Systems, Sidewalks, and the Stories We Tell

Community Conversation:

Systems, Sidewalks, and the Stories We Tell- Facing Middletown

Brad King, June 13th, 2025

Neighborhood: Old West End

When someone asks about life in Muncie, what do you tell them?

It’s a city that’s easy to love and easy to be frustrated by. It’s got the bones of greatness with walkable neighborhoods, deep history, real community, but it’s also stuck in patterns of political caution and civic fragmentation. If you look, you’ll find good people doing hard work to improve their place: neighbors organizing cleanups, nonprofits filling service gaps, common folks showing up for each other. But from above, you can see how disjointed the systems are, from housing and transit to health and planning. Muncie is where effort doesn’t always translate into change, not because people don’t care, but because the systems don’t connect.

I live in the tension between those two truths. I love this place for its people, its scale, its potential. But I work in systems that too often stumble over their own design. So, when someone asks what life in Muncie is like, I say: it’s a place where you can still make a difference—but you’ll have to learn patience, strategy, and how to build bridges between systems that weren’t made to talk to each other.

What is a good life in your place?

A good life in Muncie is one where your ZIP code doesn’t determine your outcomes. It’s a life where people look to stay, and where systems serve to lift people, not sort or punish them. In my version of this city, I can walk to get groceries on safe sidewalks, and my neighbor can ride
the bus to a job that pays a living wage. The park down the street is clean, well-lit, and full of kids from every background—not because that’s a utopian dream, but because we invest in places that bring people together instead of pushing them apart.

A good life here isn’t luxury—it’s dignity. It’s access to what should already be guaranteed: affordable housing, clean water, mobility, meaningful work, and a say in what happens in your neighborhood. It’s the kind of life, where contributing to your community isn’t an exception; it’s the expectation, because the systems are set up to let you participate and to be heard. That’s my Muncie: not perfection, but possibility made real for more people, in more parts of the city.

What allows you to live this life? What is standing in your way?

What makes it possible, what always makes it possible, is people. Community. Not in the abstract, but in the everyday: neighbors shoveling each other’s sidewalks, checking in on each other, or organizing cleanups when no one else will. It’s nonprofits that punch above their
weight because they have to, and it is local leaders, many unpaid, who keep showing up even when the systems don’t show up for them. There’s a lot of caring in this place. That’s what keeps the city breathing, even when the scaffolding shakes. But what stands in the way is how that scaffolding was built. Muncie is trying to solve 21st- century problems, economic inequality, crumbling infrastructure, climate adaptation, with a municipal toolkit built in the 19th and 20th centuries. The city’s structure hasn’t evolved. We still operate with fragmented departments, redundant boards, and funding formulas designed for a different world. Add in top-down decision-making and political risk-aversion, and what you get is a city that burns out its caregivers while keeping its power centers locked tight. The will is here. The know-how is here. What we lack is unity. Until our systems are restructured to match the capacity of our people, we’ll keep mistaking survival for success.

What are the questions that will help researchers understand you and your community?

King asks: 
Who gets to decide what the future looks like?
Who is invited to the table when visions are shaped, and who’s told the table is full?
From where does the power to plan actually come: statute, budget, ballot, or backroom?
Who benefits when things stay the same?
Who pays the cost when systems decline?

These aren’t just policy questions, they’re cultural and moral ones. They’re about who we listen to, who we believe, and who we consistently dismiss. If we want to understand Muncie, we need to follow the decisions, the dollars, and the silences. Watch what gets funded and what gets forgotten. Track which neighborhoods are over-studied and under-served. Ask why plans pile up without execution, and what that tells us about our political culture. The real story of Muncie isn’t just in data. It’s in our governance structures, our nonprofit survival strategies, and our residents’ ongoing work to be seen, valued, and included. The right questions don’t just uncover trends, they uncover truths about power, equity, and the space between intent and impact.

What images would you use to represent life in Muncie?

A sunken sidewalk in a historic neighborhood: beautiful but broken. It tells the story of a city that once thrived, and a public realm now held together more by memory than maintenance. A dad walking his kids down a two-lane road with no sidewalk, dodging traffic because we’ve never prioritized pedestrian infrastructure. A once-vacant home brought back to life with a coat of paint and a porch light; a quiet signal that someone believes in this place again. A neighborhood meeting with coffee, maps, and a stubborn hope that maybe this time, the plan will lead to action.

These images sit side by side. Contrast is Muncie’s reality: care and collapse, effort and erosion. You can't understand Muncie through a single toxic-positive photograph. You have to see the layers. The disinvestment and the grit. The neglect and the love. That tension, that simultaneous
decline and dedication, is where the truth of this city lives. And where its future could still take hold.

What do you want to see this project produce?
I hope it produces an honest story. Not just nostalgia, and not just trauma—but complexity. Something that captures the lived-in contradictions of this place. I want to see the stories that exist between official reports and campaign slogans. The ones that don’t make headlines or
ribbon cuttings but reveal what it really means to live here. What it means to persist through poor planning, political opaqueness, and civic absenteeism.

I want this project to make space for voices that rarely get past the mic check. The renters, the single parents, the bus riders, the folks who serve on boards nobody listens to. I want it to challenge the stories we’ve told ourselves about who matters in Muncie, and who we’ve allowed
to speak for the rest of us. And more than that, I want it to be useful, not just archival. Let this project inform how we plan, how we govern, and how we measure a city's health: not by its PR, but by the lives of its people.

What do you wish people knew about Muncie, but don’t?
That the city isn’t defective; it’s misaligned. The raw materials are here: the people, the plans, the potential. But our institutions are out of sync with our needs. We have neighborhoods ready to lead if we’d only follow their example. We have youth who want in, if we’d just stop shutting
the door. We have institutional partners willing to build, if we could just stop working in silos.

Muncie doesn’t lack ideas or initiative. What’s missing isn’t capacity. It’s synthesis. And the political courage to try something new.
Too often, we treat dysfunction as destiny. But the truth is, we’ve never really aligned our governance with the complexity of our community. What people outside Muncie miss, and what some insiders forget, is that this city is already home to everything it needs. But until we
restructure how decisions are made, how plans are implemented, and how power is shared, we’ll keep mistaking (toxic) positivity for progress.

What do you think, hope, or worry about happening to Muncie, 100 years from now?
I hope we become a city that honors its past without being trapped by it. That we stop mistaking old habits for heritage. I hope Muncie figures out how to be flexible without losing itself, how to evolve without erasing. I worry we’ll keep treating public service like patronage and politics like war. That we’ll keep designing systems to guard power instead of growing trust. But I believe we could become something more; a model for how small cities adapt. Not through tech gimmicks or branding campaigns, but through honest planning, community intelligence, and systems built for care, not control. I believe our next century could be shaped by neighborhoods that lead, institutions that listen, and a local government that finally learns how to collaborate with its people instead of managing around them. That’s what I hope history will record—that somewhere between nostalgia and neglect, Muncie found a better way forward.

What should people know about Muncie but don’t? Why?
Muncie is more than a place; it is a people whose place matters. The decline of Muncie wasn’t by accident but by design. Many of our neighborhoods were left behind by design: redlined, underfunded, and then judged for not keeping up. Against that design Munsonians are still here. We are fixing sidewalks, mentoring kids, feeding the underserved, and pulling weeds in the park. The work has never stopped, even if the attention moved on.

What is a thing or place in Muncie that is important to you? Why?
The front porch.
The front porch is a symbol of how people connect. It’s the original public forum. A place where folks say hello, watch over the block, catch up, share gossip, grieve, celebrate, or just be. In a city that has lost population, lost industry, and often feels like it’s losing the narrative, the front
porch reminds us we’re still here. It represents visibility and neighborliness without pretense. You don’t need a degree or a title to be respected on the porch, you just need to show up, be decent, and know whose kid that is riding by on a bike.