Golliher Metagov 20230524
Speaker 1: Awesome. Welcome everyone to your Wednesday, May 24, Medigov seminar. Perhaps it's not May 24 for you. That's possible, so apologies. But it is for me. My name is Val, and I'll be the host of the seminar today. I'm a researcher with Medigov, and I was super excited. Hazel and I were super excited to invite Daniel to join us today to present all about Maximum University, a civics...
Top Keywords
- york 0.022
- city 0.020
- york city 0.020
- government 0.009
- daniel 0.007
- political capital 0.006
- central park 0.006
- civics 0.006
- system 0.005
- park 0.005
- city government 0.005
- civic 0.005
Transcript
Awesome. Welcome everyone to your Wednesday, May 24, Medigov seminar. Perhaps it's not May 24 for you. That's possible, so apologies. But it is for me. My name is Val, and I'll be the host of the seminar today. I'm a researcher with Medigov, and I was super excited. Hazel and I were super excited to invite Daniel to join us today to present all about Maximum University, a civics institution that Daniel founded. Hizla and I are heard about Maximum through a fellow MediGov community member, CASE, Amber CASE, if you know them. And, essentially, we've been going to Daniel's classes on Sundays here in New York City. And in these classes, Daniel teaches what's called the foundations of New York amongst other classes that have to do with governance. But the class that we're in is around civics education. What is the structure and processes and cultures of New York City's govern government, empowering people like us, residents of the city, to get involved, to learn about how it works so that we can make the changes, help facilitate the changes that we wanna see. And, yeah, I think in in terms of, you know, understanding governance and and empowering participation, Daniel knows a lot and is very on the ground helping us to be better citizens, community members in our city. So we're excited to have Daniel present on maximum today and teach us a bit about New York City, the govern governance of New York City. And so I will leave it to him. I think he's got some slides for us. And welcome, Daniel. It's so exciting to have you here.
Thank you for having me. So so I
pull up the slides, and I do I have share screen permission per chance?
Cool. So in general, one of
the things that ends the end is before some someone decides what to be with regard to governance, they should find out what is. And I think reality is stranger than fiction when it comes to government, especially when you become specific. So Oftentimes, people say sentences like the government should do x, y, or z, or z, or b player that way. And my first question to people who tend to speak like that and that in that way only as is our government now. And and the government is not a monolith. So you can't even ask what is our gover government. You could say, what is the federal government, or what is Congress, or you could say, what is New York state government, or you could say, what is what is New York City's government? All these things are very different. And, of course, they're interrelated, but it's very hard to say anything that's true in America about just the gun. So for me, things me, things get steam and the rubber hits the road. When you when you really turn up pollution and decrease the scope increase the scope focus on some relevant subsystem of the entirety of our governing apparatus. So so I focus on New York City, which means means I also focus on New York State as well because they interrelate. But I focus on giving people a very, very good overview on how the New York City system of government works. In general, I think we the changes that we need
to make make for New York have an even greater future if more smart, kind, ambitious people are unable to enter
the civic and political sphere. And I and I full thing that's keeping them out is that that there is no really good or efficient way for them to learn how it works. There's a giant blob of friction standing between them and this knowledge, which is not really available to be could be consumed in a coordinated fashion anywhere, including in the law schools of our universities, cities, the city itself, Not even the City University of New York has these kinds of classes, which I which I found to be purchasing. You'll find urban to urban policies. Yes.
Hey,
Daniel. Sorry. I think your Internet's, like, a little choppy. It's just making
Ah.
You, like, sound like you're repeating a couple of words here and there. It's kinda cool, and, like, you can understand what you're saying.
It it might be several microphones on too, several sources overlapping. I don't know what it is. It's not a standard bad connection. It's like your Max Headroom, if you remember who he is at all.
One one.
See what we can
do. You
may try going off of video momentarily to see if that's
a
factor. And is it with all of my audio my audio? How's it coming across?
Unfortunately, yes. Still happening.
Interesting.
Let's see.
This is one of the coolest Zoom glitches I've ever encountered.
I had a call right before this, and there was no feedback. So let's see.
No. It's really weird. What it is is you sound totally normal, and then all of a sudden, a phrase will repeat, like, three or four times. And then you'll go back to sounding normal, and then you'll say a word three or four times, like audio, audio, audio. And it's like
Val, why don't you say something interesting you've seen you found from class? Take a minute or two to play around with settings.
Oh, wow. Okay. Well, I mean, I don't wanna steal your spotlight, Daniel, here. But one of my favorite things I learned in class, something very fascinating about the New York City government is that in 1989, which doesn't sound like that long ago it was before my birth, but it doesn't sound like that long ago. The entire structure of New York City government was deemed unconstitutional and was restructured completely from what was pretty much it was called the board of estimate. This kind of, like, backdoor, backroom. Like, the borough presidents of New York were a bunch of old white men basically in the backroom making all the decisions. And the Supreme Court said, essentially, it's not one person, one vote. It's not democratic. Do away with it. And Is
this the state Supreme Court or the or the national Supreme Court?
This is the the national Supreme Court. And they deemed this the government unconstitutional, and luckily, the mayor and folks at in power at that time had a backup plan. They thought that might happen, so they had designed this new system that was a lot more fair and involved what Daniel will describe today. And, again, apologies if I stole a little bit of your thunder there, but the structure that Daniel will present or, you know, will that has a lot more democratic kind of channels for participation, was only sort of set in in place in 1989. It's crazy. How's the audio doing, Daniel? And how did I do on that explanation?
Great. It's already on video.
Uh-oh. This this this is worse.
Much worse.
How about Hazel? Hazel, what have you learned in class?
I feel like it's really, really interesting interface with the New York government in a real way because I think in web three and in the crypto world or in a lot of online communities, we think of, like, cyberspace communities or Internet native communities as, like, this new thing and, like, this new radical thing. Right? And I feel like, I mean, I love New York City. And to me, it's really, really fascinating to learn about the New York government and like zoning laws, like, you know, how the city gets built, history of the New York government, city council, or like even to to the point of knowing who the city council members are. And there is like a they're right there. We can actually have a conversation with them, go to a park with them. Yeah, like, effect governance and effect local change in that way. I think, like, this idea of locality is not something we, or like we web three people think about. I think we have this weird antagonism towards governance or resistant to touching, like, real life governance bits. But I I I realized from Daniel's class that all of these assumptions are just untrue. Then we can go attend the hearing, and we can just speak at the hearing. And Daniel has has this really, really helpful way of thinking about civics in in terms of, like, building political capital by just showing face, showing up. Yeah. Like, I think all of that are valuable lessons for me to sort of carry forward. How's your audio doing, Daniel?
I don't know. How is it doing?
It's doing great, I think.
Alright. So I did not change anything material as far as I could tell, except I switched I there are two microphones, the AirPods and then the studio mic. So I just disconnected the studio mic. I've never had these play poorly together before, but maybe that was it somehow.
Sorry. Let's do it.
Nice. So, hopefully, what I said before was at least partially intelligible, but the basic idea is get more smart, kinda ambitious people into the politic political and civic realm, and the only way to do that really is for them to understand it. And as I mentioned, there really is no system or Citizens Academy or anything in place for anyone to go and learn. So that's that's when I decided decided to start or at least start learning it for myself. That took a couple of years of intense study and working with people around the city, doing legal research, and doing the things that eventually would become part of the syllabus for the foundations of New York, which Val and Hazel are in. So I teach classes that are an accelerated introduction into New York City government law, and I also teach a class in parliamentary procedure, which I suspect a lot of people in this group will be familiar with. They're the rules of procedure that govern what are called deliberative assemblies. So that is our New York City council. It it's local entities called community boards. And, yes, someone that Hazel Hazel mentioned Robert's Rules of Order, that is the American Standard Parliamentary Authority. And most organizations, including corporations, say that it specify it as their parliamentary authority in their bylaws. Some exceptions to that are most state legislatures in the US Congress, they develop their own bespoke parliamentary authority, but it's often based on Robert's Rules of Order. So that is why I teach because if I don't, I don't really see that there's a ready on ramp for smart and ambitious people to get into the system, and I'm working on widening the on ramp and making it more efficient. And then, of course, there are things to do after people take the class. But for now, that's that's the point of the class. That's the point of what I do for the most part. I think getting involved in politics and understanding it, in general, in our culture, I think that's treated as a an unpleasant thing to do or it's pulling teeth. It's a duty that you must take on. It's a burden you have to embrace. And sometimes, it that is unavoidably true, but maybe only, like, three to 5% of the time. I think 95 of the time doing these things can be experienced, like, I don't know, Richard Feynman experienced physics. You're getting very curious. You're finding that, like, the flower, the more you discern its details, the more beautiful it becomes. You're spinning plates in the Cornell cafeteria and coming up with with new rules of physics that wind up getting you a Nobel. It's tinkering. It's curiosity. That sort of thing. That's how I experience politics, and I think that's ideally how most people would experience it. Is that good, Val, for an introduction? Yeah. That's why I do what I do. And we have to build more things, so we need more people who know how to build things.
Yes. Awesome. Cool. So that's a bit of the story on how maximum came to be, and, you know, you sort of addressed the problem that you're trying to solve. I'm curious. From your experience and knowledge and, you know, expertise at this point of of New York City government, What are some of the best and worst qualities when it comes to the structures of the government, the processes that the government uses, the culture, its decision making, some key governance components, if you will?
And I will. Also, I have a question in the chat. Is there a public referendum process? If that's referring to New York City, there is a public referendum process, but it is not as easy as the ones that you would find in, say, California. So, for example, you have to gather, a certain amount of signatures, which is equivalent to either 10% of the electors who voted for governor in the previous election or 30,000, whichever is less. And then that will enable you to get something on the ballot or that will enable you to force through a a charter amendment. If you get those signatures, then it goes before the city council. The city council can say go ahead, and at which point it will go on the ballot. If they vote no, you can override them, but it requires a second round of signature getting that has a lower threshold. So it's not just get the signatures and then it gets on the ballot. You'll probably have to be doing multiple layers of work, and I think there's possibly
lower threshold or a higher threshold? Is it second yeah. The second time around.
Yeah. The second time is it's about half. So it's a lower a 50 about a 50% lower threshold. Let's see. But in terms of my favorite and least favorite things about the New York City government, that is where I'm going to pull up some slides. Okay. So I'm not gonna go in presentation mode. I think I'm just gonna click on them. So can everyone see the rapid transit graph? So things some things that have changed about the modern era of New York City and New York City and state government is that it cannot build a new subway line to save its life. And if it does, it's just incredibly expensive, bankruptingly expensive, and very slow. So what you see here is a graph of the amount of miles of rapid transit that were constructed in the city starting in 1870. And from 1870 to nineteen o four about, these were not subways. They're called above ground elevated railways or they were called elves. And then nineteen o four is when our subways all the subway lines started to open. So you can see we built them at a very rapid clip, especially starting after 1900, and then something happens in nineteen o four where we Yeah. Completely I
hate to interrupt you, but we we actually can't see it if it's not
in presentation mode. Do you mind?
Oh, all these things I did not know.
Well, it's just very we can see it. It's just incredibly tiny.
Oh, it's small. I gotcha. And this shows you how often I use Google Slides. Okay. How's this?
Great. Thank you.
Okay. So, you know, you see the construction of lines of rapid transit here up until 1940. It's a pretty precipitous rise. And the majority of the subway system that New York City uses today, almost the entirety of it was built between nineteen o four when the first subway opened in about 1930. So most of our subway system was built a hundred years ago, and we still have it. But then something happens in 1940. That is when the city took over all of the subway lines from the private companies that had built them. So we had a wild reconfiguration in who runs the subways, how they're administered, how pricing works, that sort of thing. So if you're asking me what do I think is not going well about the New York City government, one of them is that they do not think creatively about how to build and administer our subway lines. And you can see the data is pretty unambiguous. Not only in general have we not built any new lines, but we have lost lines since the 1940 peak. And there are nuances to this data, but in general, I think it paints a a pretty discouraging picture of state capacity. I do think it's fixable, but that's one of the things that is not good right now. For a variety of reasons, the New York City government and the New York State government, which actually has more control here in the modern day, they just do not build. Something that's good, and I think this shows modern civic capacity. What you see here are two aerial photographs of Central Park. One of them was taken in the late seventies. The other was taken recently. So in 1975, New York City almost went bankrupt. In the colloquial sense, it did because it ran out of money. The accounts did run to zero. In the legal sense, it thankfully did not have to enter bankruptcy proceedings. It was saved by a bailout package from the state. But I think knowing that helps paint a picture of what New York was like in the decade, 1970 to 1980. The city lost over a million people in population. City services were slashed, and even something like Central Park. If you visited it today, it's beautiful. It's in a golden age. But if you would have gone in 1970 anything, you would have seen a park where vast areas of it are fenced off. You would have seen no law enforcement. The Central Park Police precinct had been disbanded. You would have seen Bethesda Terrace, which is this beautiful fountain, run dry. It's stonework broken and covered in graffiti. And the great lawns of the park were literally eroding away to packed dirt. So imagine imagine that you're in the nineteen seventies scenario. It can seem pretty impossible to rejuvenate an 843 acre area of land in the middle of New York City. It's an incredibly huge job, almost as large as building the thing itself, although it's more an active maintenance and rejuvenation than initial construction. And many people thought it was impossible. They were going to give it to the Federal Park Service to administer, which would probably have not been desirable for a lot of reasons. But one woman named Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, who had come to the city, moved here from Texas, she loved the park and decided she would save it. And to compress a very long story short, she founded the Central Park Conservancy. It's a private nonprofit that to this day, both runs and funds Central Park in an agreement with the parks department. So if you look around at Central Park and wonder why why is there not trash here? A lot of the rest of New York City has a trash problem, but not Central Park. Or why do the capital projects at Central Park get completed faster and maybe on or under budget, but not the capital projects around the rest of the city? The answer is the Central Park Conservancy, which is a wonderful example of institutional design that has also solved the succession problem and that works hand in glove with the New York City parks department. So it's not a fully private entity. It is a wonderful public private partnership that has managed to come together well. So if you ask me what's great about the New York City government of modern day, it that it does public private partnerships that work like nowhere else. In many other cities and places in The United States, they use the word public private partnership, but what they really mean is something like the government cuts checks to nonprofits, and the nonprofits maybe don't actually do that much. So New York City is very good at making these public private non these public private partnerships work. And this is another example of something that's going well. So, you know, I have more examples of things that are going well than things that are going poorly, partially because everyone already kind of has an idea of what's not going well. We can't build housing. We can't build subway lines, etcetera. Actually, a ton of things are going really well, and they it's, you know, it's it's a case of infrastructure. You only notice it when it breaks. And some of the infrastructure that doesn't break is our water system. And so I just have a screenshot of one of my tweets from last year. As you can see, even though New York City's population is rising, both our absolute and per capita consumption of water are declining precipitously. And so you might wonder how is that possible? And it's because the governmental entities that oversee our water system are incredibly proactive, forward thinking. They adopt new technology. They they might be the ones developing it, in fact. So this is an example of a government agency that's working very well, is a wonderful steward of natural resources, and is making the city a a far better place to live. So that's another example of things that are going well. Our water system, our Department of Environmental Protection that oversees it, and its cooperation with its state counterpart. So that's the examples, some answers to your question, Val. We'd it's a very mixed bag. New York City is not dying nor is it a utopia. Some things are going poorly, but some things are going world class.
So cool. Yeah. Thank you for that. Before we jump to to other folks' questions, I wanted to ask one more one more thing, which is just about that, like, what we went over recently and kind of what I alluded to when I was mentioning something I learned about, like, changing over time. I think something that we talk about a lot in MediGov is transitioning, you know, changes of governance structures and processes and things, kind of the role of experimentation when it comes to transitioning governance, powers, and responsibilities. And I'm curious if you could speak a little bit about what you've learned in studying the history of New York City government, how it's changed, and, you know, that sort of, like, it is possible for things to change on a large scale. How can we use New York City as a model in in that way in understanding transitions? Yeah.
I can answer this question and maybe some chat questions or whenever you think is great for chat questions. Cool. So you already highlighted one very big example of this. New York City's government as we know it is only about thirty three years old. So the city used to be primarily ruled by an entity called the Board of Estimate, which was a group of eight people. And the the Supreme Court of the United States struck that board down, and the government had to completely rearrange itself. The Board of Estimate was the only government the city had ever known since it since all five boroughs came together in 1898 to become the New York City that we know. And if you read New York Times editorials from that era, from 1988, '89, 1990, people were apocalyptic. They thought if we get rid of the board of estimate, the city is going to literally disintegrate. The boroughs will go back to being separate entities, what they were before, and it's just not going to work. You can't just replace a core part of your government like that overnight. So that was one mood of the populace. And as Val highlighted, the other mood was the people actually trying to make this happen. The mayor, the charter commission that the mayor appointed, and a variety of other people who just said, well, we do have to rewrite the charter, so we're going to give it our best go. And as it turns out, it was the apocalypse did not happen. The transition was quite smooth and orderly. The powers of the board of estimate were reallocated mostly to a new city council that was about doubled in size, and then the the balance of their powers largely went to the mayor. And that's how we got the the government that we know today. So when you think you when you think about making large change, I think too quickly a lot of people go to the burn it down direction. We must, like, erase we have to have a greenfield. We have to start over. And I'm not saying don't experiment with greenfield development like charter cities and brand new places, But the existing cities are not as far gone as you think. I generally just say you're not being creative enough or you don't have the resolution turned up high enough on all the levers that exist in the current system. Because probably there are levers to do very large overhauls that can be achieved in a smooth way that doesn't make the system fall apart. And 1989, New York City's transition from the board of estimate to our modern city council mayor system is a perfect example of how true all of those things can be. So, there are more examples like this in New York City's history. New York City, just like America, has continually reinvented itself and has not fallen apart. In fact, has set itself set itself up for better growth every time it has evolved. So I think the board of estimates the preeminent example of this. As far as some of the chat questions, let me see. Yeah. Alon Levy is a transit activist who writes very broadly about transit, but also specifically about New York City. And they presented at NYU and are very much around and have the attention of the MTA, the entity that runs our subways. Let's see. Do you think engagement in online communities can be a substitute for the civic training that you get from engaging in city politics? I mean oh, someone waved their hand. Oh, yes. From Seth.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I think you just have to have both. So you can be trained online or you like, as Val and Hazel could say, you can be trained by coming in person to a class. These things are good. But at the end of the day, there is no substitute in politics for just going out and meeting people and getting involved in the system itself. That's why as part of the class, I have what's called witnessing government homework. You have to actually go to something and ideally talk to people, but at the very least, just observe. And if you get inside one of those rooms, you observe how very cut out of the process you will be if you're one of the people on the Zoom screen over there. And you'll observe just just how much you're not in the process if you're not in the room itself. Now the the nice thing about New York City's government is you can get into all of those rooms. That's not true everywhere. But one of the things that I think is great about our system, especially post 1989, is most of the rooms are open. So but in general, I wouldn't say it's either or. Like, you can have online civics boot camps and that sort of thing, but any proper political or civic training program has to also be in person. I'm sure there are some exceptions to that, but yep.
My question little bit different. I guess that I'm not asking about being trained in civics. I mean, doing civics, doing doing participation. Do you see online settings as okay. I guess maybe it's a question of what's the goal of the civics training in your mind? Like, what why? I guess I mean, you said this in some way, but maybe could you repeat it?
Yeah. In general, the the goal of the civics training is to well, the minimum goal is just to allow people to understand the system and that there's possibilities. They can go on and do things further if they want. But if they want to do things further, those things are achieving concrete change in the built physical environment and changing the law.
Okay.
So those are the two things.
So okay. So you really are talking about municipal civil engagement. Yes. It is. I guess the only comment I have in all that, I I have several a lot of my students come from other countries. A lot of students come from areas that don't that aren't democratic or that used to be and are and are backsliding. And and one is a is is an activist in Turkey, a lot of engagement, around, elections, around protests, around around, yeah, activism and underground and just getting words out. She took, the kind of one of the standards of engagement tests that are really common in US discourse for just, like, evaluating, like, whether someone's engaged in democracy, and she failed it. So, like, a lot of I feel like a lot of our understanding of what it means to be informed or engaged, is, kind of really, really, really contextual to this old, like, the Tocqueville understanding that, like, town halls are what it means to be a democratic participant. And, I think in looking at online communities and looking at, like, outside The US, I'm really interested in what it would mean or what it looks like to have the most general conception of what it means to be to participate to to or to engage. And but it sounds really fruitful for you to kinda stay within that paradigm. So I'm just curious what you think.
Yeah. I mean, I think you can develop some general principles. Like, for example, for me, the things I say are, first look at what is before you start thinking about what ought to be, recognizing that government anywhere is not a monolith. And so if your lens only has the government, it's probably not a good lens usually. And, you know, a variety of these kinds of very general principles. But at the end of the day, you always have to zoom in on what you're working on specifically. I think it's very hard to get a general activism or involvement test that's applicable everywhere. One of the things that I work on is getting people to set up institutions parallel to mine elsewhere. Because at the end of the day, there simply is no substitute for just understanding what your local system is. Mine my local system is New York City and Albany, the capital of New York State. That's our primary system. Of course, we're also related to Washington, DC. We all are in some respect. But I I I think you have to be trained somewhere specific, and you learn a lot of very valuable lessons there that can help you distill very general lessons. But if you wanna move somewhere else, you're just gonna have to relearn that system because it will have a different context, different cool levers you can pull different people. Yeah. I I think, in general, one of my I don't know if this is a spicy opinion or not. But I don't think civics instruction is scalable. At least most of it, I don't think is. I think at the end of the day, beyond a few broad principles, you really just have to get to know get to know local systems very in a very detailed fashion. Now let's see. Do do do other questions. Someone oh, actually, Val, maybe maybe you can pull up the questions if you have a better idea of which ones.
Yeah. It looks like Chase has a question. I don't know if Chase wants to unmute and give voice, or I can read their question aloud.
Yeah. I don't mind. I'm muting. My question is, I was wondering from from what you've seen, how much influence or impact can an individual actually earn, you know, by being really engaged in New York civics and and and things like that? Or what are the ways in which, you know, an individual without political connections or, you know, political clout can earn influence and make an impact within New York civics?
So I'd break it down into two I would break that down into two chunks. But before I do, I will say one of the things people have to do before they graduate from the foundations of New York, which Val and Hazel will learn starting next class, you have to make a one page political capital savings plan. So in general, if you don't have political capital, if you don't have connections, you really can't do anything, Nor do I think anyone should aspire to try to do a lot without cultivating these. It it won't work, and that it can actually backfire in a lot of ways. So the real question isn't necessarily, can you do things without political connections? Largely, you can't. The question is then, well, how do you get political capital? That can seem like a very fuzzy abstract question just like the phrase political capital might. So I think defining it dispels the the fuzz. So political capital is just specialized knowledge about your system and connections, personal relationships. So if you're making a political capital savings plan, you can literally write down some things you know, and you can write down the people you know within that system. And you can make the plan to get to know more people. And through my class, you will be doing those things. So I don't think there's any way of getting around getting into the system yourself. And, again, there are some exceptions to this, but I think that there are exceptions that prove the rule. The best thing to do is get involved in the system consistently and over the long term. Ever if you try to go the other way, it's probably going to be very hard, and it will be very hard to be successful. I mean, if you look at the members of New York City's city council, for example, almost all of them grew up here. The same for the mayor grew up here, and there's a reason why that's very powerful. Now that's not to say that the system doesn't allow people who moved here from somewhere else to come in and do things. It most certainly does. And in fact, those people are you often the ones who build the things New York loves the most. Central Park was originally built by people who came here from somewhere else, and it was rejuvenated in the seventies by someone from Texas. And if if you look at everything in New York City, who are these architects that built this thing? Who are the people who architected the laws that consolidated the five boroughs together into one city? They came here from somewhere else. So all that to say, you don't have to be from here to get involved, but it is very hard for people who come here from somewhere else in the modern day to get involved. One of those reasons is that blob of friction I mentioned earlier. There's no way for them to learn about it. So, yeah, I I think you just have to get to know people and earn political capital. It's kind of like, with dollars or whatever currency, fiat currency, and you wanna buy something or crypto for that matter. If you want to buy something, you have to have the currency.
Speaking of challenges to getting involved, Steve's question. Steve, I don't know if you wanna unmute to give voice, but it really hit home for me. And I often I wanna throw in that a a mentor of mine used to say that we need not just work life balance, but work life civic balance. And that always really resonated with me. Anyway, Steve.
I believe I was just asking. Do you have any strategy strategy that you teach with regards to engaging people who are overworked? Because affordable housing is such a problem in New York City that, you know, everybody's just working all the time.
Can you say a little bit more more about that?
Oh, I'm just saying that, you know, because there is housing is less affordable, people have to have two or three jobs, especially if they're not, white collar jobs in order to be able to afford a decent place to live. So as a result, they can't be civically engaged. They can't come to your class as easily, I'm sure. And I'm just saying, how do we engage those communities? And how do we make affordable housing so that people can be In other words, how do we put those two processes together? Those seem to be synergistic processes naturally. Civic engagement and affordable housing, they go together or not at all?
I think they go together, but I I think I would frame it a little bit differently. Like, for example, I I don't think it's the case that affordable housing makes people unable to engage civically. I think not that they're not related. I do think No.
I'm saying that not having affordable housing is what makes people unable to engage. Right. Right. Affordable housing would make people able able to engage.
Right. I mean and so I mean, if that I think I I wouldn't frame it quite that way because otherwise, you would see much more engagement with people who don't have trouble paying for housing, which is not really true here. We have depressed civic engagement across almost every access access you could think of. Our voting rates, like, for our average voting rate, even in our most popular elections, barely gets over the 20% threshold. And it doesn't really matter if you can afford your housing or not. Most people just don't participate. And so when I think about the question or when I think about my class, I think there's actually a pretty broad net to cast there. People with money are also looking for a way to participate, but they're largely kept out by the same friction as people without money. But also, New York City is home to a ton of people who aren't working that much. I mean, in general, as as far as I've seen from the last run from the, Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics
What I'm really interested in here I did say my question wrong. So I'm saying how do you engage these citizens, okay, who are would be very civically minded if they weren't working? There's there are a lot of people who who Right. Are very responsible, and therefore, they work a lot, and therefore, they would also be civically engaged if they weren't working.
Right. Okay. So I would break it up into two two parts. I would first say most people aren't in that bucket in New York City. But for the ones that are, it's it's very difficult because they're trying to undertake a a very difficult task, getting over that blob of friction. And for them, I would say the best thing to do or the easiest thing to do is find someone like me or someone like Val to find one local civics group that's doing what I call dirt politics, something where your hands actually touch dirt. Don't do grassroots. The grassroots have been astroturfed. It's my funny joke. The is to find, like, a parks group to volunteer with literally just once a month for, like, an hour. And there are so many of those kinds of groups throughout the city. And that might seem like a small thing, but that's the sort of thing that most people's schedules, even the busiest, can accommodate. And as it turns out, those things can actually reap disproportionate amounts of political capital in terms of relationships. So for people who are very overworked, two options. Number one, there are a ton of things to go to that and they are all the time. You can fit them in your schedule and they can be worth your while. Number two, if you want if your goal is more just to learn, every meeting is recorded that happens in the city. So you are free to learn as much as you want once you know where to go about how things work here. And that's another great thing about New York City's government. But, yeah, if you're if you're pinched for time and resources, you know, you're necessarily limited, and there's really no way around that.
Any other questions? If not, I had the one, and I saw your slide, Daniel, the tech question.
Oh, that's right. I forgot about that slide. Yeah.
I think, yeah, from what you hinted at so far, I and I don't think we've quite gotten there yet in the class, but, like, the role of technology in the government, does it support how does it support processes currently in the government, and how could the use of technology better improve the government's effectiveness of meeting people's
needs? Yeah. This is another thing I think is great about New York City and is nation leading is, in 02/2012, New York passed what's called the open data law, and this is building on things that had happened in the past. So New York City has more than 3,000 open source datasets about all of its governmental agencies and a variety of other things within those agencies. They're all they're great. They're, for the most part, very well maintained. And it's not really, like, it's not really true of almost any other place in the nation. So you can go and be trained for free by members of the government on how to access and use all of these datasets. Or if you are a data scientist or a software engineer, you know how to do this. There's a lot of data at your fingertip tips that is very underexplored. So, for example, we have a tool called Checkbook NYC from our comptroller's office, which is our CFO. You can explore the budget down to the individual check level. Like, you can see that the checks that any entity is cutting, who they're cutting them to, how much they cut them for. The data is incredibly granular, or you could look at where are all of the filming permits for movies being issued around the city. We have a tree census. If you walk around New York City, almost every tree on every tree, you'll see a little tag with a QR code, which that might seem like a lot of QR codes because we have a seven figure number of trees, but most of them are tagged. The parks department is an insane and good organization. So you can see who's in charge of that tree. Who is its steward? What kind is it? How much has been spent on the tree? All of these kinds of things. But there's these these datasets exist for things in the city. They exist for entities in the city. You can pull data about, say, how many bills are going through the city council? How many have passed? Which committees are more active than the others? You can get all of these proxies, good proxies for legislative efficaciousness and do things with that data. So when I think about Civic Tech or when I think about data and government, New York has no problem in making all of the data available for the most part. There are some some exceptions here as with everything. The problem is not is the data available. The problem is do we have enough people looking at the data and doing creative things with it. So that's that's more the situation that we're in. We need more kind of smart, ambitious people running around the data. But that's a far more encouraging kind of problem than we don't have the data, which is where most people tend to live.
Awesome. Another question came in from Kate from Chase. How do you feel about compensation of civic engagement? It seems like most people civic engagement as volunteer work, but high civic engagement is actually very good for a city. Should it be rewarded?
Highly variable. And in that case, it depends on what you mean by civic engagement. So for example, you could take this question in one of multiple ways, like management of parks, as I mentioned before. Shouldn't shouldn't paid members of the parks department be taking care of all of our parks? Why do our parks rely on volunteer labor to be the best that they can be? I think first that's a relevant question. And if you're a citizen who lives someplace, you might have an opinion on that. But at the end of the day, I think you should feel a sense of ownership for where you live, and you should think something like, well, I want it to be nice, so I will make it so. That sense of ownership, that sense of agency, I do think that needs to be the overriding consideration. It just depends on how much you want it. I do think a lot of civic engagement is paid, so it already is in New York City. We have a large fleet of nonprofits, and there are entities like the Central Parks Conservancy that have a lot of employees, and they pay them. So if your question is with regard to civic engagement making the city better, there's already a lot of paid opportunities to do that kinds of thing. Where I live in Northern Brooklyn, there's an entity called the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance, and they hire a whole bunch of people to do things. So maybe did you have a specific aspect of the civic engagement you were wondering about?
I mean, you know, just kinda thinking about your course and the way I think of civic engagement at least, and I'm not really super familiar with it, but I assume that, like, you know, people go through your course, they do the political savings checklist or go through this process of trying to, engaged in their local politics and try to change something that they would like to see better within their local politics. And we would like to see a lot more people engage in this in this manner. But that form of engagement, you know, at least to me, it it doesn't seem like there's a a strong opinion that it should be rewarded in in some way, beyond just the reward of of getting to see your city change. So I was wondering how you thought about that.
Yeah. I mean, it's sometimes it's a tough question because sometimes you want something to change, but no one is offering you a reward for it or no one is offering you compensation for it. And in throughout New York's history, many people have encountered that all up and down the privilege ladder, all up and down whatever access one might think of. And I think New York City's history is special because it has a ton of people who say, even though I'm overburdened, I do want this to change. So, nonetheless, I will help change it. And that is that's probably not the ideal situation, but New York does have a lot of people who do that. As far as getting rewarded or having value exchange for value, like, is there monetary value to be had for changing the civic commons or for improving the civic commons? I think increasingly so. It just depends on how you structure your group and your entity. How good is your marketing? There are a ton of grassroots or dirt politics organizations in New York City that have successful funding models that are becoming more successful. So but it just takes work to stand those up. I don't think any of these are easy questions.
Yeah. With only two minutes left, I see Steve has a question on delivery workers, which I feel like is a is a big problem we see in New York. Honestly, tech facilitated problem. But, yeah, if you wanna address that quickly before we wrap up.
I mean, only if you're familiar with the issue. In other words, mayor Adams has essentially rolled back what I thought was legally binding increase to their wages and, you know, it seems like a it'd be a great thing to support them if, if that was somehow possible. And I don't know how you what experiences you have with processes like that.
I mean, I'm not directly involved in this this issue. So it depends on how one wants to help them. Like, there are multiple ways. There's minimum wage laws. There are putting in specialized stands where they can charge bikes, where they have, like, a place to charge their phone protection and that sort of thing. So there's there's many different ways to help them or many different leverage you can pull on. If you if you want to increase their wages, then that means you have to get involved with Yeah.
Yeah. You're you're not familiar with the fact that that Adams is actually violating the law right now. So that's what I'm speaking of. So in
how how to intervene in fact yeah. Yeah. Yes. I understand that. But what I'm saying is, like, if you have a mayor that's, you say, violating the law, for example, what's the way to push back on that? The way is the legislative process because you need a speaker of the council to either pass a law countermanding that, take it to court, etcetera.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
On our the principal check on our system is the expenditure of political capital on the legislative lever if your mayor lever if your mayor is doing this kind of thing and you disagree with it. But that means having political capital to spend in the legislative arena.
Great. Thank you so much. It was cool to see you kind of walk through that and break it down. So thanks for that. And, yeah, thanks for joining us, Daniel. Everyone, I know y'all probably gotta go, but if you don't mind unmuting and giving Daniel a round of applause, thank you so much for joining us. And if you're based in New York City, I will say extra time to join the membership because we'll be doing meetups in New York, and we can talk about all these things in practice. And, hopefully, maybe Daniel can join us in that. Yeah. Thank you all so much. Thank you, Daniel. See everyone soon. See everyone on Slack. Bye y'all.
Thank you.