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The votes are in.
Last week The New York Times published 17 suggestions for how New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, might improve the city’s urban environment. I canvassed experts. Readers were invited to vote on their ideas.
The exercise was an attempt to jump-start public debate as a new administration moves into City Hall. To the tens of thousands of readers who voted, and to the hundreds who shared alternative proposals and gripes in the comments section, thank you.
And the winner is …
A suggestion to devote more resources to parks and libraries. That received the most up versus down votes. Supporting libraries and parks — beyond the roughly 2 percent of the city’s budget now spent on them — may seem a mild no-brainer. But 35,000 up votes to increase the funding makes plain just how valuable these traditional tent poles remain to residents and others in a swiftly changing city besieged by competing budget demands.
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Second on the list: repairing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a Robert Moses relic traversed by millions of trucks and cars now forced to play Russian roulette on its crumbling roadways.
The list’s bronze medal went to a proposal to build more mental health crisis centers. Both the expressway repair and the centers suggest New Yorkers care about vulnerable residents. But residents are also fed up with the city’s aging infrastructure and failure to deal with an epidemic of homelessness supercharged by the affordable housing shortage.
