The votes are in.
Last week The New York Times published 17 suggestions for how New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, might improve the city’s urban environment. I canvassed experts. Readers were invited to vote on their ideas.
The exercise was an attempt to jump-start public debate as a new administration moves into City Hall. To the tens of thousands of readers who voted, and to the hundreds who shared alternative proposals and gripes in the comments section, thank you.
And the winner is …
A suggestion to devote more resources to parks and libraries. That received the most up versus down votes. Supporting libraries and parks — beyond the roughly 2 percent of the city’s budget now spent on them — may seem a mild no-brainer. But 35,000 up votes to increase the funding makes plain just how valuable these traditional tent poles remain to residents and others in a swiftly changing city besieged by competing budget demands.
Second on the list: repairing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a Robert Moses relic traversed by millions of trucks and cars now forced to play Russian roulette on its crumbling roadways.
The list’s bronze medal went to a proposal to build more mental health crisis centers. Both the expressway repair and the centers suggest New Yorkers care about vulnerable residents. But residents are also fed up with the city’s aging infrastructure and failure to deal with an epidemic of homelessness supercharged by the affordable housing shortage.
Commenters wrote in to note the list’s lack of budgets and timelines. We largely omitted both to liberate readers’ imagination. Dreams crash when actual dollar amounts enter the picture.
In last place was an exception to the lack of specifics: a suggestion with a dollar figure, from the Adams administration. The former mayor, before leaving office, earmarked $400 million to redesign Fifth Avenue. The idea was first proposed during the de Blasio years by the local business improvement district, which promised to pony up millions of dollars on its own to help upgrade the boulevard. With construction costs what they are now, $400 million to rework several dozen city blocks almost seems a bargain.
But I suspect that the price tag struck some voters as high. Mention of an unpopular former mayor may also have skewed the tally. And more than a few readers suggested that Fifth Avenue wasn’t actually in need of a makeover.
Many commenters focused on the scourge of sidewalk scaffolding, which early on had made the list of suggestions but was ultimately cut because the City Council last spring passed legislation to address the problem. To judge from the comments, the legislation hasn’t made much of an impact so far.
Noise pollution — from helicopters, honking cars and screeching sirens — was another frequent complaint among commenters. At the same time, voters ranked near the bottom of the list a suggestion to enlist some big corporation — along the lines of Citibank sponsoring Citi Bikes — to tackle noise in subway stations. The proposal landed in 15th place. A few readers derided the idea of corporate involvement.
I’m guessing many readers abhor subway noise but have bigger concerns with the subway system; more than a few commenters highlighted the inaccessibility of stations for people with mobility issues. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state entity that oversees the subways, is planning to install elevators at 95 percent of stations only by the middle of the century.
The list’s ranking remained a horse race for much of the past week. Voters ultimately awarded fourth, fifth and sixth places to spongy coastlines, reining in City Hall bureaucracy and providing clean, safe public pay toilets that don’t cost taxpayers $1 million apiece. A range of desires.
As it happens, over the weekend Mr. Mamdani announced his intention to commit $4 million for 20 to 30 modular toilets across the five boroughs.
“In a city that has everything,” he said, “the one thing that is often impossible to find is a public bathroom.”
Now let’s see how he deals with the rest.
Michael Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a team of journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic.
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