How neighbor opposition affects what gets built in NYC and when
When do elected officials heed public comment? And is the current system working for us?
My friend Tucker had a good question after he read my last post about why NYC’s public toilets are so expensive and take so long to get built.
Tucker asked: “Why does neighbor opposition matter? Like when things get opened to public comment, what’s the requirement that the gov pay attention to what’s said?”
It’s a good question, and the answer isn’t obvious. There’s a few different mechanisms at play here.
1. NYC requires public comment as a step because bad things happened in the past without it.
NYC built neighbor input into processes because in the past, governments made decisions that were bad. Like tearing down the old Penn Station. Or building a freeway through a Black neighborhood. So now there are required spaces for public input for everything from building a new bike lane to updating the windows on a historic building to rezoning a parcel. But there’s no requirement that electeds do anything with that public input. They listen because a) they’re thinking about re-election and b) angry neighbors can thwart other stuff that electeds want to do.
2. Officials want to get re-elected.
The most extreme consequence of neighborhood opposition is a recall election, which requires widespread public outrage. Tucker and I experienced this firsthand in San Francisco in 2020, when local opposition to elected officials grew strong enough to result in a series of recalls. In 2021, voters successfully recalled three members of the San Francisco school board. The recall was driven by frustration over the board’s focus on issues like renaming schools, rather than prioritizing the reopening of schools that had been closed due to COVID. While this is a rare and extreme outcome, it illustrates how powerful concentrated opposition can be— if a group can drum up the significant resources and broad support needed to succeed.
What’s more common is that neighbor opposition can make an elected official vulnerable in their next election. Proposals that take away parking or add housing can escalate easily to this level. Here’s what that looks like: a couple angry people get other neighbors riled up about an issue. They text and email everyone they know. They post in Facebook groups and Nextdoor forums. They put up signs and gather signatures. They hold community meetings. They organize a group to show up with matching shirts and signs at a city council meeting. Their efforts make the local papers. They’ve succeeded in making a stink. The next election is coming up. No one wants to run against a popular incumbent. But when there’s blood in the water… more challengers pop out of the woodwork.
This is an important part of representative democracy. We want our elected officials to be worried about what we as voters think. They should be worried that we’ll recall them. They should be worried that we’ll support a challenger instead. But here’s where it gets tricky.
3. Electeds expend political capital when they approve projects with broad benefits but concentrated costs.
Does neighbor opposition to a public toilet really rise to that level? Opposition to public toilets isn’t rage-worthy enough or well-organized enough to threaten someone’s re-election. So why would electeds care about neighbor opposition to something like a toilet?
Let’s consider a hypothetical. An agency is proposing a modern modular toilet go into a historic NYC park. Say there’s a few vocal preservation advocates who say the design clashes with the character of the park. They won’t accept a new toilet there unless it fits with the park’s architectural style. This local group isn’t super big or powerful, but they’re part of the broader citywide preservation network which is bigger and more powerful. A local elected official might think: “They’d be good to have on my side to advocate for other issues that I care about, and also helpful if I want to run for higher office at some point.” To make matters more complicated, one of the advocates leads the local Democratic Club, and upsetting that person just makes it harder for the official to get the Club’s endorsement and support in the next election. Need a reminder on the importance of Democratic Clubs? Here and Here.
It’s easier for the elected official to kill the modular toilet than to anger this small but influential crew. Since the bathroom wouldn’t deliver a major political win, it’s not worth the potential fallout. The diffuse public doesn’t care enough about the marginal toilet to make it worth it.
It takes bravery for elected officials to make moves that are in the public interest but opposed by a smaller group of more powerful folks.
Let’s rethink the process, so we can have nice things
My take: our current systems of public input aren’t getting us what we need. Not only do they make it impossibly time consuming and expensive to pop up infrastructure as simple as bathrooms… they also often fail to engage community members that are representative of the community.
I’d be excited to see more proposals that streamline the process. Ultimately, the goal should be to make the process faster, more efficient, and more responsive to the needs of the general public. Whether it’s installing public toilets, building bike lanes, or updating historic buildings, we need a system that allows us to move forward with infrastructure projects that serve everyone, without getting bogged down by endless red tape.
Part of that is focusing on outcomes as well as process. If we agree that the outcome we want is 2500 more public toilets, we will never get there if the Parks Dept has to try to please everyone to find a location for each one. Electeds should be worried that they won't win reelection because they didn't fulfill their goal of permitting 25K new homes or bringing down subway delays by 5%– but we as voters are not currently holding our representatives accountable to quantitative results.
It’s like going on a road trip with a car full of backseat drivers. If everyone keeps chiming in with their opinion on every turn, it just slows us down. But if we pick the best driver, trust them to choose the best route, and give them shit if they don’t get us there on time, we’ll make it there.
I would personally be willing to trade some public input opportunities for results. Instead of taking agency staff time to ask our opinion, what if we just held them accountable for results?