The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) was started in 1995 as a collaborative effort by the Urban Institute and local partners (now from 21 cities) all of whom have built advanced information systems with integrated and recurrently updated information on neighborhood conditions in their urban areas. The local partners concentrate on facilitating the direct practical use of data by city and community leaders, and all see using information to build the capacities of institutions and residents in distressed urban neighborhoods as central to their missions. The Partnership aims to further the development and use of neighborhood information systems in local policy making and community building nation-wide. The work includes cross-site research, documentation of best practices, tool-building, operating a national data system, conferences and workshops, other approaches to dissemination, and efforts to help other cities develop similar capacities. This seminar will highlight the form and role of these new local "data intermediaries," their accomplishments and the way they are influencing how planning at all levels is carried out in their cities.

Talk slides

G. Thomas Kingsley, AICP

Tom Kingsley is a senior researcher and research manager in housing, urban policy, and governance issues at the Urban Institute, and is the author of numerous publications in those fields. He served as the Director of the Institute's Center for Public Finance and Housing from 1986 through 1997. He currently directs the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership--an initiative to further the development of advanced data systems for policy analysis and community building in U.S. cities--and is leading efforts to strengthen performance monitoring and evaluation in HUD's HOPE VI program and to use 2000 census data to analyze neighborhood change across U.S. cities.

In the 1990s, Mr Kingsley was co-director of the Ford Foundation sponsored Urban Opportunity Program, which produced four books on the status of urban policy issues in America and worked with HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros on a series of essays on the future of U.S. cities. He has also directed several other major policy research programs, including: testing the market effects of housing voucher programs (1974-80, the HUD sponsored Housing Assistance Supply Experiment); analyzing the structure and potentials of metropolitan Cleveland's economy (1980-82, for the Cleveland Foundation); preparing a national urban development strategy for Indonesia (1982-85, for the United Nations); and helping the Czech and Slovak Republics design and implement policy reforms in housing and municipal infrastructure (1991-95, for USAID).

Mr. Kingsley previously served as Director of the Rand Corporation's Housing and Urban Policy Program, and as Assistant Administrator for the New York City Housing and Development Administration, where he was responsible for the agency's budgeting and policy analysis functions. He has also taught on the faculties of the graduate urban planning programs at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.