equity by advocating for policy change.
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Working with national & local partners for America’s Middle Neighborhoods, longstanding stable communities for middle and working class families that today are often teetering on the edge between growth or decline.
The Middle Neighborhoods Initiative brings attention to neighborhoods that have been homes to middle and working class families, and now are on edge between growth and decline.
Modest investments in middle neighborhoods can sustain these communities as safe, affordable places that offer a high quality of life and access to opportunity.
NCST coordinates national Middle Neighborhoods activities in partnership with NeighborWorks America, including conducting research on neighborhood dynamics and developing policy proposals for supporting and investing in middle neighborhoods.
Sign up for Middle Neighborhoods’ next webinar, or sign up to receive their monthly newsletter. Both highlight best practices from the practitioners, researchers, and policymakers who are influencing middle neighborhoods throughout America.
The middle neighborhoods team offers free monthly webinars on key topics to help strengthen and protect the middle neighborhoods in our communities.
Below are the webinar registrations for the upcoming months and links to previous webinars.
Supporting DIY Home Improvement for Best Results
The Remodeling Futures Program at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies recently reported that DIY home improvement spending jumped in 2021. In this webinar we’ll be joined by practitioners who are delivering support to DIYers that encourages, trains and supports their projects. Updating housing stock in middle neighborhoods is a common strategy and DIY can be part of it – learn about best practices, funding sources and more.
Tuesday October 10, 12:00-1:30 Eastern REGISTER HERE
Previous Middle Neighborhoods webinars are broken into 5 different groups:
The Middle Neighborhoods Community of Practice is an informal, facilitated network of practitioners, researchers, and policymakers working in the field to strengthen middle neighborhoods
The primary purpose of the Community of Practice (CoP) is to facilitate peer-to-peer learning and technical assistance opportunities among practitioners working to stabilize and strengthen middle neighborhoods. The CoP also provides input to researchers and policymakers and builds support for middle neighborhood work. The CoP’s work takes place primarily through newsletters, webinars, peer introductions, site visits, focus groups, and direct communication on the CoP listserv. The CoP has also hosted annual in-person convenings, which will resume in future years.
Middle Neighborhoods members publish reports, research, policy briefs, and articles—and conduct webinars and events—to help equip communities around the country with the information they need to begin or refine interventions and investments in their middle neighborhoods. Resource materials are available to download free of charge below.
Please feel free to link to any of these publications to share with others, but do not upload the publications to any other public website or forum without written permission of Middle Neighborhoods. For additional information or to request such permission, contact Marcia Nedland at [email protected].
Learn more about Middle Neighborhoods and the conditions that allow these communities to thrive
Over fifty leaders met with researchers and government representatives to examine policies, approaches, and strategies to strengthen neighborhoods poised between stability and distress. The report highlights three working groups' priorities regarding practice, research, and policy.
This publication aims to provide a comprehensive framework to think about the growing challenges faced by the middle neighborhoods of America's legacy cities and their inner-ring suburbs. This document closes with key strategies for revival of middle neighborhoods.
Often overlooked, middle neighborhoods matter—both to the people who live in them and to their cities and regions—and solutions demand engagement not only from the neighborhood itself but also from the city, region, and state. Nothing less than the fate of millions of people and dozens of cities lies in the balance.
On the Edge: America’s Middle Neighborhoods (2016) aims to stimulate a national dialogue about middle neighborhoods. With case studies and essays from leaders, this volume explores the complex web of communities transitioning—for better or worse—across the US' shrinking middle class.
Middle Neighborhoods created a map-based tool for understanding the breadth and location of middle neighborhoods in cities and suburbs across the country
Middle neighborhoods are a category of neighborhoods that are neither clearly healthy and thriving, nor overtly distressed. Millions of middle- and working-class families in cities and suburbs across the nation call middle neighborhoods home. But despite their prevalence, and the energy being poured into stabilizing and revitalizing these neighborhoods, there is not clear agreement on how to define middle neighborhoods. What, exactly, are middle neighborhoods, and what are they in the middle of? And how can we reliably identify middle neighborhoods in the communities where we live and work?
To shed light on how to define middle neighborhoods, the NCST has created a nationwide map that allows users to explore the communities where middle-income households live.
The map allows users to select among seven different definitions of middle neighborhoods, each of which identifies middle neighborhood census tracts within metropolitan areas based on their median household incomes. The seven definitions are:
We plan to update this map over time, including by incorporating data from earlier decades. If you have any suggestions, questions, or comments about the map, please reach out to [email protected]. The current map is the release version 1.0.
Data sources: All income, social, and economic data from 2014-2018 and 2006-2010 American Community Survey (5-year ACS) Estimates. Each census tract was assigned to an MSA using FHFA’s 2020 Low-Income Areas file. City-wide incomes are based on the MSA’s Principal City identified in Census Bureau’s March 2020 Principal Cities of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas file. It is important to note that ACS home price and rent data is respondent estimated.
Nedra Sims Fears, Executive Director
Chicago, Illinois
Jeff Verespej, Chief of Staff & Operations
Cleveland Neighborhood Progress
Cleveland, Ohio
NCST’s work increases access to homeownership, promotes resilient neighborhoods, and advances racial equity by advocating for policy change.