Introduction and Executive Summary
Many reports are published each year in which experts try to envision and influence the future of the nation’s largest city. Why do another one? And why read a report written by undergraduate college students, however talented, when so many studies are available from respected non-profits, seasoned academic researchers and government officials? The answer is that here we have a future envisioned by those who have the greatest stake in it – young people who are planning for careers in which they will play leadership roles in the great city where they are now being schooled. New York’s future belongs to them – it’s their town, as the report’s title indicates. As a 63-year-old professor on the verge of retiring from teaching, I’ve been mindful that it’s about to be my students’ turn to try to shape the future direction of New York City. The decisions of the next mayor of New York – whether it is the current one or one of his challengers – will affect them for a long time.
With Ms. Kelly Eckenrode, instructional technology fellow, it’s been my pleasure to work with 20 second-semester sophomores in the Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College as they completed this report as part of a spring, 2017 seminar called Shaping the Future of New York City. Their ideas are fresh and thoughtful, sometimes daring yet also fiscally prudent.
The students have shown a good ability to recognize what has been working well, and look to build on that. For example, Monica Saw-Aung, Radhika Patel and Yocheved Gourarie see the de Blasio administration’s ThriveNYC program to improve access to mental health care as a good step forward, but they want to see better monitoring of the results. They focus on building a more caring structure of support from the ground up. They also stress the importance of continuing to wipe out the stigma that has often been attached to mental illness.
Even as they recognize current and past achievements, our team has also demonstrated impatience at the prospect of continuing to live with some of the more dysfunctional aspects of New York civic life. For example, Jannat Javed, Boris Avrumov, Batsheva Ettinger and Josiah James find that any comprehensive plan to truly prepare the subway system for the city’s future would have to include some revamping of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to make it more efficient and accountable to the public. They have some interesting ideas about how to raise revenue to improve mass transit – but they don’t want to give the MTA a free pass to spend such large sums without much better oversight of it.
Poverty was an important concern of our researchers, who picked the topics they reported on. Maisha Kamal and Crystal Lim took on the crisis of worsening homelessness, which has bedeviled mayors since the 1980s. After providing a clear-eyed history of the problem, they carefully recommend a number of solutions that go beyond what city government is doing now. Like the students who studied mental health, they also urge a change of heart so that the homeless are viewed with greater understanding and compassion.
Rose Douek, Eliane Aini, Daniella Jakubowitz and Dimitar Atanassov looked for a practical approach to reducing poverty and unemployment in New York. They note that while New York is a world financial capital, many people live in poverty because of the rising cost of housing. They propose a number of avenues that the next mayor can take to reduce poverty, especially to expand vocational instruction in high schools and community colleges, emphasizing skills that are in high demand. Another is to do more to provide incentives for large companies to bring jobs directly to the poorer communities where job opportunities are scant.
Taylor Castro, Maryam Choudhary and Nicole Grennan researched the school-to-prison pipeline, and write that the mayor of New York has a moral obligation to recognize the complex environmental factors that often connect to criminal behavior, such as socioeconomic status, education, mental health or family issues. That is their starting point for transforming the criminal justice system to end a harsh, overly punitive approach that they see as counterproductive.
Students brought their interest in health care and the sciences to our discussion of the city’s future. Abraham Chabbott, Fradah Gold, Fred Gong, Anna Gugeshashvili focused on three ways to improve public health – reducing smoking further, reducing obesity, and improving sex education – that all involve efforts to change public behavior for the better. They favor a more active approach on the part of city government.
What all of the research has in common is that the authors of this report are not content to let problems of the past fester in New York’s future – their future. They have the energy and the talent to get things done, and I have the feeling that the city of our future will be the better for it.
— Professor Paul Moses, May 2017
