One year ago, we started an experiment: to give New Yorkers the power to decide how to spend $1 million of their tax dollars on projects in the neighborhood.
That experiment, Participatory Budgeting, was a huge success. Over 3,000 people participated, we received nearly a thousand ideas for projects in the community, and our small voting sites were overwhelmed with eager residents wanting to be part of what the New York Times called “revolutionary civics in action.” The seven projects with the most votes – projects for local schools, libraries, parks, and streets – received City funding and are moving forward.
Now we are starting again, with another $1 million and your great ideas. Like last year, the whole process depends on you. The best ideas and energy came from the “neighborhood assemblies,” big community meetings where residents share their ideas for projects to build in our neighborhood. So please come out to a neighborhood assembly in the next few weeks to give your ideas, and help us build on this new form of democracy.
- September 24th, 6:30 PM, Carroll Gardens Library, 396 Clinton St. (at Union St.) RSVP here
- September 27th, 6:30 PM, PS 154, 1625 11th Ave. (at Windsor Pl.) RSVP here
- October 1st, 6:30 PM, PS 230, 1 Albemarle Rd. (at McDonald Ave.) RSVP here
- October 3rd, 6:30 PM, Greenwood Baptist Church, 461 6th St. (at 7th Ave.) RSVP here
- October 15th, 7 PM, Bais Yaakov Day Care Center, 1371 46th St. (at 14th Ave.) RSVP here
If you didn't participate last year, or want to be reminded of the fun, check out our new video.
One thing that makes Participatory Budgeting great is that it brings new people into community discussions. One voter at the Windsor Terrace Library said, “I've lived in America ten years and this is the first time I got to vote in anything.”
This year, we hope to engage more young people in Participatory Budgeting. At each neighborhood assembly we will have a break-out group for youth where they can discuss their ideas for projects in our community with their peers (generally between ages 12 - 18, but anyone is welcome). So please encourage your children to join us. And starting this year, residents 16 and older will be able to vote on the final projects!
We are going to need a lot of help pulling together these historic assemblies (and throughout the process). If you would like to volunteer, either to help spread the word about the assemblies or to work at one the assemblies themselves, please email me at lander@council.nyc.gov.
I hope to see you at one of the neighborhood assemblies. Please RSVP here.
Please tell me you are not saying that Carroll Gardens had rundown storefronts before the yuppies came? If you are, you lose all credibility in this conversation. It was our mamma and pop shops that attracted the yuppies here in the first place. Get lost.
Maybe you're confused...this is the Windsor Terrace/Kensington Patch, not Carroll Gardens. And your credibility isn't exactly established when you suggest that $1 million is enough to build "affordable housing for senior citizens." A million dollars isn't very much money and is barely enough to build one house in Windsor Terrace or Carroll Gardens. In any case, things have changed and property values have gone up. That's a good thing. I doubt that people who own homes in any of the neighborhoods we've mentioned are complaining that rising property values have made them fairly wealthy. As for mom and pop shops...I lived in Park Slope in the nineties and it became a vastly better place...after the yuppies moved in, not before. Before, it was kind of a shithole. Now it's one of the richest, most desirable neighborhoods in the entire country. This may not be to your liking, but luckily you aren't King of Brooklyn. Otherwise we might all be living in "affordable housing."
But, for you to make blanket statements that every landlord who sold to newbies was a local is asinine. Stop making huge generalizations. It wasn't all locals.