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To Help Increase Resiliency, New York City Needs More Community-Tailored Climate Information


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Protecting NYC from climate change (photo: Paige Polk/Mayoral Photography Office)


Climate change seriously upped its impact this year in New York City. Hurricane Ida produced historic rainfall and flooding, which triggered flash flood warnings across all five boroughs for the first time ever and caused at least 13 fatalities in the city itself.

In protecting our communities from the consequences of climate change, an important piece of the solution that needs improvement is access to and engagement with user-friendly, hyper-local climate data. This would allow policy-makers and New Yorkers to understand how to better address impacts to their own communities.

Recently, the City Council voted to create a citywide climate resiliency plan, which strives to ensure preparedness for extreme weather across New York City. From the limited information that is publicly available, it appears to take a “top-down” approach, i.e., city agencies will be responsible for its development, implementation, and oversight. While it is possible that it will work to expand direct community engagement in the process,  those details are not currently highlighted.

A lesser discussed aspect of climate resilience is the importance of social infrastructure, namely the people, places and institutions that allow communities to respond to climate change. When extreme events upheave daily life, the stronger the local relationships one maintains with their community, the greater their ability to recover. Importantly, incoming Mayor Eric Adams’ citywide resiliency plan includes the idea of a neighborhood-specific needs assessment.

There are a number of reasons that it is imperative to consider climate resilience from the “bottom-up,” communitywide level, in addition to the focus on citywide planning initiatives. While a portion of the $15 billion in federal funds administered by the city post-Sandy did go to small business and workforce funding, money to build resilience through efforts that better connect people within communities was largely absent. Measures such as generating plans to identify and support vulnerable neighbors likely could have alleviated some of the impacts of stormwater flooding experienced during Hurricane Ida.

Community-focused efforts strive to marry climate justice and social resilience. They work to generally implement effective, quick to install, and/or inexpensive hyperlocal measures. These may include maintaining secular and nonsecular spaces for people to discuss local climate information and educating communities about how they can improve their climate decision making through interactive games. They help highlight nuanced neighborhood needs and recognize that residents are important sources of knowledge about the places where they live. 

When community information is not sufficiently utilized, there can be unintended consequences. For example, green infrastructure projects to divert stormwater from Jamaica Bay in New York City through government projects were concentrated in the northern and eastern parts of Brooklyn. Such a focus level left many residents in adjacent neighborhoods with flood reduction projects still in the “design phase” when Hurricane Ida hit.

New York State went down the path of community resilience once but didn’t fully see it through. The New York Rising Community Reconstruction Program was launched after Hurricane Sandy to fund proposals submitted by planning committees, each representing a small piece of the state. Reporting by The City said that many of these proposals remain unfunded, hampering the ability of the state to cope with climate impacts since that time.

So how do we support neighborhood-based resiliency efforts in New York City? One of the puzzle pieces relates to the information an interested member of the public, but not a climate expert per se, could extract about neighborhoods across the city.

In our efforts to address this topic, we found two overarching themes.

First, while each neighborhood faces a unique set of climate-related issues, different neighborhoods often face similar challenges that can help direct citywide planning when looked at from a “bottom-up” approach. As mentioned by community members who took part in a 2020 climate outreach initiative, better information sharing across districts and neighborhoods would also help geographically separated communities support each other’s planning efforts.

Second, the city does have a variety of sources that contain climate change-connected data. However, the information is spread across a seeming maze of locations that is often incomplete, hard to access and compare, and/or difficult to visualize. While these can be common challenges for state and federal level data too, they seem more pronounced at the local, community-wide level.

Efforts to include stakeholder engagement with city data do exist, for example, in the recent Stormwater Resiliency Plan. However, there does not appear to be a concerted citywide effort to connect the various aspects of the climate picture together for New York City’s communities. Bringing in people with expertise in research and analysis to serve as community liaisons, translating city data to the public, could greatly help accelerate that process.

To its credit, NYC Emergency Management produced a valuable, digitized resource in 2019, the NYC Hazard Mitigation – Community Risk Assessment Dashboard. It provides information searchable by addresses and neighborhoods, on a handful of climate-related issues. However, since it broadly focuses on hazards, it requires an additional effort to cross-reference the information with other sources to gain a clearer climate-based picture of a neighborhood. It also does not appear to promote information sharing within and across neighborhoods, or collect knowledge embedded in communities.

Other ideas are also underway to seed information sharing, such as the Climate Knowledge Exchange under the Mayor’s Office of Climate Resiliency. While this is more focused on broadening stakeholder input to set research priorities, it represents an important effort in New York City to integrate and support community-led planning efforts.

Improving citywide access to data does require some additional “top-down” work on the government side. That said, a relatively small investment in improving the data quality and the ability to meaningfully engage with it could go a long way toward growing a more sustainable “bottom-up” resiliency.

While limiting greenhouse gas emissions is a global problem that needs global solutions, the impacts will be felt locally, by communities. Providing all New Yorkers, especially those in underserved communities, with the climate-related information they need, will create not just more resilient communities, but also a more collectively resilient New York City.

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Vaishali Talwar holds an M.Phil. in Physiology and Neuroscience and is a member of Science for New York (Sci4NY), an effort that aims to have policy makers and scientists work more closely together through project-based interaction in NYC. Nancy Holt, Ph.D., leads Sci4NY. She holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry and has worked on climate change issues at various levels of government, including at the U.S. Department of State. On Twitter @Sci4NY.

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Get Social: Candidates Must Unlock the Power of Young Voters in New York City Elections


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Teen voter registration (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


Twenty-five million people under the age of 30 voted in the 2020 presidential election. That’s the highest it has ever been, both in raw numbers and percentage of eligible voters. As one of the largest voter blocs in the country, politicians want and need as much of the “Gen Z'' vote as they can get. So naturally, politicians are thinking, where can we find the youth?

On social media, of course.

Yet, as New York City’s 2021 election cycle has drawn to a close, local candidates have been struggling to use social media to connect with this impactful group of voters, who we know vote  at far lower rates in local elections than national ones. As a 15-year-old, future voter, and New York City native, I have a few thoughts on how candidates should be better utilizing these communication tools.

According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of Americans under 30 use some form of social media, making it the most important medium for connecting with young voters. It’s also a useful tool for reaching a wider array of people. About half of Latino and Black Americans are on Instagram in particular, according to the Pew study.

The ultimate endgame for all politicians is to get as many votes as possible. How they allocate their resources determines their priorities. Over the course of the 2021 election cycle,  New York City candidates spent over $47 million on television ads and an additional $27.3 million on all mailings, campaign literature, and print advertising, according to the latest data from the city’s Campaign Finance Board.

While it’s harder to track spending on social media, if candidates invested a quarter of what they spent on traditional media on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok, they would be far better off connecting with young voters*. While it can be complicated, it doesn’t have to be expensive at all. Duolingo, the popular language learning app, is dominating TikTok (@duolingo) with its weird, wacky, and low-budget content that doesn’t even reference its language learning app. And, it’s working: this year alone they managed to increase profit by 106%.

Throughout history, successful public figures have mastered the communication tools of their time. Benjamin Franklin distributed pamphlets of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” to inspire support for the revolution. Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his Fireside Chats through radio. Dwight Eisenhower was the first presidential candidate to use televised campaign ads. And John F. Kennedy charmed Americans through his performance (and use of stage makeup) in the televised debates. In the modern era, politicians must learn to use social media.

In 2008, Barack Obama tapped into social media to reach the White House. Donald Trump was the first president to have his own personal Twitter account. (While Obama did have a Twitter account while running and during his time in office, it’s been carefully managed by his team.) Trump was his authentic, unfiltered self on Twitter and used the platform to gain and direct a massive following before he was kicked off the platform due to the risk of further incitement of violence.

Nowadays, we see a lot of politicians on Twitter, some trying to copy Trump’s model while others use it far more carefully. The politician most widely-recognized as being on the cutting edge of social media is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC came out of nowhere to win her New York congressional seat in 2018 and become the youngest member of Congress. Her saviness on social media has played an instrumental role in her rise. In fact, she was so successful at connecting with people through social media, she was asked to lead a seminar on how to use Twitter for fellow members of Congress.

Whether she’s cooking pasta on Instagram Live, conducting a makeup tutorial on Facebook, responding to Ted Cruz on Twitter, or live-streaming a video game session on Twitch, AOC is always looking for new ways to break the fourth wall and connect with people on social media. Of course, she’s not cooking up pasta in front of the world just because she has a killer recipe she wants to share. She’s sharing her ideas while building a two-part story combining the visuals (cooking, gaming, etc.) and her voice (policies, big ideas, opinions). She’s being real and human, breaking the barrier of awkwardness that often arises when people talk to politicians.

Her approach is similar to the TikToker Dylan Lemay (@dylanlemay). Lemay gained millions of followers on TikTok while working at an ice cream shop. While his videos show him scooping ice cream and decorating cakes, his voice-overs share stories about what he did that day with his friends, and his plans for later. This is often referred to as “multi-narrative storytelling,” and it’s the same approach AOC is using in her social media content to discuss public policy.

Unfortunately, these inventive new ways of using social media for political purposes mostly haven't reached New York City’s local elections -- despite being the nation's cultural capital and home of countless social media agencies and influencers (soon to include Lemay, who is moving to New York City to start his own ice cream shop).

Based on my own analysis of the New York City mayoral candidates’ social media channels, few if any are using social media to efficiently target young voters. Many are sharing longform, highly-edited essays in Twitter threads spanning multiple tweets, which ruins the allure of Twitter’s short form and personable style. On Instagram, candidates mostly posted pictures of their travels around the city, meeting and talking with voters. Rarely did they try to engage directly with voters through social media (commenting, responding to questions directly, interacting in other ways), missing out on the potentially pivotal group of voters under 30.

Most candidates running for mayor never even attempted to create a TikTok account, despite the platform’s growing popularity over Facebook and Instagram and a global audience of over 1 billion users.  We know this is a viable way to help win elections because it has happened before — on November 2, two 19-year-olds from Connecticut won their local elections through the power of social media.

There are some local candidates who shine above the rest in their social media performance. For example, Brooklyn City Council Member-Elect Chi Ossé developed his online following through his leadership in the Black Lives Matter movement. The 23-year-old has expanded his audience by being genuine on Twitter and interactive with voters on Instagram, which helped lead to his win on Election Day. His staff also consists of fellow underrepresented New Yorkers around the same age. I would love to see Ossé take on TikTok as well.

That’s among my suggestions for all New York City politicians, who collectively can do a lot to improve their social media game:

First, use TikTok. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s what’s now and next, so you better use it. With TikTok just surpassing YouTube in watch-hours per month, it’s an important medium for appealing to a younger audience. Warm up with repurposed content from other platforms if you are feeling skeptical. The more you use it, the more comfortable you will get with the platform's unique and ever-changing trends. Be silly, embarrass yourself, let loose, show yourself. TikTok is the place to be.

Next, be authentic. Twitter and Instagram aren’t just advertising platforms. Be yourself. Write your own tweets. Not everything has to be reviewed by a team of 10 people. If you have an idea, share it. Have a picture you like? Post it on your IG story. This will help candidates appear more relatable and in-touch with regular people.

Next, try using multi-narrative storytelling. Introduce seemingly unrelated narratives into the same content and trust that your audience will understand and actually enjoy the content.

Don’t forget, interact! One-way social media communication is boring. Social media was created for people to have conversations with each other, and that’s what most people use it for. Respond to comments. Comment on other people’s content. Carefully, have a debate with someone in their DMs — I can promise you they’ll remember it.**

Next, be genuine. You don’t have to be so uptight and calculating. Voters aren’t dumb, they can tell. If you put on the camera and lose the makeup and all the other showmanship you might have, you will appear more genuine. Voters are always looking for more genuine candidates.

Lastly, get more youth on your team. Who’s better at appealing to young voters than other young voters? Many young New Yorkers are leading the fight against climate change, gun violence, and so much more. You can work with young voices to guide your decisions in the world of social media. Many young people know what they are doing, and you should trust that many would love to help you with your campaign.

With another round of City Council elections throughout the city just around the corner in 2023, now is the time for anyone considering running for one of these seats to break ground on their social media strategy, and start thinking big about how they can inspire young New Yorkers to support their candidacy and vote. In doing so, our elected officials will be more in touch with young voters and more responsive to their needs.

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Nikita Chernin is a sophomore at New Dorp High School and a NYC Votes Youth Ambassador in Staten Island. The views expressed here are his own. On Twitter @N6chernin.

*While a lot of campaigns use the Facebook ad tools to advertise to voters, the people they target are usually of an older demographic. Facebook does skew more towards the older generations in its user-base so while politicians do advertise there, it’s not seen by youth as much.

**A word of caution. There are boundaries that people have. Be careful to not cross them, as crossing people’s personal boundaries usually results in problems. Always use your brain and exercise caution when talking to voters in private — and expect that anything you say privately will become public at some point.

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De Blasio Administration Announces Long-Sought ‘NYC Digital Service’ Just Days Before Adams Takes Over


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NYC Department of Information Information Technology and Telecommunications Github profile


New York City’s civic technology community has for many years been calling on city government to establish a Digital Service Organization (DSO). DSOs are technology groups organized within government agenies that use open source software to create their own technology solutions instead of buying proprietary services from vendors like IBM, ESRI, and Microsoft. The DSO organizational model is about 10 years old and has been adopted by cities (eg Boston), regions (eg Ontario) and national governments (eg 18F) all over the world with great success.

Inexplicably, New York City has failed to organize a DSO of its own. So while governments all over the world have operational DSOs with dozens, even hundreds, of staff effectively building and deploying modern websites and apps, and rebuilding critical technical infrastructure to modernize service delivery, New York City’s Chief Technology Officer, with less than a month left in the de Blasio administration, just put up its first job postings seeking “founding member[s] of the NYC Digital Service!”

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From the outside, it certainly looks like the administration and its CTO want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to claim they “founded” New York City’s DSO without having to ruffle any feathers by operationalizing it. And DSOs ruffle a lot of feathers. This is something the administration and CTO know well because when diligent civil servants within city agencies organized DSO-style units on their own, these units were mostly ignored by the city’s technology leadership and left to fend for themselves against legions of bureaucrats uninterested in implementing DSO-style reforms. Here are a few examples:

The Mayor’s Office of Economic Oppportunity’s Benefits and Screening API team have done a tremendous job putting together a solution for automating the screening of people for city benefits. Their pioneering work delivered a functional technical solution, but a system without users isn’t very useful. They need city agencies to work with them to both document screening criteria and to use their screening tools.

Without support from top leadership pressuring agencies to work with them to implement their system, what could’ve been a massively successful program to modernize how the city delivers benefits has turned into an incremental step in the right direction. And that direction leads right to Eric Adam’s “MyCity” app concept, which he mentioned frequently during his successful campaign for mayor.

The story of Planning Labs at the New York City Department of City Planning is another good example of this administration’s failed technology leadership. Planning Labs was created within City Planning explicitly as a DSO. In its two years of operation, its members built about a dozen innovative and popular apps such as the ZoLa land use map system and Population Fact Finder statistical research tool.

But its success and aggressive DSO-style approach to IT reform drew the ire of the NYC technology bureaucracy, who’d prefer to sign multimillion dollar contracts with Microsoft than spend hundreds of thousands of dollars organizing their own software teams. And so…NYC Planning Labs still exists but hasn’t released a new open source product in nearly two years and none of the original team members work for the city anymore.

To understand why the city technology bureaucracy fears DSOs so much you have to understand that the current crop of technology leadership, not just in New York City but in governments all over the world, are, generally speaking, not engineers and product managers but business people and public administrators. The way they’re trained to produce technology is through procurement processes, not by building it. This approach used to make sense.

Twenty years ago software was a lot harder to make than it is today so governments needed to hire specialized software development firms to make it. But not any more. Now there are open source components for virtually everything. DSOs knit them together to create solutions. Often they do this with flexible teams of five or six people: two software developers, two graphic/content/experience designers, and two project/product managers.

The fact that it’s never been easier to create complex information management systems to make government services delivery faster, better, and cheaper is great news. But it's also scary for the old guard technology establishment and their young acolytes. They don't know how to organize productive software development teams and would much prefer to outsource this work to the giant corporations that, very likely, they used to work for and/or, very likely, they plan to work for again after their government service is over. Why would they, as a city employee, want to spend their time organizing software teams for the government when they could spend it organizing lucrative contracts for potential future employers?

Plus, building software within the city government is hard! The city’s arcane civil service designations make it difficult to hire competent software developers and pay them competitive rates. The city’s archaic IT infrastructure, from its slow internet, to its firewalls, to its government-issued computers, makes it hard for development teams to use the best tools for their work. That’s why leadership is essential for pushing through the type of coordinated reform New York City needs to modernize its technology infrastructure and service delivery. We need the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) to update civil service roles, the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) to update network configurations and hardware, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and other agencies to update their contracting practices, and so much more.

Without leadership driving reform, most people follow the path of least resistance and business as usual continues. During good times that simply means more of the same waste, inefficiency, and poor service quality that so many New Yorkers now expect from their municipal government. But during bad times, it means wholesale embarassment.

Most of us remember TurboVax, a website made by an unaffiliated volunteer software developer working in the spirit of mutual aid. That site did what the city’s CTO, DoITT, DOHMH, Health + Hospitals, Emergency Management, and others, with a combined budget of tens of billions of dollars, couldn’t: create an online map showing people where they could get vaccinated. The New York Times headline: “N.Y.’s Vaccine Websites Weren’t Working. He Built a New One for $50”. If that story couldn’t wake up the administration’s technology leadership to the reality of their failure, nothing could.

Had the city had a DSO, I have no doubt they’d have had a website up before the vaccine was out, and they’d probably have solved a hundred other problems as well: from rebuilding the famously terrible DOBNow system, to improving the usability of the city’s decade old central website (nyc.gov), to unifying user logins among city websites, giving New Yorkers the upgraded civic engagement experience that we, in a sense, voted for during the last referendum cycle, making benefits easier to access and so much more.

The good thing about being behind is that you can catch up by utilizing the best practices established by others instead of having to invent those best practices yourself. As such, the incoming Adams administration is in a perfect position to upgrade the city. There are tons of DSO alumni they can hire, Playbooks they can follow, and even established federal partnership pathways designed explicitly to support DSO-powered reform.

And the de Blasio administration gets to say they started it all!

I guess everyone wins.

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Devin Balkind is a civic technologist. On Twitter @DevinBalkind.

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