Cunningham Park, Queens (photo: @NYCParks)
New York City’s parks literally saved lives during the pandemic. In my community of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, our open spaces allowed us to escape the physical, mental, and social constraints of quarantine into fresh air. Today, our parks, pools, playgrounds, and plazas are places of reconnecting and healing for a community pushing forward from its days as the epicenter of a global crisis.
Across our city, parks and public spaces will be essential to meeting the multiple challenges we face, from health care to climate change and more. We must recognize the extraordinary value of our park system and deepen our investment for all neighborhoods, and for future generations. Every community needs and deserves the space to thrive.
Beautiful, functional parks are not luxuries only for certain neighborhoods to enjoy at the expense of others. They are part of our critical infrastructure. But, like so much other infrastructure, poor communities of color lack access to high-quality parks. On average, neighborhoods of color have 33% less park space per person than predominantly white neighborhoods. In an extreme example, the historic Upper West Side is sandwiched between 840 acres of Central Park and 310 acres of Riverside Park, while NYCHA playgrounds are in disrepair and have been neglected for decades. In my district, the immigrant communities of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, we have fewer than 12 acres of public parks, some of the least park space per person in all of New York City.
This uneven distribution of park space and playgrounds is no accident. Federal maps of New York City from the 1930s show neighborhoods where the government decided not to invest at all due to the “infiltration” of Black people and immigrants. Now, these same communities are “urban heat islands” where sparse tree cover and exposed asphalt cause temperatures to soar to deadly highs each summer. In so many ways, the lack of green space caused by disinvestment causes real harm to the most vulnerable New Yorkers and exacerbates the impacts of the climate crisis on communities of color.
Our parks are also deeply connected to our city’s civic health. From Diversity Plaza in Jackson Heights to Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick, New York City’s parks and public spaces have been focal points of political organizing and mass movements. In 1970, Stonewall activists seized Christopher Street for the first Pride. The occupation of Zuccotti Park mobilized a generation of activists. In 2020, Union Square, Foley Square, and Grand Army Plaza were gathering points for the response to the police murder of George Floyd. To deprive people of public space is to restrict their political power.
And this only scratches the surface of how parks impact our city. Bioswales and planter boxes absorb stormwater to prevent flooding. Street trees reduce temperatures on hot summer days. Open streets, playgrounds, and gardens provide places for social interaction, for our youngest kids to our elders and everyone in between. Pedestrian plazas drive foot traffic to local businesses. Public spaces can help reorient our city towards people and our needs – here in Jackson Heights, we cherish 34th Avenue, the city’s “gold standard” Open Street, which we should further transform into a linear park.
In short, our parks and other public spaces are a matter of social justice. As the new Chair of the City Council’s Committee on Parks and Recreation, I believe we must use our resources and our vision to create parks where none exist, and systematically invest in green spaces in neighborhoods that have long been ignored. Our parks have the power to heal and transform our city.
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Shekar Krishnan represents Elmhurst and Jackson Heights in the New York City Council. He is the Chair of the Committee on Parks and Recreation. On Twitter @voteshekar.
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NYC CTO Matthew Fraser with Mayor Adams (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
The de Blasio administration acknowledged that New York City desperately needs a Digital Service Organization (DSO) when it announced less than a month before the mayor left office that it wants to hire people for a new “NYC Digital Services” unit that would apply best practices in modern, open-source software development to New York City’s many software and technology challenges. Within two weeks of those first job postings going out, the inevitable happened: Mayor Adams announced a new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the start of his administration on January 1.
The new CTO is Matthew Fraser, and thanks to Adams’ Executive Order #3, he will be in charge of a newly-created Office of Technology and Innovation that will consolidate nearly a half dozen existing technology agencies and units under its leadership, including the Department of Information and Technology (DoITT), Cyber Command, 311, and the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (MODA).
So who is Matthew Fraser and what does he need to do?
A simple search for “Matthew Fraser New York City” on Google turns up Linkedin and Twitter profiles that give us some clues that can help us answer the question City & State New York flatly asked, “Could Eric Adams’ new tech chief bring NYC out of the dark ages?”
Fraser’s Linkedin shows that he was Deputy Commissioner and Chief Information Officer of the NYPD for nearly two years. Before that he worked at Gartner, a technology consulting corporation, as a Director of Consulting Services. And before that he served for four years at NYPD doing technology strategy and nine years doing technology project management for “the City of New York.”
To my knowledge, the NYPD has not adopted any of the DSO-style practices for which I and many other technologists frequently advocate. The NYPD has no presence on Github, which is a popular code sharing platform where many prominent DSOs such as the federal government’s 18F and the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service publish code, gather user feedback, and recruit technical talent. Indeed, NYPD clearly doesn’t care about Github as the github.com/NYPD profile is owned by someone with an anime avatar. From the perspective of the DSO community, which views posting code and issues to Github as a core tool in their workflows, NYPD’s Github situation is one degree more embarrassing than DoITT’s empty Github profile. At least DoITT has secured a decent screen-name!
Gartner is well-known as a technology research company, but also one of the guardians of the existing technology status quo and a primary pusher of the type of expensive proprietary corporate software that has failed New York City government agencies and residents over and over and over again.
Gartner and its big corporate IT software vendor peers view the open source-based DSO movement as a threat to their core business. They know that if New York City gets good at using open-source software to build its own solutions, then proprietary IT vendors can kiss hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts goodbye. Don’t take my word for it. Look at how the "Gov Tech" industry lobby groups reacted to the success of 18F, the country’s largest DSO. It aggressively lobbied Congress to undermine 18F’s ability to compete with corporate vendors!
But just because Fraser worked for Gartner and the NYPD doesn’t mean he’s beholden to the IT vendors that orbit those entities or that he won’t be able to deliver modern digital services to New York City residents. Let’s look to Fraser’s Twitter profile for more insights.
On Twitter, as of January 20th 2022, the @NYPDTECH handle still carries Matthew Fraser’s name and picture, and a banner image displaying CompStat, the police department’s data-centric crime-reporting tool. The content of the feed is generic NYPD stuff – nothing particularly tech focused. We do get this short but kind of charming video of Fraser talking about his work and perspective. But we can also read between the lines.
Fraser, in this Twitter profile, is the embodiment of NYPD technology. And if there is one thing Mayor Adams has made clear about his plans for the city, it’s that he wants to CompStat New York City.
CompStat is a system for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing policing data, first pioneered and launched in New York City in 1994 and now utilized throughout the world. It’s not a specific computer program but rather an approach to using databases, GIS, and data analysis tools to organize information about crime and policing, which is then used for situational awareness, success metrics, commander assessment, accountability, and more. The NYPD, and Adams, are extremely proud of CompStat.
From the New Yorker article:
Adams was part of a team that helped put together the early versions. “I was just this computer geek,” he said. “We were building out the first layers of this new form of thinking. We had no idea we were going to make this impact. Trust me, it was unbelievable.”
Indeed, the NYPD loves data reports and dashboards, and if Fraser’s Linkedin Activity is any indication, putting them together is a big part of his work. A quick analysis of the reports and dashboards section of the NYPD website reveals they’re relying on proprietary Microsoft technology, not the open-source technologies that a DSO would use to build the same type of interfaces.
It’s probably fair to say that Fraser isn’t as familiar with open-source solutions as many civic technologists would like him to be, but that’s also OK. Anyone who builds real systems that have real users knows that you’ve got to build with what works. And if Microsoft is delivering for the NYPD, and they’re doing so for about $2 million per year worth of contracts, then so be it. But the challenges he’s about to face will require far more complex work.
As head of NYPD technology, Fraser has had the benefit of working within a single agency, controlled by a central bureaucracy with a (somewhat) unified system of contracting and assembling technology solutions. In his new role he has a mandate to integrate the city’s main cross-agency technology programs into a coherent strategy, and he will inevitably come up against many of the same problems that arose when the Obama administration first attempted to launch their HealthCare.gov program, which ambitiously attempted to tie a lot of proprietary software made by different commercial vendors together. It failed massively.
A tremendous amount of ink has been spilled about why healthcare.gov failed initially and the crack teams that emerged to fix the problem using open-source components and startup-style development strategies. After fixing HealthCare.gov, those people went on to organize the federal government's first DSOs: the US Digital Service and 18F.
Now, 10 years later, there is a tremendous wealth of books, best practice manuals, organizational models, and open source code available to help overcome the difficulties of building modern digital services inside government. Thanks to all these advances, it has never been easier, technically-speaking, to fulfill the ambitious, reasonable (and dare I say essential) dream of CompStat for the city.
But to access this wealth of knowledge, Fraser will have to venture out of the comfortable world of proprietary software vendors and monolithic contracts and into a less familiar — but very friendly and collaborative — open-source ecosystem of government digital services. If he and Adams are truly guided by the higher purpose of revolutionizing municipal government in the vein of how CompStat revolutionized policing, then they could be a massive success.
Technologists all over this city are rooting for Fraser and Adams, and I have no doubt many would be willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work on the city’s behalf if Fraser indicates he is ready, willing, and able to adopt DSO practices.
A good first step: organize a presentable Github profile for his new office.
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Devin Balkind is a civic technologist, software producer and nonprofit executive passionate about digital government reform. He leads the WeGov.NYC project. On Twitter @DevinBalkind.
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Gov. Hochul in the Hall of Governors (photo: governor's office of Kathy Hocul)
Governor Kathy Hochul’s recent State of the State address promised a new era of political collaboration and offered a sweeping agenda to improve the state. “We will share success,” she promised. “We will find common ground. We will restore trust in this government.”
At the same time, she exhibited a personal modesty that set her apart from her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo. “I didn’t come here to make history,” she said. “I came to make a difference.”
As historian Allan Nevins wrote, "to be governor of New York…was to occupy a position which might be distinguished or unimportant, according to the man who held it." Governor Hochul may not have come to Albany to make history but she has already done so just by being the first woman to hold that position and by restoring decorum and public confidence in the Executive Chamber.
“I have a deep reverence for our state’s remarkable past,” she said in her address. There may be some helpful insights from that remarkable past, particularly the strategies of New York’s strongest previous governors, that she could find helpful.
Define An Expansive Vision
Great governors offer dramatic visions for their state and proceed to make them real. Gov. DeWitt Clinton (1817-23, 1825-27) championed constructing the Erie Canal, from Troy to Buffalo, the nation's most important public works project in the 19th century. The canal was a dramatic success that propelled New York City and State to national preeminence. Clinton was a visionary (foreseeing the canal as an engine for growth), advocate (crafting appeals to bring together "communities of interest": agriculture, commerce and manufacturing) and leader (negotiating approval from a factious legislature).
He was also a shrewd administrator. He worked out financing to build the canal entirely from state resources, particularly bonds. He realized that either starting at the Hudson River in Troy and building westward, or at Lake Erie at Buffalo and building eastward, might mean that the canal stopped mid-state if resources or public support waned, Clinton shrewdly began construction at Rome in 1817. That was near the middle of the state where costs were lowest. Building both east and west, toward the Hudson and Lake Erie, encouraged continued statewide legislative and public support until the enterprise was completed in 1825.
Hochul’s speech provided her take on New York’s inspirational historical greatness. “While we may be imperfect, New Yorkers have always been the risk-takers, entrepreneurs, the innovators, the builders, the immigrants, the students, the true believers and the dreamers who know that there truly is only one New York”
Demonstrate Highly-Visible Personal Leadership
George Clinton, New York's first and longest-tenured governor (1777-95, 1801-04), set the tone for taking bold action when models were lacking. Clinton, a patriot general fighting the British when he was elected, expressed determination in his first speech to be a strong governor and to "exercise for the advantage of the people the powers with which they have invested me." That set the tone for the history of executive leadership in New York.
After his inauguration, Governor Clinton resumed command of patriot troops fighting in the Hudson Valley. As his military duties eased, he turned full-time to the precedent-setting work as governor. He set up state government, established New York's first system of taxation and fiscal management, and supported public education and the building of roads and early canals.
In 1786, the governor personally commanded state militia troops to confront an armed anti-tax uprising that had started in Massachusetts and threatened to spread into New York. Two years later, he led the militia in suppressing a riot in New York City. The governor, on the front lines, was injured when a rioter threw a rock.
Act Boldly In Crises
Hochul has promised to confront COVID- 19, stem New York’s loss of population, and substantially strengthen public education. She is aligning with successful governors who take charge and dramatically meet critical issues.
Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1929-1933), alarmed by rising unemployment during the Great Depression after the Stock Market “crash” of 1929, called the legislature into emergency session in August 1931. “New York cannot wait,” he warned in a dramatic address to the lawmakers. “You face… the problem of providing immediate relief."
He proposed a Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), its name strategically selected to connote urgency but also impermanence. This strategy addressed the need for immediate action but also disarmed critics who accused Roosevelt of pushing New York into a permanent welfare state mode.
FDR skillfully outmaneuvered his Republican opponents in the legislature by threatening to veto their weak alternative proposal and blame them for inaction. The opposition folded and the TERA bill passed. The new agency improvised and succeeded, and became a model for similar New Deal recovery and relief agencies when Roosevelt became president in 1933. As federal programs ramped up, the need for the state program diminished and, true to FDR’s promise, TERA expired in 1937.
Hochul already has FDR in mind as a model. “First as governor and then as president, FDR literally rebuilt the economy from the ground up after the crash of 1929,” she said in her inaugural address. “More than giving people jobs, he gave people hope.”
Blend Short-Term Wins With Long-Term Impact
Governor Theodore Roosevelt (1899-1901) is a good model of executive energy (he often walked briskly several blocks from the Executive Mansion and bounded up the Capitol steps two at a time); openness (twice-daily candid interviews with reporters); and pragmatic compromise (keeping the public interest paramount but dealing with the political reality of political parties dominated by bosses). U.S. Senator Thomas Platt, the de facto head of the state Republican Party, later recalled that TR had promised to consult him on policy and appointments. “He religiously fulfilled this pledge,” said Platt, “although he frequently did just what he pleased.”
Roosevelt chalked up some impressive short-term achievements. He persuaded the legislature to pass a law to tax business franchises despite opposition from within his own Republican Party. TR was the first governor to issue an order mandating the cleanup of a waterway. He also left a long-term legacy. A commission he appointed recommended abandoning the by-then-aging Erie Canal in favor of a modern, new Barge Canal, finally achieved in 1903 (and still in operation today). Another commission recommended consolidation of scattered state education policy in a new State Education Department. TR endorsed it but political bickering delayed implementation until 1904.
Manage State Finances
Many governors have won initial public confidence by committing to cut waste and reign in non-essential public spending. Hochul has promised more efficient state spending and tax relief for New York’s middle class. Effective fiscal management is a hallmark of New York’s leading governors.
"New York faces the problem of fitting the aspirations of public service into the reduced limits of its treasury," said Governor Herbert Lehman (1933-42) during his first inaugural address, in the depths of the Great Depression. He had inherited a $106 million state deficit. Lehman got a fiscal break. As the Depression waned and military spending at the beginning of World War II ramped up, state tax revenues increased. Lehman made the most of public resources. He was a skilled administrator who dramatically expanded social programs, unemployment, and other areas. He left the state with an $80 million surplus in 1942.
These examples suggest that successful New York governors are strong leaders, visionary but also pragmatic, idealists but also political realists, flexible but also principled and steadfast. Hochul should find that their strategies and tactics are worthy of consideration as she forges ahead with her governorship.
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Bruce W. Dearstyne is a historian in Albany, NY. SUNY Press is publishing the second edition of his book The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History and his new book The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era later this year.
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