🍎 citymeetings.nyc #17
City of Yes for Housing Opportunity
Welcome new subscribers! The format of this newsletter is:
- I give readers an update on citymeetings.nyc itself.
- I highlight curious/interesting moments and claims from a few recent meetings.
You can reply to this email directly with feedback, questions, and requests. I'll respond to it.
Hi!
I sat down for an interview recently with Daniel Golliher, founder of civic school Maximum New York.
He published the interview last week: Anatomy of an AI-Driven Civic Tech Product.
We talked about:
- What citymeetings.nyc is.
- Why I made it and how it came to be.
- How I use AI to break down lengthy meetings.
- How I built awareness around it and who uses it.
- How I'd go about building a civic tech product.
- (I would not recommend going about it the way I did citymeetings.nyc)
It's replete with screenshots, including one of the internal tooling I've built.
If you want to get a behind-the-scenes look into citymeetings.nyc, give it a read!
Vikram
P.S. --
Daniel published a ballot guide this weekend explaining what is on the ballot in NYC (as opposed to a voter guide explaining how you should cast your vote).
If you are a new voter (like me) or a confused voter (also like me), his guide is a handy overview with:
- Photos of the ballot.
- Background on items you'll find on it.
- Explanations of unintuitive things you'll encounter.
- Pointers to primary sources.
In particular, I appreciate that he has links to the actual text amendments for ballot proposals 1 through 6 vs. the approachable-but-obfuscating language you see on the ballot itself.
Finally -- the polls are open, so go vote this week.
For a complete listing of published meetings, visit https://citymeetings.nyc.
This week I'm going to walk you through how to navigate the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity (COYHO) hearing using citymeetings.nyc.
The hearings were spread over two days:
- Day 1's meeting was DCP and HPD's presentation, testimony, and questioning by the council.
- Day 2's meeting was only public testimony. 323 individuals testified over 14 hours.
Catching up on the proposal? Skim the presentation.
The Chair of the City Planning Commission (Dan Garodnick)'s ~56-minute presentation is broken into 25 skimmable, summarized chapters.
You can read them in 5-10 minutes. The first chapter is here.
Click on "Next Chapter" at the the bottom of each page to navigate.
What is council member X's position? Why?
Skim the chapter list on this meeting page.
Find the council member you're interested in using Cmd/Ctrl+F and poke around those chapters.
(Note that roughly half the council was not present.)
The council's ~5 hours of questioning are split across 176 summarized chapters.
But there are only a handful of 1-to-5-minute segments you'll care about. Just read and/or watch those.
Want to find chapters that discuss specific COYHO issues you are curious or concerned about?
Here is a targeted and effective way to use Google to search a single meeting on citymeetings.nyc.
You can do this for any meeting, not just the COYHO hearings.
- Navigate to the meeting's page. Copy the meeting URL in the address bar.
- Assemble your Google Query:
site:[meeting url] "[query]"
Let's say you want to find chapters discussing "parking" during COYHO's public hearing, across 323 testimonies.
The meeting URL for the COYHO public hearing is: https://citymeetings.nyc/city-council/2024-10-22-0930-am-subcommittee-on-zoning-and-franchises
This is your "parking" search query: site:https://citymeetings.nyc/city-council/2024-10-22-0930-am-subcommittee-on-zoning-and-franchises "parking"
- Here's a link to that Google query for "parking".
- Here's one querying "neighborhood character".
- Here's one querying "transit".
- Here's one querying "infrastructure".
... and so on.
I'll be working on search and AI-assisted analysis tools but, in the meantime, this is the most effective way to research meetings on citymeetings.nyc in a highly-targeted way.
Will you publish testimony statistics and data points again?
For the City Planning Commission hearing this summer I published a table extracting data points from every single testimony here.
I plan to do that this time around, too, but it'll be published this week or next week, once I get some time to do so.
Highlight: a heated exchange between Vickie Paladino and Jackson Chabot
Clips from an exchange between Council Member Vickie Paladino and Jackson Chabot from Open Plans made the rounds on social media last week.
Here is the entire arc of this exchange:
- Chabot gives testimony in favor of lifting parking mandates. Link
- Paladino calls Jackson's background as a New Yorker into question. Link
- Kevin Riley intervenes. Link
- Chabot responds. Link
- Paladino responds. Link
Paladino previously testified against COYHO at the City Planning Commission hearing.
Highlight: elected officials who gave testimony
- Mark Levine, Manhattan Borough President, supports COYHO and stresses the need for tenant protections. Link
- Antonio Reynoso, Brooklyn Borough President, supports COYHO. Link
- A lot of questions from council members follow, starting at this chapter. Link
- Notably, he calls out "member deference" as a barrier to citywide solutions. Link
- Vanessa Gibson, Brooklyn Borough President, supports COYHO but notes that some components require further consideration, especially the lifting of parking mandates. Link
- Jaime Williams, NY State Assembly Member, opposes COYHO, stating it will cripple NYC's middle class communities. Link
Every other testimony
All 323 testimonies are viewable and linkable here on citymeetings.nyc.
I'll put together a more useful index for these public testimonies in a week or two, like I did for the City Planning Commission hearing.
Thanks for reading!
Comments, questions, or feedback? Reply to this email or shoot me a note at vikram@citymeetings.nyc