Upzoned
In New York City, a playful bracket about broken hoops and dumping sites turns routine maintenance into a citywide tournament. Carlee Alm-LaBar, Edward Erfurt, and Alexander Lazard explore what that reveals about complaint driven 311 systems, how priorities really get set, and which neighborhoods get left off the board entirely. Their conversation presses on whether mayors can turn one clever contest into lasting trust instead of a one week story.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi, this is Carlee. Welcome to Up Zoned, a podcast from Strong Towns where we take a current news story about cities and use it to explore deeper concepts about how our cities work and what we can do to make them work better.
With me today I have frequent guest and Strong Towns Chief Technical Advisor, Edward Erfurt, as well as a friend and colleague from Lafayette, Louisiana, Alexander Lazard. Alexander is the Executive Director of the Lafayette Public Trust Financing Authority and also formerly worked in our local government here in Lafayette, so that's going to come in handy today. Both Edward and Alexander have extensive experience working in cities and with cities, and I think they'll have some great insights on today's story. Welcome, Alexander and Edward. Glad you guys are with us.
Hello, hello. Glad to be here and talk about some really fun things today.
Yes, always great. Carlee, awesome.
Edward knows this — Alexander, you may know — we're just coming off our own March Madness contest here at Strong Towns. I feel the need to give a big shout out to West Allis, Wisconsin, who was this year's 11th annual Strongest Town contest winner. A lot of great community pride coming out of Wisconsin this year, and West Allis was crowned the rightful champions last week. Congratulations to them.
Today's story is another kind of tournament-style celebration. I saw this first on social media, and then I had to track down an article about it. New York City has just asked their residents to vote on things like broken basketball hoops and rough bike paths in their own March Madness-style bracket, where they are trying to get their mayor to crown the winning city project. As someone who loves a good community engagement project, I was excited when I saw these headlines. But of course, my Strong Towns brain kicked in when I thought about the fact that these were maintenance projects we were asking folks to help with.
So today we're going to discuss with Edward and Alexander: what happens when routine city maintenance is turned into a public competition? Does it strengthen how we view this? Does it help cities prioritize? We'll talk about how cities actually manage routine maintenance, why prioritization matters, and what leaders can consider when doing something like this — something that gamifies a basic operation of our city.
We're going to talk a lot about maintenance today, but I wanted to start by asking you guys a basic question: when the mayor and his team dreamed this up, what problem do you think they were trying to solve? Who wants to take that first? I feel like Edward has a lot more experience and mileage, so I want to give him home court advantage.
I'm happy to chime in. Edward is right in theme with this whole topic.
On the surface — and I have lots of thoughts on this — what a great way to distract away from all the things that you're doing in City Hall. We're not going to talk about the big problems. We're not going to talk about the financial crater or filling certain job roles. We're going to pick some things in our community that are pretty simple things — fixing park benches, fixing water fountains — and then we're going to mobilize four of our city departments to advocate and cheerlead these fixes.
It's kind of like the Roman Coliseum, where Rome is burning but we're going to throw some Christians in the ring with tigers to bypass that. That is my initial read of this when I first saw it: here's a great way to shift that conversation in a completely different direction, mobilizing the whole city to talk about fixing little things as opposed to some of the other deeper issues cities face.
I will say too that I'm with Carlee — I'm a sucker for community engagement. So there's a piece of you that's like, you got thousands of people to interact with a thing that needs participants and citizens to care about it. Great.
Then, to your point, you look at what the things are and you think, well, we kind of should have a plan for some of this already. But I do have a sensitivity towards finding something that makes citizens care. There are times where the big problem is too much of an albatross — too large a thing for a citizen to wrap their arms around — but they get the basketball court that's been missing the net for three years. They see that and they get it.
So I think it opens up a discussion about municipalities' ability to recognize that you have to do both. You have to be responsible with your own capital infrastructure, but you also have to realize you should find a way for citizens to get involved where they can, to maintain that healthy citizen pride. I'm kind of torn, which is why I like this conversation, because you love it, but then you want more.
What I also thought about — I'm not sure if it was you or Edward who mentioned the departments, but the four departments coming in and saying, 'We got this project, we got that project' — I like the engagement, but it does open up a conversation about whether we're really thinking about maintenance of infrastructure. Oftentimes we stop at the initial construction and do not spend enough time thinking about operations and maintenance. That was my hot take when I first saw it.
I thought of you, Edward. I was excited when I found this story — I was like, Edward is the person I need with me on this. Does it reinforce the city's obligation to fix things, or does it run the risk of making it seem like not the city's core obligation? That's why I started with: why do you think this city did this? Is it really about maintaining public infrastructure, or is it about something else, and this is just a means to an end?
The trap that people could fall into with this is trivializing all of the different things. It's kind of like my background in architecture and looking at cities — all the folks that go to Detroit to look at the buildings that are decaying. There's an actual tourism industry of folks who like to go see that decay. So when you go into this, you kind of are trivializing all of these pieces.
But then I started to dig deeper into it. At first I thought it was such a polished approach that every mayor across North America should look at this and ask, 'Why aren't we doing this?' This Municipal Madness piece mobilizes the community. I'm sure the parks commissioner and the sports commissioner don't want to sit and talk about those little things — they're working on the billion-dollar roadway project, the hundred-million-dollar sports center. So they have to come out for these pieces.
From a management side, if you are truly vested in this, this is probably one of the most Strong Towns things a community could do, because you are shifting the conversation and saying: we are probably good at all those big things, but we're not good at the small things. Where does it really make a difference when we start looking at these small things? If I look at anything on the list, 'repair and repaint park benches' was like one of the first things knocked off the list.
We could be restructuring our conversations with staff when we're looking at repainting park benches, just saying: we need to get that into our cycle of work. We need to not wait for a citizen complaint. We're being empowered by the mayor — this is one of the top sixteen things they think we should be doing. This is not a hard thing. We could have a summer intern or a volunteer do it with paint. Why aren't we doing that?
By doing a lot of those small things, we build public trust in the work we do in municipalities, and it starts the snowball effect: now we're not just going to paint benches — we're going to find the broken ones, or identify where we need benches, because we'd like to be painting those in the future. From a structural management perspective, if you're truly serious about this, this is a great way to change the entire conversation you have internally with staff on taking on these projects.
To that point, Edward, I also see this as communication of a prioritization matrix. Even when you start to look at it, community space fixes came out on top because of their particular idea being the one ultimately selected. But you can look at what was the highest-ranked park fix, the highest-ranked street fix, the highest-ranked sports fix. If you want a proactive administration — a mayor always connected to the citizenry — then when they tell you what they want, do it. Repeat it.
Everywhere there's a trash pickup or illegal dumping pickup, every elected official should be there. I'm not an elected official, so I don't know — but I wonder if they make that connection: that the people told us what they wanted, so maybe I should do what they said they wanted.
We're going to link the story in the show notes. One of the things I noticed in the articles I read was that they made a point every time to say they were going to fix all of these — this was just a way to celebrate the mayor's first 100 days and get him out with the people prioritizing a fix that the people said was important. They were quick to say, 'We're going to fix them all. This is a prioritization mechanism.'
Alexander, as someone with a great track record of engaging the community — they got about 20,000 votes in a city of 8 million people. Certainly they're probably excited while also thinking there's more to tap into. How do you think about generating excitement? What are your benchmarks for when something is successful at engaging the community?
I don't know if 20,000 meets the statistically significant number based on the population density — I just don't know what that percentage would need to be. But when you get a response, number one, that's the hope: that you get people to engage with the information you're putting out and you're seeking to understand. Number two, not only are you hoping they engage, but you're hoping they stick around for the completion of the campaign. There were multiple rounds — things voted out at round one, round two, round three, and then there was the runner-up. So there was a cohort of people who cared enough to stick with the community engagement campaign on these particular items.
In a perfect world, you would create pinpoints of where you got responses, because most participation software can tell you what district a response came in on. You create a heat map, start to understand what portion of the city is your most engaged portion. Then you back into: I have a cohort of residents, a cohort of citizens, that I can go to not only when I'm trying to level-check what projects to do with limited dollars, but also when I'm trying to expand cultural opportunities and get more feedback on amenities. It starts to be a base that — if you take care of it — can provide feedback in an ongoing way.
My rule is: how you start a project is how you continue it. If it began with community engagement, it must continue with community engagement. So my question will be: how will you continue to have people engaged — not only just prioritizing maintenance opportunities at highly used public assets, but with how well you took care of the one thing they said they wanted done? Those are the benchmarks: where is the response coming from, how are we cultivating that for other things we need engagement on, and how well are we keeping people engaged throughout the duration of the campaign we asked them to give feedback for?
I love that — you're exactly right. To me, when I looked at this story, it's less about the success of this particular contest and more about whether this is something that helps build more trust and more engagement with his administration and within his community. That was the thing that stuck out to me.
I think the first question we asked was: why do you think the mayor did this? I think the mayor did this because he really wants to stay connected to the people who live in New York and call New York home. This was another way to get their attention in a way that could build that connection — not for everybody, but for 20,000 folks who are paying attention, whose primary interaction with government is the dumping ground that won or the basketball goal that needed to be fixed. They are seeing, in Strong Towns terms, a small step of their local government working for them. There are certainly complicated maintenance implications to this contest, but the engagement piece is really quite interesting.
Edward, you've worked in cities. I'm curious how you think about the normal system — many cities, including Alexander's and mine here in Lafayette, use a 311-type system. New York City has one too. How does a community balance a 311 system — where you see problems addressed but also problems linger — with a contest like this? How could you use something like this to build support and engagement for your normal maintenance operations and that sense of 'these are our core responsibilities to our community'?
When I think about 311 systems and online reporting, those are things we feel really good about in local government. It's an orderly way — we can put in a work order, somebody can get an alert, we can prioritize and knock items off the list. As a citizen, we think they like it because it's a way for them to complain without being on Facebook. But the responses are essentially: 'Received. We've heard you. We're taking action.' That's all you hear as a citizen. Maybe you'll see the thing changed, but there isn't that engagement.
What I see here is that there are millions of people who know there's an illegal dumping site that needs to be cleaned up. Only 20,000 people may have participated in that survey, but the New York Times and every national news organization is sharing this story.
As we've worked on this with our community action labs, cities are working really hard to do this stuff every single day, but it's hidden in the shadows. We don't celebrate it. We don't get news stories about that type of work. We rarely ever report it to our elected leadership. So something like this — when we show the item is actually fixed — if you have a 311 system, give the report with a picture of the basketball hoop fixed, or the spray paint removed. Show where the new trash can is. For cities, especially smaller cities, what I found is that if we put public works on our Facebook page — somebody in public works filling a pothole, picking up trash, moving snow — those posts went off the charts. Everybody liked it, shared it, knew who the person was, and was thankful that work was being done because the feedback loop of government was occurring.
So I think the key takeaway and follow-through that we forget at cities — we're just so busy doing the things — is that it's not just receiving, but also sharing. The mayor probably had 1,000 people show up at that press conference, with a marching band and cheerleaders and people in costumes. Starting to show people that they can be empowered to do this work as well is the next piece.
With illegal dumping, we shouldn't just have a phone number to call. If you get a community group that wants to go out and clean up the junk — the broken window philosophy — if a community wants to clean that up, they can get stuff in bags, but getting those bags to the dump is the hard part. How do we partner as a city to do the thing we're really good at? All of our cities have trash removal, contracts for that. We can get it to the dump. It's getting that first step moving forward. That's something like this — on all these items — how could we start to empower citizens to take on some of this themselves? Not that we're asking them to defer what government is doing, but we're asking them to be engaged as citizens in our community.
A lot of neighborhood programs include some type of improvement district — a formalized structure, a formalized way that empowers a neighborhood group to get some resources and have some ability to execute projects with built-in municipal support. Sometimes it's informal — just relationships that the department has the authorization to enter into with neighborhood groups.
I love that thought, Edward, because if they mapped what some of these fixes were and overlaid that with some type of neighborhood governance structure, I'm curious whether there are already built-in capacity engines that could execute some of these projects. It flips from a March Madness of picking one to a March Madness where we fund them all — it's less about which one fix can we do, and more about which neighborhood could we focus on that has eight fixes. You start to have this snowball effect. How do we use this information to enable citizens to be a part of maintaining their own backyard, their own front yard? I think a lot of people would jump on that and really enjoy it.
Do either of you think there are things that should be considered — given that this was a campaign to focus attention, a winning-vote campaign — are there things a mayor's office or city hall can do to make sure that things which maybe won't get the most votes, but are still true needs, can get attention? You can't only fix the things that win the popularity contest. The spirit of this contest was to fix everything and just bring the mayor in for the winning item. But if you're trying to think about how you build a community, what about the things that need fixing but maybe don't have the broad popular support? Alexander, I feel like that's a question right up your alley.
The pieces that I feel always get left out are definitely some of the infrastructure things, because a lot of maintenance programs are complaint-driven. It's just the way it works in a lot of municipalities, because they don't have enough people to fully manage all of it proactively, so they almost have to rely on a reactive complaint management program.
Those things that neighbors and residents have accepted as norms in their community — but that are below the level of service or quality of infrastructure they really should be experiencing — those are what get missed. I'm forgetting the name of the book right now, but there's one that talks about paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks — different ways a person interacts with their neighborhood. It talks about the paths that are all the dirt trails that take you to where the resident wants to go. Not the sidewalk, not the $3 million bike trail — it's the dirt path that brings you from Miss Susie's corner store to the back way into the park. You see the footpath. You see how the grass doesn't grow anymore, because that's the way people get around in the neighborhood.
Those types of things will never make it to the large scale for two reasons. Number one, it's hyper-local — it's super special to the person who lives near it, but it doesn't beat the drum for the community at large. Number two, the person who lives near it has accepted its current state as good enough. They wouldn't even say, 'I need this path to be gravel' or 'I need this path to be paved,' because they've accepted it being a dirt path for generations. It was a dirt path when my mom walked. It was a dirt path when my grandma walked. So those things that are hyper-local yet hyper-important to help people move around — that mobility-connected type of infrastructure — to me, that's the type of stuff that always ends up at the bottom of the list or never makes it on the list at all. I would love for those types of things that could improve neighborhoods and lived experience to make their way into these broader conversations.
That's a really good point. The things you've accepted as just the way things are — I find that a lot. I find myself surprised every time I use a restroom in a park that's clean and has toilet paper. Is that really what we should accept? In the spirit of this competition, that probably wouldn't get the most votes, so it needs another way to get time and attention.
What I've found is that when you start to collaborate with those we would otherwise call complainers — when we actually sit with residents and start to understand how they're using the city — we start asking: what is the struggle? We talk about humbly observing where somebody is struggling, just asking what's going on and observing what's happening.
Then being honest with them. It is so hard to get 50 feet of sidewalk installed — it's way easier to get a grant for two miles of sidewalk. But the small segments where the desire path is, that we could improve — when we start talking to residents, it's revealed that the reason there's no sidewalk here isn't a budget issue. It's because Miss Ruth, who owns that property, won't give an easement. Of course she's not going to give one to the government. But if she knows it's for the kids in the neighborhood, and the kids themselves say, 'Miss Ruth, will you give them five feet for a sidewalk?' — that's the kind of conversation I think cities are afraid to have, where they are honest about what's preventing them from doing these projects.
We can't just say it's a budget or staffing issue. We really need to be honest about what the things are that are preventing us. When citizens are willing to do some things, even if it's not to the standard, there are things at City Hall we could just allow them to do. It's not going to be perfect, but it's going to be embraced by the community until we get the time to do the next step. When we ask folks what is something they could actually do, most of the time the public says, 'Oh, I'm not allowed to do that, because the city is going to do it.' The city's like, 'Well, we don't have the time or resources. We wish somebody would do it for us.' So we've got to shift how we're talking about this so we can empower residents to take on that step and embrace it.
It's very likely — maybe not in the case of New York City, but in other parts of the country where you experience these types of infrastructure conditions — that it's probably in communities where not everyone has the extra time as a citizen to take on project management of these types of things. So the other question becomes: do cities see the development of projects on the periphery as worthy of investment? Sometimes the only investment we see is the hard-scale capital infrastructure project, but there is investment in the people who would go into the area that needs that type of care and project development.
Do you value tactical solutions? Do you value a guerrilla approach? How are people experiencing the edges of your policy? We know the core — the big roads coming in, we know it's going to be multimodal. But the edges, in the neighborhoods — when that path ends and you get into the neighborhood, how are they experiencing your policies? Do you see it as valuable to invest in the people infrastructure to help people on the periphery have a good experience too? Something like this elevates where those folks on the edges are, and turns up the volume on going there.
That's great. I have one more question to close with, and then we'll do the Down Zone. I'll start with Edward, then ask Alexander to close us out. Edward, if you were advising the mayor, what would you advise him to do to make sure this project helps build trust in the community and supports ongoing maintenance?
I would celebrate what this is, and I would immediately announce the next sixteen projects. But I would do sixteen projects in each one of the four divisions — make it bigger. Behind the scenes, staff are probably thinking: 'I don't know how we're going to resource this, I don't know if this is what we want to do.' It's like: we're going to identify the things at the top of the list that everybody's complained about. They're all in your areas. As mayor, I'm going to provide the cover for you, because I'm going to ask residents to vote, and everything's going to get a vote.
As we build that momentum, after a couple of these, it's no longer just a voting exercise — we're going to shift our language on it, shift our approach, and we're going to see lots and lots of these small projects just get underway.
Alexander, any thoughts? What would you advise the mayor?
I don't know if it would be that different from Edward's advice. This should be seen as a response that requires more investment. Whether you use it as a method of engagement and copy-paste the approach onto different solutions that require feedback and prioritization — how do you let this inform you on prioritization? We said it at the top of the call: all the things need to get done. So this can't say what will and won't get done, but it can say in what order.
How do you start to connect that with soft engagement and programming? How do you start to let what people have going on in their day-to-day life inform what these fixes are? I would say: you've tapped into a method of hearing from folks, and you've oriented people on how to communicate what they want to see. Don't waste the lesson. Run the wheels off of this thing. Do this as often as you can allocate money in the budget. These fixes are all very, very economical. Allocate money in the budget, get it done. That's what I would say. Don't waste this lesson. You've trained people on how to communicate to you — now use that training, reinforce it, do it again. You're only going to get more participation.
That's great. You guys know we always close with the Down Zone, which is one thing you're reading or consuming today that you'd like to share with our listeners. Alexander, it's your first time as a guest here, so I'm going to ask Edward to go first and set the tone. Edward, share something with us.
I just came back from the Grand Canyon, and on the South Rim are these beautiful historic buildings from the 1920s. I picked up a book to learn more about it. There is an architect — her name is Mary Coulter — and there's a book written about her work: Mary Coulter: Builder upon the Red Earth. Incredible book, if you want to geek out about a female architect and designer battling the big railroad giants to get beautiful architecture built. If you like traditional architecture, it's incredible, because it's not a copy of something old — it's credible work. To have the opportunity to walk through some of these buildings and see what she was battling for from a design and architecture perspective, and just to think of the power she was wielding in the 1920s — it mesmerized me. Mary Coulter is somebody to really take a look at if you want to geek out on traditional architecture.
Before I get to what I'm reading now, I want to go back for those who are listening — the book I was thinking of earlier but couldn't remember the name of is Kevin Lynch's five elements of a city. He talks about paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. It's a really good, tight read, and I'd recommend anybody look up Kevin Lynch's Image of the City — a really good way to think about places in a tactical way.
What I'm reading right now is How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. He basically analyzed 16,000 projects from 20 different fields across 136 countries and wanted to learn how many projects actually complete on time, on cost, and deliver the benefits they initially promised. If you want to know how we're doing as a world with delivering big projects — and what the percentage of our success rate is — this is the book. I don't want to give away the secret sauce, but it's a really good read. His motto throughout the whole book is: the way to speed up is by slowing down. That's what I'm reading, and that's what I'd recommend.
I love that — the way to speed up is by slowing down. Couldn't agree more. That's great.
My Down Zone is also a plug: we're in the spring season here and preparing for the National Gathering coming up pretty soon. Both of you will be presenting at this year's National Gathering, May 18 through 20th in Northwest Arkansas. That is filling every day of my schedule right now. Hope to see all of our listeners there — or at least a good chunk. If you're interested and haven't gotten your ticket yet, it's gathering.strongtowns.org. We would love to see all of our listeners there. So that's what's on my plate right now, which means my reading is not where it needs to be, but I'll pick it up after May 20th.
I want to thank you guys both for coming. This was our March Madness answer. I also want to congratulate West Allis, Wisconsin again on their Strongest Town award. Thank you both for joining us, and on behalf of all of us at Strong Towns, take care of yourselves and take care of your places. Thanks so much.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.