Most Americans Still Rely on Their Neighbors. New Nextdoor Research Shows the Conditions for Stronger Communities Are Already in Place.

Nearly a third of Americans (32%) say trust in their neighborhood has strengthened over the past five years, double the 16% who say it has weakened. That finding comes from a new nationally representative survey Nextdoor commissioned with The Harris Poll, released today on National Good Neighbor Day. It runs against the story most of us have absorbed about American social life, and the rest of the data explains why. Read the full survey findings here.

What the survey found

The practical foundation of neighborhood life is largely intact, even as fewer Americans describe their neighbors as trustworthy than they did a decade ago. Two thirds of Americans (67%) say they could call on a neighbor for help if they needed it. Sixty-four percent feel a sense of belonging where they live. Sixty-three percent trust their neighbors to keep an eye on their home while they are away.

Those are not the numbers of a country that has stopped relying on the people next door. They describe a set of working relationships that most Americans still have access to and still use.

More than a quarter of Americans (27%) say they want more interaction with their neighbors than they currently have. That may be the most useful number in the whole survey, because it points at a gap that is fixable. The appetite for connection is already there. What most people lack is an easy, low-stakes way to act on it.

Where people go for a recommendation

When Americans need a recommendation for a contractor or a local service, they turn to friends and family first, with neighbors close behind and ahead of online reviews. Thirty-five percent say they trust neighbors a lot or completely for local recommendations, compared with 25% for online reviews. Social media influencers come in at 14%.

Proximity turns out to carry real informational weight. A neighbor who hired the plumber lives with the result, walks past the house, and will run into you at the mailbox. That accountability is difficult for an anonymous review to reproduce, which is part of why local recommendations have held their credibility while other forms of online reputation have lost theirs.

What weakens trust

Asked what most weakens trust among neighbors, Americans point first to a lack of communication, cited by 46%. High turnover and crime or safety concerns follow, each at 36%.

Communication ranking above both of those is worth sitting with. Turnover and crime are hard problems that take years and money to move. Communication is a problem of infrastructure. People are not withholding contact so much as lacking the occasions for it.

The gap is widest for young adults

Young adults report the widest distance between the connection they want and the connection they have. Among Americans ages 18 to 24, 69% feel lonely or socially isolated at least sometimes, compared with 46% of adults overall. Only 24% feel welcomed or included by their neighbors, against 41% of adults overall.

The same group is the one asking for more. Thirty-eight percent of adults under 25 want more interaction with their neighbors, well above the 27% of Americans overall. The generation most often written about as withdrawn is, by its own account, the most interested in a neighborhood that would have them.

What actually builds trust

Two thirds of Americans (66%) say regular day-to-day interactions are what strengthen trust between neighbors, the most common answer by a wide margin. Long-term residency follows at 45%, shared community events at 31%, shared public spaces at 24%, safety initiatives at 19%, and neighborhood apps or online groups at 17%.

We find the last number clarifying rather than uncomfortable. No app builds trust on its own. What an app can do is lower the cost of the thing that does build it, which is frequency of contact. Learning a neighbor's name, borrowing a ladder, hearing that the road will be closed Thursday. None of that is remarkable on its own. Repeated over a year, it is what separates a set of addresses from a community.

The recovery, and who is leading it

In a meaningful share of neighborhoods, trust is going back up. Thirty-two percent of Americans say trust where they live has strengthened over the past five years, twice the 16% who say it has weakened, and the recovery is being led by the group least expected to lead it. Among Americans ages 25 to 34, 45% report strengthening trust, the highest of any age group.

The gains show up broadly across the country rather than in one corner of it, ranging from 30% in the Northeast to 36% in the Midwest.

Five neighbors, recognized today

Today we are recognizing five honorees, one from each region of the country, for exactly the kind of everyday, repeated acts this survey identifies as the strongest drivers of trust. Their stories are the survey's findings at human scale. A free dinner for a hundred neighbors every Wednesday that began with enough food for four. Twenty years of volunteering that rebuilt a neglected subdivision outside Houston. A driveway plowed all winter so a woman could get to the hospital to see her husband.

Read their full stories and how they were chosen here.

Methodology

This survey was conducted online in the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Nextdoor from April 16 to 20, 2026, among 1,003 adults ages 18 and older. Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, household income, education, and political affiliation where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Respondents are selected among those who have agreed to participate in our surveys. The sampling precision of Harris online polls is measured by using a Bayesian credible interval. The sample data is accurate to within +/- 3.8 percentage points using a 95% confidence level. This credible interval will be wider among subsets of the surveyed population of interest. All sample surveys and polls, whether or not they use probability sampling, are subject to other multiple sources of error which are most often not possible to quantify or estimate, including, but not limited to coverage error, error associated with nonresponse, error associated with question wording and response options, and post-survey weighting and adjustments.