Developing a Comprehensive Middle Neighborhood Strategy

City government’s role historically has been to manage available public funds and work to secure additional state and federal capital to ensure a standard quality of life, focused on the health and safety of all Baltimore City residents, including Middle Neighborhoods. A renewed effort to focus on these neighborhoods specifically was originally identified in the Middle Neighborhoods section of DHCD’s comprehensive framework, “A New Era of Neighborhood Investment: A Framework for Community Development” released in 2019.

The Middle Neighborhoods Work Group, convened in 2019, was a group of stakeholders organized by the Mayor’s Office as a sub-group of the Mayor's Neighborhood Subcabinet. The objective of the Work Group was to generate recommendations and to discuss initiatives to further the Middle Neighborhoods strategy. The group, chaired by Live Baltimore, included representatives from City Council, DOP, Baltimore City DHCD, State DHCD, Live Baltimore, City Schools, community development organizations (HNI, NHS, St. Ambrose, MD Community Development Network) developers and many representatives from the private sector. Final workgroup recommendations included categories related to racial equity and displacement, housing stock, homeownership, commercial/retail, and services/amenities.

Implementing the Middle Neighborhood Strategy

The Middle Neighborhoods Planning Group was convened by the Department of Planning in 2020 and 2021 to develop an Implementation Plan for the Middle Neighborhood Strategy and the Workgroup recommendations. The process focused on developing a Middle Neighborhood Strategy Toolkit, identifying financing tools to support implementation of toolkits, and utilzing data to support prioritization of neighborhoods for pilot projects and investment.