Sa ou fè?*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we’re covering:

- The power of natural areas;

- Better service delivery for government;

- A newsroom in a park;

& much, much more.

Concrete jungle

In 2019, I got to write my favorite story yet. After researching New York City’s parks for Center for an Urban Future (CUF), which resulted in my first-ever policy report, I grew kind of obsessed with the city’s wilderness. The work had taken me to green spaces across the five boroughs—wetlands, marshes, streams, forests, trails, and bridle paths. As a native, I was bewildered by how little I knew about them, and I wasn’t alone: the ‘friend test’ (when you gauge a story’s appeal by asking your pals) came back with flying colors. So, I pitched a story to The New York Times that became a hiking guide for New York City. And the photos, taken by the great George Etheredge, still inspire awe (and field trips) to this day.

It was then sheer serendipity that the subject of natural areas would become the focus of my final parks product for CUF. I left CUF at the end of July after serving three years as its first-ever Senior Fellow for Climate and Opportunity, where I oversaw research efforts on topics like innovative funding streams for parks, public universities as green job machines, and expanding micro-mobility. (There is work forthcoming from the Project for Livable Streets, which I’ll share here when it’s out.) This last report was the second in a two-part series on overlooked pieces of the parks system—a spiritual sequel to our exhaustive report on public recreation last March, with similar themes of access, health, and equity.

The city’s natural areas make up over 10,000 acres—or a whopping third of the whole parks system. Yet they receive minimal maintenance, policy attention, and public recognition. In fact, we found that the programming to bring people into these spaces only reaches about 5 percent of the general population. And that’s for a variety of reasons which we unpack, including issues of connectivity, safety, awareness, and more. It resulted in 10 low-lift ideas for City Hall to more strategically invest in these spaces to better connect New Yorkers, particularly low-income residents, to these vast and beautiful spaces in our own backyards.

Same-day delivery

For many progressives, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance is the closest thing to a social contract that modern-day liberalism has had in years. And for good reason: the book and subsequent movement offer an attractive appeal to the left to start building stuff again. That’s important; it demonstrates that government can still do big things, at least in a material sense. But for me, it focuses too much on public works and not enough on public goods. Sure, it’d be great to have high-speed rail spanning the country and renewable energy flowing into our homes—this newsletter will always vouch for those things. But when most people are struggling to pay bills or make rent, that vision (often touted by a mostly white, male crowd) falls on deaf ears. People want tangible improvements in their everyday life now, not some promise of a better life TBD.

Government has to build—and also, deliver. That was the focus of the Mamdani administration’s recent Commission on Government Efficiency, or COGE, a play on the ‘move fast and break things’ approach taken by Elon Musk and his foot soldiers in those first days of the second Trump era. This effort, at a much more local level, uses an upcoming window to reform the City Charter as an opportunity to accelerate hefty bureaucratic processes, like applying for an outdoor dining permit, paying nonprofits for their services, or making a street safer. The voters will have their say on the five proposals in November.

But why stop there? The public sector is inundated with policies and regulations that are well-intentioned but designed for a different time. And unless you’re an insider or public policy expert, all you see on the backend is delay, malfunction or more costs. For the latest Just Fix It column in Vital City, we laid out another 13 internal operating tweaks for City Hall that could improve that end product for all New Yorkers, from loosening up hiring rules to unlocking rules for the public realm. You can read them all here.

Crown jewel

As we speak, over a million fans are descending upon the USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center, the home of the U.S. Open for three weeks at summer’s end. And unbeknownst to many, one of the world’s largest sporting events—both in dollars spent and attendance—takes place in a city park. Just outside its gates lies Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the borough of Queens’ largest green space. It’s also home to a baseball stadium (Citi Field) and, soon, a casino (Metropolitan Park). And just down the road, the city’s first major soccer arena (Etihad Stadium) is rising rapidly. This is, undoubtedly, one of the most consequential corners of New York City right now, and FMCP is at the center of it all.

Last year, I co-authored a report at the Center for an Urban Future that carried a clear message: city leaders should maximize this immense moment to invest in this crucial community backyard. Built for the World’s Fairs of the 1930s and 1960s, the park hasn’t seen a major overhaul since then, with now-failing infrastructure that still dates back to the Space Age. We laid out 20 ideas—some small, some large—to strategically uplift the park for years to come so, once again, it could set an example for urban parks everywhere. The report got some press then, and now we’re seeing impact: the borough president has allocated funding to modernize a pioneering playground—which was one of our recommendations—and convened a task force to spot short-term fixes. The park’s needs are massive, but these early advances are certainly a start.

To that end: while I’m no longer undertaking research with CUF, I’m beyond excited to see through this work as the newest mayoral appointee to the board of the Alliance for FMCP, the public-private partner that raises resources, offers programming, and helps steward this special place. My mother sang with her high school choir in the New York State Pavilion (otherwise known as the mothership in Men in Black) in 1964, and now, decades later, it’s an honor to be back there to advocate for a park I love dearly. We’ve got our work cut out for us—and if you’d like to support it, please do—but the moment is ripe for change.

See you at the Unisphere ✌️

OSA: Take two

Over the last two years, a solid segment of 31st Avenue, in Astoria, Queens, has slowly turned into what city planners here call a ‘bike boulevard.’ I’ve described it in these pages before, but a quick recap: the Avenue became a one-way; a two-way bike lane was added to one side; and the traffic flow was flipped every few blocks, meaning that cars could no longer drive down the whole stretch without having to turn off. This is what’s known as ‘traffic calming’ at its best: the whole point is to discourage cut-through congestion while also retaining local access, so it’s a more hospitable environment for those who walk, bike and drive locally.

One of our proudest achievements on the Open Street is inspiring the project’s Phase 1, which covered some 20 blocks, including the two we close to traffic each weekend from April to December. For seven years straight, we’ve shown our neighbors an alternative. And today, that space features greatly expanded pedestrian areas that see people sitting street-side everyday. But during the design workshops, community members grumbled that the redesign stopped abruptly, without continuing east into the next neighborhood of Woodside. Even Zohran Mamdani, then an Assembly Member, told city officials then that they should keep going. And now, as mayor, he’s making it happen.

Enter Phase 2. Right now, the Avenue near our house is being repaved, repainted, and redesigned to follow roughly the same layout for another 10 blocks. Except a five-way intersection that we trudge through each day, just outside of a school, will see one of the city’s first roundabouts as well. It’s the latest project in a part of town that has seen some transformative street changes these last few years. And once done, all road users will have a safe and seamless connection through Western Queens for the first time ever. Back soon with more.

Bright Side: Park press

We’re back in San Francisco for this month’s edition—not for more subway stand-up, but instead, a new initiative aiming to bring journalism to the people through public space. The online news source SFGate announced this month that it’ll build one-day newsrooms in city parks over the next few months. The idea? Not only meet people where they are, but also, (re)introduce people to reporting itself.

Faith in media is at an all-time low, and it doesn’t help that about a quarter of Americans have never once actually spoken to a journalist. (We are real people! Hello!) And that’s due in large part to the fact that there are a lot less of us around nowadays, for a slew of reasons. SFGate’s new program wants its journalists out hearing from people about local happenings, sure, but it also wants to demystify what journalism actually is. And what better place to disarm than a local park.

I’d be remiss not to shout out The City Reporter, a local outlet in New York, and its Open Newsroom initiative, which does something similar in public libraries. But leveraging outdoor spaces, where people can come and go without having to enter, is particularly unique for fostering conversation. Excited to see how it goes.

On The Radar

Here Where We Live is Our Country, by Molly Crabapple

There are few other talents out there like Molly Crabapple. She is equal parts journalist, artist, activist, soothsayer, and storyteller. There was a moment where I’d be confronted with Crabapple’s murals when I’d get off the ferry where I live, then see her sketches in Rolling Stone, and then read her reporting in The Guardian or The New York Times, in that order. A pioneer of what she describes as ‘live-illustrated journalism,’ where she’s sketching out what she’s writing about in real-time, I’ve long been a fan and admirer of her work.

Her latest book, though, reaches new levels of skill. Crabapple is the great-granddaughter of Sam Rothbort, a post-impressionist painter who was also once an active member of the Jewish Labor Bund, the single-largest revolutionary party in Eastern Europe by the turn of the 20th century. The Bund was fascinating: it was a working-class party that boldly organized around Jewish identity in Poland and Russia, at a time when anti-Semitism was the de facto policy regime. It wasn’t religious, per se; it welcomed the rituals of Judaism, but class identity came first. And it was staunchly anti-Zionist, arguing that Jews lived in the diaspora, as the book’s title infers. In the traditions of mutual aid, the Bund built an entire world for itself—hospitals, housing, schools, pantries, and sleep-away camps—to survive and thrive in the face of unthinkable persecution.

Crabapple wrote about her family history for The New York Review of Books in 2018, which served as a preface for a book-length investigation, out this last April. Crabapple never knew her great-grandfather, but through rich interviews, vast archive dives, and vivid retelling, she explores a past she never knew and learns about the roots of her own identity in the process. And for readers, it’s a seminal piece of recent history that wasn’t shared growing up—and an inspiring, albeit cautionary, tale of what solidarity can look like.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• New Yorkers for Parks, the advocacy outfit that stumps for the city’s green spaces, is hiring a development and administrative associate. (New York, NY)

• A citywide network of secure bike parking is (finally!) coming to Gotham, and the Department of Transportation needs a lot of help making it happen. (New York, NY)

• It’s election season, and canvassers are needed out on my ancestral land to stump against Medicaid cuts. (Long Island, NY)

***

In these desperate times, we ask: where are the jobs? Submit them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Antillean Creole French, in honor of J’Ouvert and Carnival.

***

This newsletter’s logo was created by River Quinn Jensen.

Streetbeat © 2026

What cheer?*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we’re covering:

- World Cup transit;

- Un-roundabouting;

- Local climate policy;

& much, much more.

Programming note: I’ll be returning to London later tonight to teach a two-week workshop at my graduate alma mater (UCL!) that I’ve been cooking up for some time. It’s focused on equipping urban planners with the skills needed to turn complex ideas buried deep in dissertations and academic journals into publishable pieces for the masses. And we’re topping it off with a quick jaunt up to Edinburgh for Fringe to support my pal Jake Alexander’s one-man show Like a Good Neighbor. UK friends — drop me a line!

Circle, square

About 13 years ago now, I did a short stint in Central Brooklyn. And besides anytime access to Caribbean food, what I miss most living there was the proximity to what is, I think, the city’s most dynamic intersection. In just a two-block span, you have some of the borough’s finest cultural institutions, sidled up to the mouth of its greatest park and botanical garden, and seated along a grand boulevard. The only issue? You have to get through Grand Army Plaza.

Grand Army Plaza is like every urban planning challenge in one. Car traffic is unpredictable and, subsequently, dangerous. Bikers and pedestrians compete for inches. And the green space that is there is cut off from any real connection. The city has made progress over the years calming parts here and there. But population and cycling growth has only made the fight for space more fierce.

Now, there’s a plan to fix it. One of the most ambitious public realm projects to come out of the Mamdani administration could usher in the greatest transformation to Brooklyn’s craziest crossing in over a century. But those challenges won’t simply disappear overnight—and addressing them will require a careful balancing act to create a space that people will actually enjoy. Can the city pull off? I explored that and more in my latest feature for Bloomberg CityLab.

Canyon of champions

Ask any planning or event expert earlier this year, and they all said the same thing: America wasn’t ready for the World Cup. Along with Canada and Mexico, the country was set to host the largest sports tournament on the planet, with 78 games spread across 11 cities — a notable spike from 1994, the last year the U.S. was in this position. Millions of people were going to descend upon stadiums surrounded by parking lots and starved of public transit. What could go wrong?

Turns out: not so much. Now that the World Cup is over, we can officially say it went well. Municipalities hitched successful game plans for shuttle buses, ride-share, and park-and-ride. Americans took public transit in record numbers. And there were no major crises or hiccups to speak of. Maybe it was the worrying headlines that struck fear in the heart of planners to prepare accordingly. But whatever it was, it worked. (A special shout-out to my pal Kaitlin Coari, who did a truly herculean job running transit for FIFA at MetLife Stadium, in New Jersey.)

Don’t waste a crisis, sure—but also, like the Olympics, don’t waste a mega-event. The World Cup was an immense opportunity for a risk-averse nation to try out new things and see what sticks. So goes New York. Two weeks before start, City Hall rolled out an ambitious transportation plan to keep things moving in Midtown when the games were underway. Now, it’s worth asking: what did we learn? For New York Magazine’s Curbed, I heard from riders, advocates, and business owners along Manhattan’s 42nd Street about what could come next.

Climate conflict

I’ve made this point before, but when Washington retreats from climate investment, progress doesn’t stop—it just switches lanes. During Donald Trump’s first term, which saw America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, New York passed its two most landmark climate laws to date. The first was the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or CLCPA, a state law that set nation-leading emissions goals, with targets and environmental justice priorities that were monumental at the time of its passage. And the second was the Climate Mobilization Act, or Local Law 97, a city law that required its biggest emitters—buildings!—to cut carbon or face fines.

Their paths have diverged ever since. This last legislative session, New York’s state legislators, led by the governor, defanged the CLCPA, citing the now-common refrain of affordability and federal threats as culprits. The targets are later; the goals are lower; and the plan to get there is still shaky. Meanwhile, Local Law 97 has seen success: the city’s biggest building owners are (largely) complying, and the legislation has driven the city’s carbon footprint down to its lowest levels since the pandemic. Again, progress doesn’t stop; it shifts.

But will New York City’s climate policies remain as effective if the statehouse has punted? Figuring that out is the theme of my latest dispatch for Skylight.

OSA: Win ‘em all

Last year, when transit planners announced a redesign of one of our borough’s most dangerous corridors, which lies about ten minutes away from where I’m writing this, a collection of businesses filed a lawsuit to stop it. The city hadn’t done their due diligence studying the impact on deliveries, traffic, or emergency response, the plaintiffs argued, in a case that posed the most formidable threat yet to the neighborhood’s street safety efforts. Ultimately, the judge sided with them and paused the project, leaving it half-painted for some time.

Then the city got a new mayor, who used to live and work off this dangerous strip. He ordered his transit agency to redo the project—but three times the length—and they did their homework. The project moved forward, and today, Astoria’s 31st Street is a completely different place. You can hear yourself speak. Crossings are safer to walk. And people once afraid to bike down it are now gliding past. (Myself included.) A new lawsuit was quickly dismissed as moot; meanwhile, a celebratory ride is planned for this Sunday.

Shortly after, Emily Smith, a reporter for Streetsblog NYC, asked a good question: “So how’s it going?” And King Souvlaki, a famed family-run food truck that elicited boycotts for opposing the redesign, responded in kind: “It’s a great bike lane.” Withdrawing from the lawsuit, the owners admitted that the thoroughfare was calmer, safer, and—no surprise—good for business. It’s something that we often don’t see in traditional media: we tend to tell readers when we hear the sky is falling, but we rarely return and report when it doesn’t. Imagine if we did.

Bright Side: Clips on clips

Earlier this month, my colleague Whitney Dangerfield and I concluded our third run teaching a summer class that we co-created. It’s called Newsroom: From Pitch to Publish, and it looks to fill what we think is a big gap in the journalism curriculum—students are taught how to write an article, but they’re not taught what to do with it after. So as both a longtime editor and writer ourselves, respectively, we put together a 6-week course that essentially teaches working relationship skills, so students can feel comfortable speaking to editors, handling feedback, and pushing their stories ahead.

Now that it’s over, we’re able to share some results. The first byline to come out is on a story in the Brooklyn Paper about Scrappleland, a new pinball hall, and its various competitive leagues. Another, accepted by Slate, hears from people who are affirming their gender identity after talking to AI. Another, this one arriving soon in The LA Times, is about Gen Z’s support for prenups. And more will come! Together, the stories boast a broad diversity of reporting. But they also represent some seriously impressive work from budding journalists. Bravo!

On The Radar

Changing Lanes

This month, the 31st Ave Open Street Collective did something we’ve never done before: we hosted a documentary screening! Partnering with the Museum of the Moving Image, Civic Pulse, and others, we packed a theater with 75+ people to watch Ben Wolf’s Changing Lanes. And then we had a panel after to talk about it.

A few years ago, Wolf started to follow the saga forming around a plan for a ‘road diet’ on Brooklyn’s McGuinness Boulevard, another deadly stretch of asphalt. Catalyzed by a local teacher’s death, local parents advocate for a reconfiguration that would literally stop the bleeding. Powerful moneyed interests try to stop it. And the tensions rise all the way up to City Hall, who tries to intervene. For those who don’t know the rest of the story, I’ll stop there for dramatic effect.

But for me, what made Wolf’s film so moving was its universal applicability. You don’t have to be a transit die-hard to like it. In fact, the movie’s greatest impact is really who else watches it. Wolf masterfully explains how cities everywhere ceded their streets to cars—and the adverse consequences that people are pushing back against today. It’s a history lesson. It’s a primer. And it’s a fight.

Go check it out.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• Nifty placemaking outfit (and newsletter regular) Culture House is hiring an event and operations associate for one of its public spaces, and a fall communications intern. (Cambridge, MA or remote)

• Skylight, a publication all about building decarbonization in New York City, is on the lookout for a director of audience growth and partnerships. (Hybrid/NYC)

• The Natural Areas Conservancy, which stumps for the care of wild places, is looking for a new manager of public affairs and community engagement coordinator. (Hybrid/NYC)

***

In these desperate times, we ask: where are the jobs? Submit them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting comes from 1700s-era English to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.

***

This newsletter’s logo was created by River Quinn Jensen.

Streetbeat © 2026

Bon bini*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we’re covering:

- Thinking ahead for road safety;

- How to decarbonize right now;

- Transforming the ‘city of men’;

& much, much more.

Bumpy road

In 2014, New York City became the first major U.S. city to subscribe to Vision Zero—a policy goal of zero traffic-related deaths and injuries. At its core, the agenda is an affront to the status quo of our streets, where death and carnage have been normalized for decades as oh-how-unfortunate byproducts of a modern mechanical society. And it tries to change that through a data-driven ‘3E’ approach: education, enforcement, and engineering. In sum: raise awareness amongst road users; reprimand bad behavior; and redesign streets.

I’ve been writing about Vision Zero for years, mostly in New York City and across the Hudson, in Jersey City. And since 2014, it’s largely* been working. The first quarter of this year was the safest on record in New York City, and Jersey City has now docked several years without a single traffic fatality on its* streets. Just like, whoa. But there are, of course, asterisks: serious injuries are still sky-high, which is telling of a larger lived experience, and plenty of state and federal roads that cut through Jersey City are maiming and killing people. Much to the chagrin of drivers, the cities taking action have made life-saving progress since Vision Zero was implemented, even with the pandemic acting as a flame accelerant for reckless driving. But there’s still a long ways to go.

This month, I was humbled to help chart out what a path forward could look like through the inaugural installment of the Center for an Urban Future’s Project for Livable Streets, the think tank’s first-ever research effort focused on cultivating safer, more vibrant streets across the five boroughs. It’s a hyper-local look at the uneven landscape of per-capita crash rates and infrastructure investments over time, where some neighborhoods have seen substantial safety gains while others—mostly low-income communities of color, often not too far away—have fallen behind. The analysis, aided by CUF’s Eli Dvorkin, Rachel Neches, Jonathan Bowles, and Nora Lewis, underlines a series of recommendations for policymakers as they consider the next chapter of Vision Zero. Glad to see that work covered in amNY and News 12, but you can read the whole report here.

Wasted energy

We’re in a bit of a carbon conundrum. Stationary energy—or all the heating, lighting, cooling, charging, and cooking that we do in our homes, offices, schools, and everywhere in between—has skyrocketed with worsening weather, endless devices to plug in, and a push to electrify everything. Its price tag, too. This colossal usage compromises the bulk of emissions in our built world, so the buildings we inhabit everyday have a pivotal role to play in decarbonization, or the process of shifting away from an economy driven by fossil fuels. But right now, because of bad economics, the options are limited.

Unless you’re a well-resourced developer, which most property owners are not, you likely don’t have the money for a full energy overhaul, let alone the room. You probably can’t build a wind turbine in the backyard, install enough solar panels to power everybody and everything, or install heat pumps at any realistic rate. Sure, there is some low-hanging fruit—like LED, glass, and smart sensors—that can certainly trim the margins. But if you’re going to dedicate the time and revenue, it has to be worth the return. And for that, you may have to get creative.

One50 West End Avenue, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, had an idea. State-backed subsidies have made it possible to seal up age-old ventilation, where leaks were a major drain on the energy budget each month. And so far, it’s working; the mid-size development has saved on loads of carbon and costs. Now, the partnership is a case study for budget-savvy results amidst coming climate targets. I wrote about the building board’s solution and process for Skylight.

Crisis management

No doubt this has been one of the most exhilarating months in recent memory for New York City. The New York Knicks are comeback champs for the first time in over half a century. The world’s biggest sports tournament has arrived in our backyard. (Okay, technically New Jersey.) It’s Juneteenth. It’s Pride. And we haven’t even gotten to America’s 250th trip around the sun. Is it even July yet?

If the World Cup is any reminder, this is exactly the time when transit has to be top-notch. We can’t maximize the benefits of all this fun stuff if it’s tough to get from points A to B. Just ask Brooklynites. For the last few weekends, the G train has been shut down in segments to patch up faulty signal modernization work, substituting subway service for slower shuttle buses. In other words: New York City’s only cross-borough train that tens of thousands of commuters rely on every day is offline at some pretty peak hours throughout what many are calling the best month the city has ever had. And, for good reason, folks are pissed.

But to me, this seems like high time for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to get creative—and maybe save some face in the process. In January, I penned an opinion piece for Streetsblog New York, calling on the city’s mayor and the state’s governor to work together to revive G service to central Queens, where it once ran. Elected officials—including several who won primaries this month—came out in support, along with 40+ business and advocacy outfits. (Even the Mets!) Mayor Mamdani himself said his team was “digging into” the idea. The MTA? Not so much. But as I recently wrote in an op-ed for amNY, the short-term shutdown provides an opening to test worries about ridership and service by piloting extensions to both central Queens and Coney Island (the so-called “G to the Sea”). As the saying goes: don’t waste a crisis.

OSA: Public Art

Public spaces often mimic a city’s mood. They provide a stage for the formal and informal, from the sponsored watch parties to the spontaneous bodega TV hookups. To that end, the Open Streets have been no different: each weekend has brought throngs of crowds for ‘Soccer Streets,’ movie nights, outdoor hangs, and more. It’s a vibe, for sure. And we’re delighted to be a part of that history-making.

But I want to hand this section over to another celebration we held this month. The all-volunteer 31st Ave Open Street Collective just wrapped its biggest project yet—a $25,000 grant for five artists to paint five murals across three different blocks that I mentioned here a few issues ago. The ribbon-cutting for ‘Drawn in Astoria’ is here, and we had the big scissors and photos to prove it. Enjoy :)

See the full coverage here.

Bright Side: Rail power

We’re in the ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ phase of climate mitigation and adaptability, where municipalities, in the face of rising costs and resigned public opinion, are left with an all-of-the-above approach to the green transition. It’s simply not enough to have goals on paper or flashy incentives; today’s realities are stacked against action, even as Paris sees its hottest nights since 1947 and a heat-charged El Nino wreaks havoc on climate patterns. Needless to say: the stakes are higher than ever and the same old playbooks aren’t working.

But this section is for inspo. This month, that comes from Buttes, Switzerland, where a startup called Sun-Way has outfitted a train track with a new line, except this one generates energy rather than needing it. Over 100 meters of easily mendable solar track were installed between the railways, with 11,000 trains passing above this last year without issue. (In fact, their resulting wind tunnels helped swipe off dust.) In that time, the solar track generated 16,000 kWH of energy, enough to fuel three to four homes for a year. In retrospect, the setting is ideal: railways are often within a government’s right of way; they’re lined with conducive black or gray gravel; and the land otherwise lays dormant. And while the output wasn’t much, the pilot area was tiny; if the entire railway system had this, the startup projects it could power 2% of all Swiss households.

Powerful stuff.

On The Radar

Women Changing Cities, by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett

I’m excited to once again sit on the jury of the Pattis Family Foundation’s Global Cities Book Award, through Metropolis, where I’ll be reviewing a handful of prominent books on cities with colleagues to advance for the top prize. That means my summer reading list is stacked, which includes some titles I’d be hoping to read regardless. One of which is worth a shout-out.

I’ve followed the Bruntletts’ work for some time. The couple moved their family from Vancouver to Delft some years ago, and have written at length about what the relocation to a much more walk- and bike-friendly environment has done—not only for their quality of life, but also, their children’s independence at a time of addictive screens and constant check-ins. They provided a sorely needed parent-led perspective in the livable streets world, but as the two quickly admit in the introduction to their third book, their work was fairly Euro- and male-centric in its highlights. They wanted to change that.

True to its name, their new endeavor together covers a series of female trailblazers around the world, from Barcelona to Kampala. The work varies, from public space design that better reflects the needs of women and children to a ‘care’-based lenses placed on how we get around. In short, the book takes a hard look at the cities that fields (i.e. planning, architecture, engineering) long dominated by men have built, and it shows us what else is possible.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• The Manhattan Borough President’s Office, which kinda/sorta has power, is looking for an urban designer. (New York, NY)

***

In these desperate times, we ask: where are the jobs? Submit them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Papiamentu in honor of Curaçao’s World Cup run.

***

This newsletter’s logo was created by River Quinn Jensen.

Streetbeat © 2026

Wah gwaan*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we’re covering:

- The end of the school year;

- The pitch for permitting reform;

- The magic of low traffic;

& much, much more.

The capstone

It was last August that I first mentioned the Honors seminar here. That was the start of the year-long ‘capstone’ course that I had the privilege of teaching for the first time at NYU Journalism. It’s a rare opportunity for undergraduate students there to spend a full academic year studying, reporting out, traveling for and ultimately writing a 6,000-9,000-word magazine-length feature. And for me, it was a real full circle moment: I took the class myself as a senior over a decade back (my capstone was about City Hall, shocking, I know), so being able to help guide that process as an educator was a career high mark, to say the least.

Here’s what the year looked like. The students spent September nailing their topics down, and October applying for research grants. November and December, they wrote a short feature. Over January, some students went on reporting trips while others did interviews from afar. February and March, that continued. And April and May were wholly dedicated to writing, writing, writing. It culminated with a graduation party with loved ones, where we toasted to storytelling’s vital role amidst an increasingly uncertain future. (It was so nice!)

But their work really stands on its own—with students now pitching these magnum opus (opei?) to major publications. We’ve got some truly amazing stories on the coffee industry’s labor problem, the ‘sex wars’ over OnlyFans, and the lack of representation for Black women in film and TV. Students traveled to Warsaw to see firsthand the reverse migration of Polish-Americans from Brooklyn, London to learn how the West End is adapting to scarce public funding, and Manchester to understand what a casino in Queens could look like. One student visited birth clinics around rural New Mexico; another went to rowdy meetings around school choice in Arizona; and one spent all of January studying textile reuse in Iceland. And we’ve got some seriously urgent pieces on the return of ‘skinny culture,’ the dark history of maternity homes in the U.S., and the value of ‘student empowerment’ in school curricula today.

I often told the students that I was the class’s project manager, more than anything; keeping them to task, checking in, and enforcing deadlines. But these folks made my job easy, delivering deeply impressive bodies of work that—and I say this from experience—they’ll remember for a lifetime. Again, it was an honor.

Yes in my backyard

“Build, build, build” is all the rage these days. It’s wild to watch such a bipartisan consensus around a belief that government can actually do stuff when government gets out of its own way—but alas, here we are. Now, of course, the “stuff” you’re trying to actually build depends on your audience. For small-c conservatives and the MAGA right, it’s likely to be oil fields, detention facilities, and sprawl. For progressives and ‘abundance’ liberals, the pitch is for public transit, renewable energy, and housing. But both ideologies share the hope that a speedy show of force to restless voters will be a ticket to power.

One major key to getting there is permitting, or the intricate process to get the government to say yes to your project. And recently, I’ve gotten a crash course on its pitfalls and potential for reform. The first was for Vital City, where our latest ‘Just Fix It’ column focused on the bureaucratic hurdles to building virtually anything in New York City. With an average duration of two to four years, obtaining a certificate of occupancy—the golden ticket for construction—has spurred a cottage industry of expediters. It’s an experience so vulnerable to outside interference, it may have even doomed the former mayor. And it’s a problem that plugs up housing, retail, offices, and so many other buildings alike. So after speaking to experts, we came out with eight ideas to accelerate everything from elevators and fire inspections to staffing and traffic studies. And now, it looks like City Hall is set to implement a lot of them. Hip hip hooray!

Zooming out a bit, the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, is considered the ‘Magna Carta’ of environmental law. But for this conversation’s sake, I’ll call it the fairy godmother of permitting. It’s the legislation behind the federal environmental review process as well as every state and municipal counterpart, which is often cited as a major bottleneck. It’s tricky, though, because the intentions are good on paper, like so many policies we have: NEPA is meant to protect us from projects that pollute, hurt, or damage our local ecosystems. But when it almost dooms something like congestion pricing—ostensibly something quite good for Earth—there’s a problem. For my latest feature in Bloomberg CityLab, I unpacked a Supreme Court decision that could change everything, including how cities build the very things that we all depend on to thrive.

Public works

This may come as a shock to readers, but the public sector also takes a while to build something. Outside of dealing with parks, libraries, and schools closed for years on end, my first encounter with what’s known as the capital construction process was Stretching New York City’s Capital Dollars, a policy report I wrote in 2021 for Center for an Urban Future. Our research found that a library project can take up to seven years to complete—triple the time of private office building construction, and costing much more, too. Park bathrooms? At least $4 million. HVAC replacement? More than $3 million. Fixing this process, we said, could save the city up to $800 million. Not to mention what feels like an unquantifiable amount of faith in our institutions to get anything done.

Thankfully, there has been progress. The city agency responsible for major public works—the Department of Design and Construction, or DDC—has been shaving years off its timelines thanks to changes put forward in a reform blueprint that our work helped influence. That includes initiatives like design-build, where one firm comes up with the design and then builds it. (Whoa!) That recently allowed the agency to build the city’s new first recreation center in decades at record speed and lower price.

But there’s still a ways to go. Stuff still costs too much and takes too long to build. And at a time when budgets are tight but calls for investment grow louder, improving the way cities do capital work has emerged as a huge area for savings. (That $800 million figure from 2021 is probably a lot higher today.) So I was glad to recently testify to the New York City Council on behalf of CUF in support of a new suite of bills that aim to cut price tags and timelines even more. The blueprint exists—now it’s time for the city to get it done.

OSA: Low-traffic

It’s a wild time in Western Queens, as our streets literally transform in front of us. A massive safety-oriented facelift of the most dangerous corridor is going in at warp speed, after circumventing a court order and tripling in size and scope. The next phase of a ‘bike boulevard,’ which I’ll discuss further in future editions, will include one of the city’s first bike-friendly roundabouts steps from my front door. We’re constantly innovating with public space, both on the Open Street and nearby. Systems are being connected along the waterfront and across the borough. And we’re hearing that more is in store—a testament, like I said last month, to the work of so many neighbors who banded together in advocacy backed by elected officials, including the new mayor, who used to live here.

So it’s time to be bold. With all this infrastructure going in, what do we want our streets to look like in the future? What else do we want out of our public realm? Because when you calm car traffic and prioritize people, that frees up a lot of space. And the right policies could allow you to level up to something greater.

Earlier this month, the 31st Ave Open Street Collective co-sponsored its first-ever ‘Nerd Night’ on that exact topic, alongside Open Plans, The Civic Pulse, Transportation Alternatives, and our spiritual sister organization, the 34th Ave Open Street Coalition. We packed a local eatery with people who wanted to envision what better mobility could look like for bus riders, cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers alike. I offered lessons from living in a “low-traffic” neighborhood in London, where holistic planning allows our streets to be treated as both a network and a place. We don’t feel far from there. So what’s next?

Bright Side: Beavertown

In October, I wrote a big spread for The New York Times about New York City’s response to its growing flooding problem—which, as it happens, broke our sewer system again this month. The story was divided into three themes: absorb (rain gardens, permeable pavement, ‘daylighting’); fortify (flood walls, barriers, and gates); and retreat (voluntary acquisition, rezoning). It was meant to shine a light on both the crisis that we face, but also, the bevy of remedies out there to adapt. Because I am, at my core, a glass-half-full kind of person.

But one thing I failed to cover in the ‘nature-based solutions’ section? Beavers.

In London—where it rains, like, a lot—the flood-prone Greenford Tube station is the site of a new experiment with wildlife that is particularly skilled at plugging up holes. Humans made beavers extinct in London centuries ago, but recently local conservationists teamed up to create the Ealing Beaver Project. The initiative resettled beavers in Paradise Fields, a nature preserve in the borough of Ealing right next to the station. And they immediately got to work restoring the wetlands; they created ponds, diverted creeks, and dammed what they could. The flooding has dried up—but the best part are the co-benefits: the more hospitable landscape is now welcoming back all sorts of other animals, boosting biodiversity and improving the experience for even us humans. The ‘beaver safari’ there—yes, this is a real thing—is officially docketed for my next visit.

On The Radar

Earlier this year, I found myself in the Epstein files. A few people have had questions ever since (lol), so I’m gonna pause this missive to explain myself. Because that really is a sentence to utter—and, I think, an elite icebreaker responses going forward. It demands immediate context. So here it goes.

In 2011, I sent an email to Steve Sussman, an attorney who represented a hedge fund that was indirectly connected to a financier named Jeffrey Epstein. I was writing on behalf of Wayne Barrett, one of the most well-known investigative reporters of his time, who worked at The Village Voice and then other news outlets after his departure. (I wrote about Wayne a little while back.) I joined Barrett’s intern cohort between my sophomore and junior year of college; a network of assistants who were known in city media for going on wild goose chases in service of Wayne’s (sometimes crazy) suspicions. And one of my tasks that summer was to dig up dirt on this guy who lived a large part of his year in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Frankly, I had never heard of him before.

My query contained questions for a piece for Newsweek/The Daily Beast that Wayne was working on then. Wayne, who had an almost-ESP-like sense for skullduggery, was best known for his biography and early articles on Donald Trump, someone who he knew, even back in the 1970s, would be a major player in New York City politics—and maybe beyond. (In an ironic twist of fate, Wayne died in January 2017, just days before Trump was inaugurated as the President of the United States.) That led us to Epstein, who kept appearing around Trump’s universe in different ways. And Wayne wanted to know more.

So in sum: I was in the Epstein files for playing a small role in the earliest investigations of him. And the spirt of Wayne’s journalism, which I’m honored to have learned from, lives on. That work was never published, and one can only imagine its contents. But maybe now the truth’s out, more will come. We’ll see ;)

Streetbeat Gig Board

• The mighty New York Botanical Garden is looking for a manager of urban conservation. (New York, NY)

• Covering Climate Now, which does the good work of training journalists in climate reporting, is hiring a communications manager. (Remote)

• Speaking of: Climate Power, a nonprofit that supplies policymakers with research on climate-related catastrophes, has a posting with an apt title: ‘Climate Urgency Research Director.’ (Remote)

***

In these desperate times, we ask: where are the jobs? Submit them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Jamaican Patois.

***

This newsletter’s logo was created by River Quinn Jensen.

Streetbeat © 2026

Silim-ma*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we’re covering:

- Quick wins as a policy agenda;

- Tapping real estate for parks;

- A new language for climate investment;

& much, much more.

It’s doable

I recently did as many white men have before me, and got around to reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I have thoughts, but there are a million other Substacks you can read by people who look a lot like me for those. Instead, I just want to quickly spotlight something that I felt was, or still is, missing from the abundance agenda. And that is small-p progressivism.

When we think of the greatest challenges facing us today—income inequality, racism, the climate crisis—we often aim high for answers. The abundance crowd is right to call for a vision to get us there; that’s what we should be striving for. But it tends to overlook the day-to-day. To put it bluntly: most people just want shit to work. Yes, I’d love universal healthcare, but I’d also love it if I didn’t have to call six different offices to file a claim. Yes, I’d love green energy, but I’d also love it if my utilities bill wasn’t sky-high. And yes, I’d love world-class public transit, but I’d also just love it if that nearby bike lane was better. For me, how liberals win today is by delivering tangible, hyper-local improvements to people’s everyday lives. So every year, you can see your city, your town, or even just your neighborhood getting that much easier and enjoyable to live in.

I’m glad to say that workable solutions are the cornerstone of a column I’ll be leading at Vital City, otherwise known as “Just Fix It.” Through rigorous research and reporting, we try to pinpoint super-specific actions that policymakers—namely, the mayor himself—can take to address whatever the challenge may be. And the first installment I worked on was a scorecard of Zohran Mamdani’s first 100 days in office, graded by how well he executed a list of 11 tweaks the column called for back in December. (Spoiler alert: he did okay!) But what I’m most excited for is learning about a whole lot of granular changes that could make life better across a wide range of issues for myself and my fellow New Yorkers. Because the moment calls for it more than ever. More soon.

Parkside property

There are few dynamics in our daily environment more visibly symbiotic than that of public parks and real estate. People pay top dollar to touch grass—accessible green and open spaces are cited in practically every broker ad or pitch you read (“You’ll be just steps from…”) as an amenity on par with ensuite laundry or a private gym. So much so that property values actually spike the closer they are to one; estimates vary, but it’s pegged as anywhere between a 8 to 20 percent increase. Real estate can drive parks acquisition, but any fan of The Gilded Age can tell you that the opposite is also true. Parks can spur a land rush.

A 2022 report from the Trust for Public Land, which I wrote about way back when, said that New York City’s parks add some $15 billion in residential property value, generating a gigantic windfall to the city’s coffers. The only problem? Unless you’ve got a conservancy or some other way to capture some of that value, New York City’s parks see very little on this return. In fact, under-resourced parks often sit next to luxury condos, whose residents directly benefit from them, yet they still struggle for funding. What gives?

In 2024, Center for an Urban Future’s Editorial and Policy Director Eli Dvorkin and I laid out 20 new potential revenue streams for parks, one of which included a mechanism to make that ROI more equitable. And this month, alongside esteemed public space thinker Tim Tompkins, we dove deeper into that idea, outlining five routes that policymakers could take to harness some of the value that parks both create and sustain for properties across the five boroughs, following the lead of cities like Chicago and Seattle. We also held a well-attended forum on the topic. With the city embarking on a housing spree in the years ahead, we think the time is now to ensure that parks get their fair share.

Green machine

It’s clear we’ve entered a new stage of our civilizational response to the climate crisis. This month, New York lawmakers, led by the governor, are at odds over how to defang the state’s once nation-leading climate law, confronting a different reality today than 2019, when the legislation was passed. With a war in the Middle East, inflation, and a hostile Washington, the economics, they say, just aren’t right. But they’re not alone. The European Union, often looked to as the leader in this arena, is doing the same. So is New Zealand. (Even New Zealand!) And more will follow. These days, we hear less about the 2-degree threshold, and more about a global recession. When times are tough, the Earth gets benched.

So if we’re going to talk about the green transition, we’ll need a new language to for this changed paradigm. It’ll have to be a mix of affordability and well-paying, dignified labor—both central to the zeitgeist of the political moment. I’ve written before on how a sustainable city is an affordable city, where mass transit and cycling are the cheapest ways to get around, and our parks and public spaces are both free and thriving. But similarly, we’ll have to talk about jobs. In 2024, Dvorkin and I (we write often together!) put out a pitch that the City University of New York, or CUNY, was primed to be a green jobs engine. The public university system is deeply affordable. It has campuses in each borough. And its student body actually looks like the city writ large. Plus, the buildings need a lot of work.

There have been bits and bobs of movement since then, with funding allotted to building retrofits, curriculum enhancements, and more. But this month we saw the biggest one yet, just in time for Earth Week: the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) is investing over $7 million for green workforce training facilities across six CUNY campuses. There will be a Decarbonization Lab at one school, harnessing student talent to test out advances that the city could then scale. And another will get an Energy Education Center House, where classes will learn how to install advanced HVAC systems and solar panels. Yes, the future looks uncertain for our fight against climate change. But the work must go on, adapting like the environment itself.

OSA: Cultivating a culture

The livable streets work where I live ended last year a little wobbly. Open Street volunteers and community organizations advocated successfully for a ‘bike boulevard’ redesign of the Avenue that we pop up on each weekend, and someone who we knew spoke the language of making streets better for all was now the city’s mayor. But we hit a dead end just around the corner. A safety makeover of 31st Street, which is one of the borough’s most dangerous corridors, was mired in dispute. The community board meeting was a mess. Several local businesses sued. And an injunction—with, ultimately, a supportive court decision—had left the corridor half-painted and somehow more fraught than it once was.

Fast forward to today. During the first week of his tenure, the mayor, who lived and worked off of the thoroughfare, announced that his transportation department would restart the process and appeal the court’s decision. All was quiet on the Western Queens front until a few weeks ago, when the agency released plans to triple the size of the project scope to span 31st Street’s entire length. That does a few things: a) it addresses concerns that the original redesign didn’t go far enough; b) it connects the corridor to a larger cycling network; and c) it counts as a “new” project initiation, thus sidestepping the court’s challenge. And this time, the agency really did its homework, obtaining approvals from all relevant entities well in advance of public engagement.

So the second public hearing went a bit differently. Supporters outflanked opponents 3-to-1, with parents of small children, teenagers, and longtime residents testifying alongside organizers. The business owners didn’t show up in numbers, having exhausted costly legal options. And defiant firefighters, led under the union banner, left en masse after FDNY approval was flashed. The board eventually voted 35-4 in support. So: what changed? The project, now in the news for months on end, may have brought out more of the silent majority that tends to like these types of projects, even if it doesn’t always seem like it. Our elected officials may have rallied more effectively. Or a groundswell of support may be more energized by City Hall’s backing. Whatever the answer may be, it was a hell of an intro to our seventh season of the Open Street, which returned this last weekend. We’re officially back outside.

Bright Side: Fast Art

This section is typically dedicated to often-overlooked policy wins, like America’s historic drop in murders mentioned last month or New York’s historic drop in carbon emissions mentioned late last year. But sometimes, it’s just for fun stuff that made my day a little lighter that I’d love to share with y’all.

Enter Greg Goya. The Italian street artist’s work almost entirely unfolds on our streets, using designs that we see every day (i.e. crosswalks, ‘Caution: Wet Floor’ A-frames) as canvases for what is known as “fast art”—temporary exhibits meant to spark quick reactions. It strikes me as true public art, with public, as in public space, the keyword there, incorporating elements of guerrilla urbanism throughout. And let me tell you: they are a delight.

Attaching a few here, with a small ask to just enjoy.

On The Radar

Make Space for Girls

In research for a report I recently co-authored on the state of public recreation in New York City, which last month’s missive dove into further, a city that stood out was Los Angeles. In particular was an initiative there called Girls Play LA, which aims to tackle the enormous gender gap that persists in youth recreation. In so many places, athletic facilities and programming cater to male-dominated sports and activities. And the numbers show for it: in LA, young and teenage girls previously made up just 22 percent of attendance. Girls Play LA, through targeted investment and engagement, successfully raised it to 45 percent.

Art imitates life, in many ways. The politicians paying for public spaces are mostly male. The professions that design public spaces are overwhelmingly made up of men. And the local bodies that weigh in on public spaces are—you guessed it!—dude-heavy. (I may have told this quip before, but friends and I clapped when a woman’s name was first mentioned in an urban design grad class. It was six weeks into the semester.) So it’s no surprise that the interests of women or female-presenting people, young and old, are left out. It’s the same argument made here recently for people with disabilities: if those voices aren’t in the room, their lived experiences are forgotten, both in the hardware and software of how our towns and cities work.

That leads me to Make Space for Girls, a nonprofit in the United Kingdom that works with everyone involved in creating public spaces, from the councils that fund them to the developers that build them, to actively engage teenage girls as a key constituency. A specific shout-out to the images they share of places like Rösens Rodda Matta, in Malmo, the first park (ever?) made by and for girls 16 to 24. Again, so much of the work is getting in the room. And they’re doing just that.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• The American Civil Liberties Union, otherwise known as the ACLU, is searching for a senior manager in planning and analysis. (New York, Washington D.C.)

• National Geographic, otherwise known as NatGeo, is giving out lots of grants for stories highlighting climate solutions. (Everywhere)

• The New York Times, otherwise known as… just kidding, is hiring an assistant editor to oversee coverage for my friends over at Metro. (New York)

***

In these desperate times, we ask: where are the jobs? Submit them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Sumerian, widely regarded as oldest language on the planet.

***

This newsletter’s logo was created by River Quinn Jensen.

Streetbeat © 2026

Kifak*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we’re covering:

- Reviving public recreation as a civic good;

- Designing cities for the visually impaired;

- Equitable access to public space funding;

& much, much more.

Respect the rec

Public spaces, on their own, are a plus. But they thrive on activation. Finding ways to provide programming or engineer new uses is essential to bringing people to a place, and having them return again and again. It’s what allows public spaces to be social connectors, resource hubs, or business incubators. Recreation is a top-tier choice to get there. A park itself naturally has passive use, but facilities like basketball courts, volleyball nets, tracks, soccer pitches, and pools inject energy to any said space. And they get people moving.

About a year ago, my colleagues and I at the Center for an Urban Future started to explore the state of public recreation in New York City. It was our first deep dive into a topic area that, frankly, gets less attention; we often focus on the parks part more than rec. But what we found is that city dollars had largely shifted away from the latter over the years, leaving behind a topsy-turvy landscape of aging infrastructure, staffing shortfalls, and gaps in access (or ‘rec deserts’). This comes at a time, too, of worsening health indicators, when free and low-cost options to exercise hold outsized significance, especially in neighborhoods where a private gym membership is difficult to afford.

Our research, aptly titled Putting the Rec Back in NYC Parks & Rec, puts forward 11 ideas to elevate public recreation as a citywide priority. We call for a recreation master plan; prescribing fitness like medicine (‘RecRx’); a ‘RecPass’ akin to a library card; and innovative forms that recreation could take—on our streets, waterfront, and elsewhere. We held a forum on the topic. We got a spread in The New York Times. We inspired language in news of a new rec center opening. And in partnership with New Yorkers for Parks and North Brooklyn Parks Alliance, we held a rally in front of a closed pool, with neighbors stopping to join us and share memories of what the building meant to them when it was open. It’s time for a new rec era. Check out the report here.

Blind in cities

Generally, there are two models of what are known to us as ‘disabilities.’ There’s the (I’d say more mainstream) medical model, which suggests that there is something wrong with the individual that needs to be cured or augmented. It’s a physical or mental ailment in search of a fix. Then there’s the social model, which suggests that there is something wrong with the barriers the world puts up that demands an overhaul. A person’s not disabled; society itself is disabling.

Lived experience dictates your exposure to either. It wasn’t until my mom required a walker, and then a wheelchair, that I noticed that she was slowly slipping out of everyday existence, which, where we lived, demanded a car to do practically anything. It wasn’t until close friends of mine suffered from mental health problems that I noticed that they, too, were falling behind at work or in school, with no safety net to catch them. And it wasn’t until I spent a morning with someone who is blind that I noticed how excluded their livelihoods are from how we plan the way we get around, which quite literally clocks countdown crossings down to the seconds it takes a physically capable man to get across the street. Again: maybe it’s not the person who’s disabled here.

That time spent navigating the streets and subways with Dr. Sharon McLennon Wier, an advocate and executive director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled New York (CIDNY), leads a recent feature I wrote for Bloomberg CityLab about designing a city that works better for blind commuters. It explores the various challenges faced and the solutions out there—technological, built, policy, or otherwise—to address them. The impacts are multiplying: a place improved and accessible to all abilities is, as it turns out, better for all people. Or, in other words, a world that is less disabling. Read more about what’s possible here.

Best practices

On the first weekend of the Mamdani administration, the new mayor was joined by his new transportation commissioner along Brooklyn’s McGuinness Boulevard to announce the revival of a life-saving redesign that had been paused by his predecessor so his top hand could score a cameo in a TV show few have watched. (Yes, really.) There, the mayor said that his end game was to make New York City’s streets “the envy of the world.” And that line is now cited as the bar to strive for—or, on the contrary, hold his team accountable to.

Now, to be fair, it’s a worthy goal. While it may be the leader here in the U.S., New York City has fallen behind on the world stage when it comes to making its streets safer and more attractive to all road users. One only has to look to the videos of Copenhagen or Chengdu for daily inspo. And this last week’s easy election of Emmanuel Grégoire as mayor of Paris, who proudly flaunted the legacy of outgoing maire Anne Hidalgo—someone who decidedly shifted the French capital away from cars—was a stark reminder of that.

But I’d hedge a bit on the notion that our best dreams are all abroad. Right now, the five boroughs are home to a bunch of projects that are pushing the boundaries (and, subsequently, our imaginations) of what’s possible. Sometimes the best lessons are local, and in a recent op-ed for City Limits with Rob Daurio, the Director of Urban Sustainability at WXY—who I’ve had the pleasure of working with on a few projects—we jotted down some of our personal faves that we think are equally inspiring, if not overlooked. Now let’s scale them citywide.

OSA: Greener Pastures

It takes money to manage a public space. You need dollars to maintain and activate it. Those materials need to be stored somewhere. Depending on your city’s risk tolerance, you might need to insure everyone. Also: don’t forget any HR needs, personnel needs, outreach needs… the list goes on and on.

For the first few years of New York City’s Open Streets program, we got lucky—funds from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) went directly to partners, no strings attached. But then as the program was codified into law, it was layered with bureaucracy, too; to access the city’s allocated budgets, groups had to navigate a haphazard invoicing process and survive a long-protracted reimbursement rate. This, in turn, made the public space program less equitable; the onus was on largely volunteer groups to figure out fundraising upfront, which favors well-resourced communities, even though we’re carrying out a city-backed program. (At 31st Ave, we rely on markets, merchandise, and community donations to make up the delta.) The struggle for funding became, by far, the biggest barrier to maintaining existing Open Streets and starting new ones—and we, as organizers, told anyone who would listen.

But it looks like that tireless advocacy finally paid off. This year, how the Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) funds its Open Streets program is set to change—a new partnership with an outside intermediary (Citizens NY) will dole out ‘micro-grants’ so partners can receive almost half of their set budget at the season’s start. This will make it easier to plan programming, buy equipment, purchase insurance, and help pay for all the other stuff that goes into managing a public space. And, if all goes well, it’ll take down one of the biggest barriers to entry and continued participation, making the premiere pop-up public space program of America’s largest city more accessible to all. Fingers crossed.

Bright Side: Crimewave

Here we have yet another installment of “bad news bias” playing out in real-time. Not too dissimilar from a point made several months back, when I spoke about the paradox of climate progress writ large (which seems hopelessly mired at the moment) vis à vis New York City (which hit a new low in emissions last year). What we’re left with, or at least feeling, is the unsettling stuff. And often, thanks to negative reinforcement, vibes are sadly stronger than facts. So it goes.

The latest example? Crime. I’m going to shoot this straight first, and then we can dissect: 2025 was one of the safest years in American history. For those who blinked, here it is again: 2025 was one of the safest years the U.S. has seen since the turn of the 20th century. Let’s let that one sink in. Last year capped off historic decreases across the board. Our violent crime rate fell to the lowest level since 1969, with the single-greatest percentage decrease ever recorded. Cities nationwide saw murder rates they haven’t seen since the 1950s and 1960s. And more substantially, we’re talking about crime rates at 125-year lows.

The reason why depends on the expert you ask. It could be the post-pandemic infusion of money into police, or changing tactics. It could be the rise in hours people are spending inside. It could be where we were headed before Covid-19 broke the bar graphs. Or it could be something else. But what I want to leave you with is this question: do you feel it? My guess is no. It might not be your neighborhood or block, per se, but (*gestures broadly*) the world seems more dangerous than ever. Again, vibes. And that is worth figuring out how to fix.

On The Radar

In Jackson Heights

Last month, we lost Frederick Wiseman at the age of 96. Wiseman was one of the most prolific documentarians of our time. He started making films in the 1960s, largely using public media as his platform. His style is sometimes described as cinéma vérité (translation: true, or unstructured, cinema) but he hated the phrase, once calling it a “pompous French term.” Instead, he preferred “reality fictions.” Wiseman would choose social institutions as his backdrop—a hospital, a youth gang in Harlem, a welfare office, a meatpacking plant—and then plop a camera there. Reality, using his own words, would do the rest.

In 2015, he applied that approach to Jackson Heights, Queens, known perhaps most famously for being one of the most diverse places on the face of the planet. Estimates say some 160 languages are spoken there. It contains this almost-incomprehensible convergence of cultures, cuisines, efforts and economies; like an entire city and its history packed into a square mile. And I have the immense privilege of living right next door to it. (A special shout-out to the 34th Ave Open Street/Paseo Park there, which I often call the ‘red pill’ of New York’s streets.)

Wiseman’s award-winning film, with an apt title, brings us to its doorsteps. A series of vignettes, each maybe ten to fifteen minutes in length, land us in the offices of an immigrant rights group; in a halal chicken coop; in a former Council Member’s office; in an imam; at a salon owner’s birthday party; and on the streets themselves. It captures the mundane, but that’s the whole point. The three-hour documentary today, which we rewatched after Wiseman’s death, is a time capsule—a snapshot of life then, in a place where people from over 100 countries co-exist, when our divisions were growing fierce (the mid-2010s). It forces the viewer to grapple with “Look, this is possible!” And leave believing that, just maybe, Jackson Heights shouldn’t be an outlier, but the norm.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• Join Streetsblog USA, the preeminent news org covering the livable streets movement, for a summer internship. (Remote)

• New York Focus, one of my favorite new media startups, is looking for a managing editor. (New York State)

• The Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice (MOCEJ), which has some neat work coming out soon that I’m excited to share, is in need of a policy advisor. (New York, NY)

***

In these desperate times, we ask: where are the jobs? Submit them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Levantine Arabic, in honor of Ramadan. Eid Mubarak.

***

This newsletter’s logo is brought to you by River Quinn Jensen.

Streetbeat © 2026

Helo!

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we’re covering:

- Snowstorms as urban management 101;

- The (failed) promises of transit tech;

- Care as a co-governance model;

& much, much more.

Editor’s Note: After six years of relative design stasis, you may have noticed that this newsletter looks slightly different than the rest.

Folks: we’ve got a logo.

Since my partner coined the name in a conversation on a Staten Island bus some years ago—back when this was was called “Journalism & Urbanism” (oof, sorry)—I’ve always felt Streetbeat deserved some art. Then I tucked that thought away somewhere in my brain, where it slept until recently. As I made changes over time, like standardizing sections and adding voiceover, the idea for a “brand refresh” (lol) returned to the forefront. Et voilá.

For me, Streetbeat is a name in motion; something that’s fun to say, like the quirky name of a radio program or public access show from the 80s or 90s. (One could only aspire to that vibe.) It’s sort of like a Walkman, but the text version? And like, make it about cities? In short: musical, but on the move.

But I am not a graphic designer, and so I sought out pals for help. First, I looked for inspiration elsewhere on Substack: I thought of Sarah Barnes’s Along for the Ride, Alex Wolfe’s Pedestrian, and others. Then I hired my friend River Quinn Jensen, a fab graphic designer who somehow made sense out of the above paragraph and similar sentences. After some back-and-forth, which spurred a bunch of fun logos that could’ve done the job just fine, we landed on what you see here, with plans for alternate skylines if this missive travels again.

Anyway, I’m just delighted by it. And thanks, as always, for being here.

Snow day

The first subsection of last month’s edition was titled ‘First 100 Days,’ detailing the gears that shift into place any time a new mayor comes to town, let alone the youngest in a century who shocked almost everyone inside and outside City Hall. We’re now at the two-month mark, and a lot has happened. But today, I want to focus on what’s taken up perhaps most of Mayor Mamdani’s attention in his first few weeks in office. And it’s not universal childcare, free buses, raising taxes on the rich, or even playing 3D chess with Donald Trump.

In fact, it’s something much more simple than that. It’s snow.

Just given the odds of a Northeastern climate, most mayors of New York City have at least one major snowstorm event during their tenure. (The last one did not, though Eric Adams did have wildfires, droughts and orange skies.) Zohran Mamdani has had three: a bomb cyclone in late January, followed by the coldest set of days New York City has seen in its recorded history, capped off with the biggest blizzard in years. And we’re not out of the woods yet either.

As a native New Yorker, I can safely say that this has been the most brutal winter in my lifetime. And it’s come at a tragic cost: at least 20 New Yorkers have died outside in the cold, unable to find shelter or underestimating how quickly they’d succumb to frostbite. Too many New Yorkers went without heat and electricity for too long. For sure, there were moments of bliss on emptied streets and joy in parks—and we should celebrate it—but this one will be tough to shake.

But for a new mayor with little managerial experience, it could ultimately be a formative experience. In Vital City this month, I dove deep into how Mayor Mamdani adapted—and the lessons learned for governing the city.

Reality check

Every so often, a silver bullet solution arrives in the transit space, heralded by monied backers as the answer to all of our greatest troubles: traffic, crashes, carbon, and so on. A few years back, it was Mobility as a Service, or MaaS, which pitches a one-stop digital shop for getting around. (I covered the concept in 2021 for the Times.) Then it was the Hyperloop, which pitches a quasi-pneumatic tube that shoots cars around at warp speed. And more recently, it’s been automated vehicles, or AVs, which pitch human error as the problem.

These silver bullets all exist in some form today: our smartphones are running a basic level of MaaS, with navigation apps that display transit options; even if Elon keeps trying to build one, we actually have a Hyperloop in tons of cities (it’s called a subway); and while AVs are in beta, cars now utilize computer vision for collision detection, reversing, and more. But if you look outside in most parts of the world, you may notice that this ‘urban mobility dream’ has yet to be realized: we’re still driving around in private vehicles that are quite literally cooking the planet; congestion is still awful, if not getting worse; and traffic violence is still accepted as an operating cost of contemporary society.

So in 2026, where do we go from here? Are we any closer to achieving our car-free (or at least car-lite) future? Or are we still sputtering out? That’s the question I set out to answer for PRISM, a publication by the consulting firm Arthur D. Little, hearing from their experts and others. You can read what I found here.

Campaign trail

As I mentioned recently, it’s prime time for policy and politics right now where I live, which has recently made a 9-to-5 routine something of myth for me. But it’s good to hit the pause button every so often to get a sense of where things stand.

Looking across three fronts we have:

• Reconnect. I’ve written ad nauseam about the work I’ve done with colleagues at Center for an Urban Future to inspire the program known as CUNY Reconnect, which re-engages older students who started but didn’t finish their college degree. That program has since taken off and been expanded to target demographics, like veterans and newly arrived New Yorkers. It’s also gone statewide. In her State of the State address last month, Governor Kathy Hochul name-dropped SUNY Reconnect several times, funding it to now cover high-demand fields. And this month, news arrived that the 5,500+ students it’s already re-enrolled are helping to close the budget gap for the state university system. And for CUNY, over 15,000 students have already graduated through the program. Huzzah.

• Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. On another CUF topic: we released our ideas report on the future of Queens’ signature public space last August. It got a lot of press. It led to a rally. It inspired a petition. And now serves as a blueprint, I hope, of how to leverage this moment of immense change for the area, with a coming soccer stadium, casino and housing development, to finally deliver for the beleaguered park. Recently, I’ve spoken publicly with Waterfront Alliance about our separate-but-conjoined work to get more attention from City Hall for this corner of Queens. And work is underway to organize, organize, organize. More soon on that front.

• The G train. I spoke in this space last about something I wrote for Streetsblog NYC calling on Mayor Mamdani, Gov. Hochul and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to restore G service back to central Queens on weekends, where it once ran. Along with friends of mine who inspired that work, we believe this is the right idea at the right moment—and this month backed us up. Mayor Mamdani has weighed in, saying it’s a “very interesting idea, and one we’re digging into right now.” Assembly Member Claire Valdez, who’s also running for Congress, continues to lead the charge. A supportive letter was signed by over 30 organizations, including major advocacy groups, venues, and The New York Mets. Riders have told news outlets they love it. The MTA continues to chafe at the concept, but we’re working behind the scenes to keep the momentum up. Watch this space.

OSA: Collective Care

I’ve recently been reflecting on a graduate dissertation written by my neighbor Yvette Kleinbock where she studied the community of care that emerged in Western Queens during the pandemic. Care, she writes, can drive a model of co-governance, where mutual aid creates this parallel safety net that catches people when public institutions fail to. If done right, it can, and should, lead to lasting change. For what it’s worth, this is a network that spawned the Assembly campaign of Zohran Mamdani (fun fact: the Astoria Food Pantry, the brick-and-mortar of the mutual aid movement here, was his HQ) and a litany of organizations that exist to this day. And in times of crisis—be it hurricanes, blizzards, ICE raids—it ideally can be activated anew.

The 31st Ave Open Street Collective is a part of that history. For the dissertation, Kleinbock spoke to myself and other organizers, but the lines are blurred because our stories are interwoven. On a recent episode of The People’s Republic of Astoria podcast, named for our neighborhood’s lefty moniker, I shared some background alongside one of my favorite humans, Benham Jones, who is an instrumental piece of the Pantry, the People’s Bodega, and Dave’s Lesbian Bar, and adjacent to many more. (Fun fact: he was also my downstairs neighbor and would later officiate our marriage.) The bonds are deep but sprawling, unified by a sense of collective pride and urgency. And while I think people will be trying to explain why this happened here of all places for years to come—The New Yorker had the latest attempt—its continued influence is a testament to the tireless work put in by so many, almost all of whom are volunteers.

Since its start, the Open Street has been an incubator to that work. Dave’s Lesbian Bar holds pop-up markets and concerts. The Rolling Library holds book fairs. The Astoria Worker Project holds info sessions. Astoria Food Pantry holds food drives. (We donate a portion of our market revenue to their operations, too.) The scroll goes on and on. None of these groups existed before the pandemic; they all came about to respond to a specific need—food insecurity, illiteracy, labor organizing, a lack of queer spaces, to name a few. We offer them a street in New York City to get their message out. In return, they activate it.

As I told Streetsblog NYC recently, public space programs like this demand civic investment. They give people a place to meet. They allow groups to grow together and prosper. They foster a community of care. And they do it for free.

Bright Side: Bench!

I’ll always set aside space to people taking it upon themselves to solve our streetscape. Some call this ‘tactical urbanism’ (which, lest I forget, I’m co-authoring a book about!) but this is more DIY. And there’s a distinction: rather than partner with municipalities or property owners to test quick-build options for long-term solutions (hence the term ‘tactical’), people who partake in what’s known as ‘guerrilla urbanism’ don’t wait around for contracts or RFPs—which, to be fair, drag—to take action. And informality can always teach us a thing or two.

For the second month in a row, the latest inspo here is from SFO. A group known as the ‘San Francisco Bay Area Bench Collective,’ or SFBABC, saw a problem (nowhere to sit while waiting for the bus) and fixed it (by installing street furniture). Their website tells you exactly how to do it, and where to find their work. And just like that, the bus stops, in the words of organizer Elise Joshi in this incredible Instagram video, go from “no bench” to “bench!” Simple.

On The Radar

Anti-Render

I’ve written here before about how AI can be used to show us what’s possible for our cities. DALL-E, the generative AI platform, spits out near-utopian street redesigns, which are now being used as tools for advocacy everywhere. It takes the idea of a rendering—which architects, planners and designers love to use to paint a pretty picture of the projects they’re working on—and throws it into hyper-drive. But what if there was something that did the exact opposite?

Enter Anti-Render. The platform shows us what a firm’s sleek imagery looks like on “a random Tuesday in November,” the creators say. “No sunshine. No happy families. No impossibly green trees. Just cold, honest, depressing reality.” And if you don’t enjoy it, there’s a way to return to Pleasantville. Hilariously, it’s called the AntiAntiRender.

Why would anyone want to see this, you might ask? Because it’s good to remind people that nothing will ever look perfect. Renderings offer us a warmer (often whiter) version of something, which tends to gloss over reality. A project will occasionally look like shit, and we have to be okay with that. If we try to convince ourselves otherwise, we’re doing ourselves and the public a disservice.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• The smart minds at the new-ish policy journal Vital City who let me write about snow this month are looking for a policy director. (New York, NY)

• RiseBoro Community Partnership, an affordable housing and services provider, needs a director of content. (Brooklyn, NY)

• The Urban Ocean Lab, which researches responses to how water is changing around us, is hiring senior fellows. (Remote)

***

In these desperate times, we ask: where are the jobs? Submit them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Malaysian, in honor of Lunar New Year.

Ma ngek!

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we’re covering:

- The politics of a mayoral transition;

- The great building retrofit spree;

- A pitch on a transit project;

& much, much more.

Editor’s Note: I cannot write a newsletter about cities and not mention what is happening in American ones at the moment. I’m sure you’ve seen it, reader: for the last few weeks—and frankly, much longer than that—state terror has arrived in our urban spaces. We have watched grocery stores and apartment buildings get raided. We have watched children get detained leaving school. We have watched parents go into routine visa appointments and come out in handcuffs. And, this month, we have watched federal agents kill American citizens who felt a natural urge to help. It is the most visible drip of authoritarianism in most Americans’ lifetimes, and it’s happening overwhelmingly in our cities.

That’s, of course, no coincidence. When Hitler’s Gestapo rounded up Jews, Romani, queer folks, and anyone else non-Aryan, they came for Berlin and Munich. When Brazil’s military police rounded up accused communists and socialists, they came for Rio and São Paulo. And here, in our own country, when slave collectors traveled North to catch freed Black men, women and children, they came for New York and Chicago. Authoritarianism needs a target, and cities provide ample fodder—they’re inherently diverse, welcoming, and inclusive. Their very best qualities are exactly why they’re singled out.

But also, they also offer their greatest line of defense. Witnessing Minneapolis, Portland, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and so many others has been equal parts terrifying and profound. It should never come to this, but seeing mutual aid groups, immigrant and civil rights organizations, and also just everyday people organize, coordinate, support, and protect one another from harm’s way—and being privy to efforts on the ground where I live—has felt like an antidote in these defuse and disturbing times. Again, it’s a testament: in cities, people have to know one another; we pass each other on the street, shovel each other’s sidewalks when the snow falls, let each other onto the subway before us, and check in on each other when we don’t see or hear from us. Looking out for one another is in our DNA and built into the urban fabric.

Our storytelling should extol those strengths, and this month was a visceral reminder of how important that work remains. Don’t let them forget that.

First 100 days

It’s primetime for politics and policy in New York City. Every mayoral transition ushers in a new roster of power players with their own set of priorities to get to know and lobby. But as someone who has covered several, I can say with certainty—this one feels exceptional. Part of that, of course, is the lack of precedent: Zohran Mamdani is not the first mayor with socialist ideals, but he is the first to say unapologetically that he ran and will govern as one. Thus, occupying City Hall in the world’s wealthiest metropolis, with Wall Street just down the road, makes for some unique dynamics to say the absolute least.

So, a quick power map, if you will. You’ve got the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who are now, as an ascendant organizing movement, in municipal government for the first time. You’ve got the old heads from the de Blasio administration, who see a spiritual sequel in the Mamdani era, even if its ideology slants farther left than they’d like. You’ve got the holdovers from Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, who are still in a state of limbo about their future. You’ve got the moderate monied interests, who are desperate for a foothold, their hopes hitched onto the city’s police commissioner and billionaire heir. And then you’ve got the steady state, who are just there to do their job.

Now, what does the big tent look like behind the scenes? After Election Day, a tight-lipped team leads a flurry of appointments, starting with deputy mayors, which hold entire portfolios of City agencies, with respective commissioners and their senior staff, underneath them. If you’re on the inside, you’re either trying to hold down your job or move elsewhere. And if you’re on the outside, you’re either trying to get inside yourself—if not for a position, then influence—or figuring out who will open the door. Then the jockeying begins, in the form of op-eds, policy blueprints, coffee chats, staffing recommendations, and resumé portals. Bonus points if you know someone on the transition team.

But because Mamdani, in many ways, represents a clean slate—endlessly energetic; new to city government; anti-establishment shades of ambition—the horserace hit a new high these last few weeks. What has resulted is a whole lot of people vying to get their very specific thing that they really care about in front of someone at least two degrees separated from the mayor.

I speak from firsthand experience. Over the last month, I’ve joined or helped lead a nonstop rotation of projects aimed at capturing the new administration’s attention, including: a letter signed by almost 40 organizations calling on City Hall to prioritize the public realm; memos calling for internal reform; proposals calling for innovative approaches to age-old problems; and an op-ed in Crain’s New York Business written alongside my friend Carter Strickland, a former commissioner for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (NYCDEP), calling out climate resilience—in the form of public parks, livable streets, and flood prevention—as a prerequisite for affordability. It’s been a busy time, folks.

There’s an adage amongst politicos that the first 100 days are all that matters. It’s when a new government sets its tone, decides where to spend its capital, and, perhaps most importantly, makes its first inroads into voters’ minds. Now that we’re about a month in, let’s see what will soon stick.

All aboard

Over the last few decades, New York City has grown more, in typical planning speak, multinodal. What that means is this: instead of economies and power centers clustered around a specific place (in this case: lower and mid-Manhattan), they have fanned out to other ‘downtowns’ in the outer boroughs. Now, there was some intention here; City Hall made some strategic decisions in the early aughts to stoke development in places with rich transit connections that could quickly shuffle people into the ‘central business district’ but also become serious places in their own right. People—and their cultures, and their livelihoods, and their friends—followed. And the pandemic only accelerated them, making it less critical to be somewhere (often Manhattan) all week long.

But as these corridors gained unprecedented steam in Brooklyn and Queens, the transit between them hasn’t followed suit. The Interborough Express, New York City’s next major transit expansion, will be the first project for the region in 80 years that doesn’t enter Manhattan at any point—a testament to how focused that hub-and-spoke model has been. The last one was the Crosstown Local, otherwise known to New Yorkers as the green ‘G’ line, which, unsurprisingly given the reasons above, has seen faster growth than the rest of the system these last few years. And in 2009, before this development phenomenon really hit its stride, service was cut further into Queens. Now, most straphangers have to take a circuitous route, through Manhattan, to go between the two boroughs.

Bringing it back feels particularly timely, though. You have transit projects that won’t be finished for years. You have a new mayor who lived along this corridor and ran on affordable transit for all. You have a governor who probably wants to deliver for voters that she desperately needs ahead of a re-election campaign. And you have tracks that are just sitting there, aching to be used. (Every so often, you’ll see a unicorn using them during an emergency reroute.)

That’s the argument I made this month in an op-ed for Streetsblog NYC—that it’s high time for Mayor Mamdani (who, yes, doesn’t control the MTA) to apply some political pressure on his counterparts in Albany to bring the G back to eastern Queens on weekends, which would plug up a missing gap in the transit map. It was shared by lots and lots of people, including Brooklyn’s borough president, a local assembly member, a state senator, and several candidates for Congress and other races. The race is on. Stay tuned for more.

Build back greener

When we think of what causes climate change, our perceptions often look like emissions. Something spewing out of something else: fumes, smog, exhaust, trash, etc. It’s hard then to imagine that most of the energy we’re sucking up is actually stationary, or inanimate. It’s from the buildings that we live, work and play in—the first, second and third spaces. Practically everything we do inside comes with a carbon cost (the largest, in fact, cumulatively) and so confronting climate change will require totally shifting the way we power every property.

Enter Harlem River Houses. The complex on Manhattan’s East Side is one of the oldest federally funded public housing projects in the U.S. At the time, it represented a serious milestone in progressive social policy: that government had to provide dignified, affordable developments to those most in need. But it wasn’t without foible; borne through deep segregation, Harlem River Houses remained a Black-only campus, a divisive legacy that persists to this day. And later, its infrastructure saw decades of disinvestment, leaving residents to live with age-old systems that broke down often on them and dirtied the air they breathed. So if this campus could decarbonize, what else was possible?

For Skylight, I wrote about what it took to get a public housing complex—574 units across nine acres, to be precise—to go green. This was my first piece for the publication, which launched last year to tell the stories of buildings at a time of climate crisis. And it has a really neat media model: each reporter teams up with another to tell one tale through multiple lenses. I was delighted to co-write, interview and tour the place with Natasha Ishak, who then compiled a neat package of shorter scenes to accompany the feature. And we’re happy to share it!

OSA: A big year

There are many, many things I’ll remember 2025 for. But one of the more positive things? It was the year that the 31st Ave Open Street became (quasi-)permanent.

A significant stretch of 31st Avenue, a vital east-west corridor in Queens, entered 2025 looking like most streets we know: a two-way thoroughfare, with little space for anything but car traffic. Every weekend from April to December, our volunteers did the same thing we’ve done since 2020—on just two blocks out of many, we showed what else it could be: a calmer, more enjoyable space for all road users, with those on two feet at the tippy top. And by year’s end, the corridor was redone in its image through a ‘bike boulevard’ redesign, which delivers expanded pedestrian space every day. (When—not if—we become a plaza someday, I’ll call it fully permanent.)

But that’s not all. On top of those high-level moves, the Collective also had its biggest season yet. Our year-in-review had highlights like:

• 🎈 676 events for the public;

• 💰 $10,000 raised in market donations for our pals at the Astoria Food Pantry;

• 🙋‍♂️ 1,276 total volunteer hours;

• 🙌 200 neighbors who signed up to make 'Astoria's front-yard' happen.

We’re using the time off to talk through what 2026 will look like. A question front and center: now that the Open Street is quite literally here to stay, what else can, or should, we do? We’ve grown more comfortable advocating beyond our borders, in our campaigns for universal daylighting, a safer 31st Street, and a low-traffic plan for the whole area, not just one avenue. One of our biggest stans in office is now the mayor of New York City, and so the potential feels both huge and humbling. (In his second week in office, he made good on his pledge to appeal 31st Street.) The sky’s the limit. In the meantime, we’ll take the W.

Bright Side: Wide open spaces

Little good came from the pandemic, and societally we’ll spend many more years trying to excavate the full extent of its damage. But it’s now common consensus that the pandemic shook up how towns and cities view and assign public space, which, as we know, is part of a historic pattern. (Past pandemics gave us parks, playgrounds, and pretty boulevards.) When our movement is limited, we tend to second-guess the status quo around us.

I tell those stories often. Since its start, so much of this newsletter has been dedicated to the products of the pandemic. Two years ago, that included Gotham Park and QueensWay, two projects reimagining long overlooked space; the former underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, the latter along an old rail corridor. Both were ignited by a surge of interest in 2020 and beyond.

Today, I’m happy to continue that work with Trust for Public Land. Last year, I helped write several case studies for the national organization’s Parks Equity Accelerator, which convenes cities to address their unique-but-often-universal challenges of parks access. (TPL is famous for their ‘10-minute walk’ count, which measures how many Americans are steps away from some public green.) Like the Boston Housing Authority, which is reassessing the acres it manages to better fit residents’ needs. Or Pittsburgh, where greenways—a sliver that often falls through the cracks of jurisdiction—are getting their time to shine.

There are good stories to tell—half of the battle is just finding them.

On The Radar

SF Sketchfest: On the Rails

The places where we travel together are shared, in many ways. At airports, we all go through the same security. At bus stops, we all wait on the same lines, checking the same boards. At ferry terminals, we all see the same boats coming into sight. At gas stations (a rare public moment for drivers), we all fill up at the same pumps. And at subway stations, we all board the same train.

In San Francisco, a question was recently posed: can we make that collective experience fun? (And, really, should it be?) It’s the idea behind BART’s latest line of programs, which is rolling out speed-dating, Star Wars-themed celebrations, movie nights, anime festivals and more to the system’s stations and subways. The newest addition? A traveling comedy show, starting at 12th St./Oakland, running the route with routines from four performers, and then returning to the same station for curtain call. It’s like ‘Showtime!’ but stand-up. And the first-ever show, held last Saturday afternoon, sold out.

So perhaps to answer our earlier questions: yes, it can be.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• The good folks over at the Waterfront Alliance, a coalition of advocates working to remind us that New York City is surrounded by coastline, is hiring a senior education manager. (New York, NY)

• Speaking of Gotham: the coolest job at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) right now might be designing the future Interborough Express. (New York, NY)

• The design behemoth Gensler has a ton of job postings up. (Washington, D.C.)

• My friends over at the Municipal Arts Society (MAS), which has been shedding light on the power of public space for over a century, is in need of a communications manager. (New York, NY)

• Someone join Oxfordshire Livable Streets and get that beautiful town even more great public space. (Hybrid, UK)

***

Let’s make this less Northeast Corridor-centric. Where are the jobs? Submit them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Seke, one of the world’s rarest languages spoken in New York.

Hello!

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we’re covering:

- Lessons from an upside-down year;

& much, much more.

Editor’s Note: It’s the last day of 2025, so I’ll spare you the summaries. I’m sure you’ve already scanned the ‘Best Of’ lists. You’ve shared your Spotify Wrapped. You’ve grieved over the obituaries. You’ve made your resolutions. And you’ve reflected on what this year is, was, and will be in the collective history of it all.

For me, 2025 stood out for all the wrong reasons. It was the most unhinged the world has felt since the pandemic—a period of great unease and uncertainty, with vibes that were, at times, reminiscent of the Great Recession. It’s hard to shake how despairing this trip around the sun has been for the sick, undocumented, hungry, jobless, vulnerable, and poor. Amidst that sense of turmoil, I do hope, dear reader, that you’ve experienced some holiday joy, wherever you may be. And that this next year is a good one, without any fear.

I started Streetbeat five years ago to spark inspiration from cities during such fraught times. For me, urban centers have always been a source of go-getter optimism that our zeitgeist seemed to sorely lack. I may sound like a record player stuck on repeat, but cities can’t wait to act—the pothole has to be paved and the trash has to get picked up, today not tomorrow. They are inherently decisive arenas where things happen, if not by chance then by choice. And in 2025, as nationalism took root anew and globalization faltered, cities were once again left holding the bag. Of course, it’s a position they know all too tell.

In that tension, though, some things became clear about cities and where they’re headed next. Here are four key themes that I’m thinking about as we enter 2026.

Cash is king.

I live in New York City, a place that practically screams ‘cha-ching’ when you say it out loud. It’s common knowledge that there’s a cost of doing business here that spikes costs on everything from rent and groceries to WiFi and booze. And so, a sure bet of travel elsewhere has been the price compare. It was almost like a law of physics: Leave the five boroughs, and it’s guaranteed to be a cheaper go.

But recently, something has changed. In New Orleans this month, I bought three coffees for $15. In Boston earlier this year, a meal at a hole-in-the-wall still racked up $30-40 a person. Friends pay pretty similar rents now in Austin and Los Angeles. And voyages abroad come at less of a discount these days, outside of transit, healthcare, and the arts. (Shout-out to public subsidies.) Unless you’re visiting a place where the dollar goes a long way, chances are your bill will look relatively the same wherever you are. It’s not that New York City got cheaper (lol imagine) or held steady; rather, it’s that everywhere else is catching up.

For years, the industrialized world has careened down a path where our productivity has far exceeded what we’re getting paid for it, all while the cost of living has gone up. That’s the stats behind the sensation of feeling like you’re working more hours than ever before just to pay your bills. No, you’re not alone: capitalism has broken a core promise of higher wages for higher output. And a key side-effect is what some call ‘the politics of despair,’ where hopelessness and frustration erode political norms. Turns out, when you watch the average cost of college for your children increase $30,000 in your lifetime as the rich get even richer, you’re probably open to exploring something new.

That’s how you get Donald Trump (again) and Zohran Mamdani a year apart, and people who voted for both of them. Sure you need charisma and a good comms strategy, too, but candidates who can clearly communicate how the game is stacked against us are winning across the board. Because affordability has become the defining issue of our time—something most of us can all relate to and fume over at the dinner table. (Even the comfortably upper middle-class are paying a lot for childcare!) And that reality is starkest in cities, where populations cluster and the haves and have-nots live in close proximity.

Now, the question is: can cities actually deliver?

Cutting costs for people is tough to do, because, like crime, it’s subject to external factors, like supply chains and crises. Our perception of price tags is often cumulative, too, not singular—meaning that while a new policy might save you some bucks on electricity or rent, that record-high price for coffee you just paid might make you forget about it entirely. So solutions must not only be sweeping, but also, deeply impactful—highly tangible savings that people can see in their everyday spending, not cents on the dollar. That’ll take a New Deal-era level of ambition uncharacteristic of our current political systems, at least at a national level. Cities, instead, are the laboratory by default. Let’s see if they can get it done.

No risk, no reward.

About this time last year, automated enforcement cameras across Manhattan started charging drivers $9 to enter the central business district south of 60th Street. Everything that has happened since is exactly what experts predicted: air quality is better; traffic is thinner; buses are faster; foot traffic is up; and public approval is rosier. And now it’s barely in the news cycle. By all measures, aside from motorists’ grumpiness, the first-in-the-nation tolling program has been one of the biggest success stories of 2025. But the thing is: it was always going to be. Those experts didn’t see into the future; that’s just what happened everywhere else congestion pricing was implemented—in London, Stockholm, and Singapore.

So why did it take so damn long to get done?

There’s a classic adage in journalism that if a story pisses people off, you probably did something right. Now, that’s not always accurate. (Just ask Bari Weiss.) But it’s a line I think a lot about with congestion pricing. Once again, negative reinforcement (a concept I’ve explained here before) comes into play; the backlash, from drivers up to the White House, blared far louder than any tune positive sentiment can sing, from the pedestrians who now cross the road more safely, parents who now have an elevator at their station, or the late-night worker whose train is now faster from added service and modern signals. (FYI: the scheme’s revenue funds these types of transit upgrades.) Just by design, our systems tend to turn up the volume on the former, making it hard to hear the latter. And politicians, fearful of losing power, follow the music.

So how do we craft processes or campaigns that can get local leaders to look past the rancor? How do we shorten the runway on passing policies and programs that research can vouch for? In short: how can we center facts in the discourse? Because we don’t have 50 years (yes, it took that long) to figure out fixes anymore. We’ll need decision-making mechanisms that yield outcomes fast yet somehow aren’t autocratic, which are—shockingly!—hard to find.

Apologies in advance: I do not have the answers here. But what I do know is that congestion pricing and what it’s wrought—the fresher air, the quieter streets, the more vibrant corridors—is proof of the prize at the end.

It ain’t over til’ it’s over.

For most of this year, I dedicated a decent amount of my mental bandwidth to two major street safety redesigns in the neighborhood where I live. (In true Queens fashion, one is on 31st Avenue and another is on 31st Street.) Both deploy widely known traffic-calming measures shown to save lives: ‘daylighting,’ where intersections and turns are made more visible; protected bike lanes; safer crossings; and slower speeds. Both had community support. Both were backed by our elected officials. And today, only one is in place.

Earlier this month, a judge sided with local businesses who sued the City over the redesign of 31st Street, effectively pausing any paint for the foreseeable future. Even though the science said otherwise. Even though the courthouse filing was incomplete. Even though there’s evidence just around the corner, on 31st Ave, where a bike boulevard has not caused the sky to fall. (Rather, initial data shows that foot and cycling traffic is way up since its implementation in June.) For months, the lawsuit was seen as a fluke and nuisance, delaying a project whose need anyone who has ever traversed the corridor can attest to. Then, suddenly, it became much more than that. And today, the street still remains one of the borough’s most dangerous thoroughfares.

The mayor-elect, who will move from an apartment just off 31st Street to the official residence in just a few hours, has sworn to an appeal. Good. But until that paint is in and some time has passed, I’m not holding my breath. Because what this year showed us is that victories, no matter how hard-fought, are still prone to outside interference. (A similar project in Brooklyn was quite literally removed after installation.) We shouldn’t have been blindsided by the judge’s decision; 2025 was the ultimate exercise in Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. And the bell tolls with a visceral reminder to us all: strategize, strategize, strategize.

It doesn’t mean the battle has ended before it even begun—instead, you might just have to take a different path to the destination. But saving lives is worth it.

Keep your eyes on the prize.

On its surface, 2025 was one of the worst years for climate progress in recent memory. Shortly after heralding historic legislation, the U.S. largely abandoned any sort of moral leadership on the issue under a new administration—firing scientists, shutting down offices, wiping websites clean of any mention that humans may be causing some serious damage on the place they call home. Efforts in Europe have slowed to accommodate private industry. The United Nations is now treating the words ‘fossil fuels’ like Voldemort. And outside of China, the public sector is retreating from any real action.

But here’s something that flew under the radar of late: in 2025, New York City’s carbon emissions—all the crap that is roasting our planet at rates we haven’t seen since the Ice Age—dropped to their lowest levels since 2020, when a global pandemic froze our footprint in time and space. The year-to-year decrease from 2024 was 5 percent, which, as one official pointed out, is like taking over half a million cars off the road. Step back even further to see the difference: in two decades, the city’s greenhouse gases has fallen by a whopping 25 percent.

So how do we square those two pegs?

Part of it is the speed at which progress takes place: we live in a minute-by-minute world now, and this stuff takes time. Experts attribute New York City’s reductions to laws years in the making (which, not coincidentally, were mostly enacted during Trump’s first term). Like congestion pricing. Like Local Law 97, which requires retrofits of the city’s biggest buildings. Or like universal composting. Industry-wide shifts do not happen overnight either: the adoption of EVs, the transition to cleaner energy sources, the dismantling of peaker plants—all of this stuff requires long-term infrastructure, investment, and intent.

The results might not be readymade for our modern-age media consumption. The world we’ve constructed through algorithms favors knee-jerk over nuance. But what’s happening here is a testament to change the old-fashioned way—tireless efforts that might not always get the spotlight they deserve. You know, ‘moral arc of the universe bends towards justice’ kind of stuff. But after a year like this one, it’s a good reminder that even in shit times, the work pays off.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• Nobody is stumping for the revival of New York and New Jersey’s waterways more than Waterfront Alliance, and you can, too, as their new senior education manager. (New York, NY)

• CultureHouse, a Streetbeat regular, is looking to add a community engagement lead and manager to their placemaking squad. (Somerville, MA)

***

Tell us where the jobs are at by submitting them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next year!

Bosu*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:

- The progressive mayor playbook;

- The future of flooding in New York City;

- The e-bike resale market;

& much, much more.

Editor’s Note: There will be more to write about Zohran Mamdani. (A few issues ago, I dedicated this note to his then-primary win.) But the same night this month that Mamdani was elected to be New York City’s next mayor—the youngest (34 years old) to win since 1892, and the first South Asian, Muslim and declared democratic socialist to do so—something happened elsewhere that I want to talk about instead. And ironically, it’s New York City’s rival city—Boston.

There, Mayor Michelle Wu glided to a second term unopposed. Just to repeat, for clarity: not even a Republican ran against her. And the story sounds familiar—when Wu was first elected, in 2021, she was the youngest (36 years old) to win in a century, and the first Asian-American and female to do so. And like Mamdani, she vanquished a dynasty (Kraft, not Cuomo) on her road to victory.

Since her inauguration, I’ve followed Wu’s mayoralty closely; I have several friends who either work for her or with her City Hall, and I touch base with them regularly. Her historic election attracted the attention of urbanists everywhere, and as time went on, her tenure appeared as an alternate universe to where I lived, in New York. Contrary to corruption charges and record-low approval ratings—as Eric Adams, New York City’s now-outgoing mayor, faced—here you had an actually popular mayor. She trumpeted her team’s smart policies—like consolidating a ‘Streets Cabinet’ for infrastructure work—instead of undermining them. Her social media endeavors are endearing–like her commutes via bike, bus or T—instead of the strange click-bait coming from @NYCMayor. And she didn’t sidle up to the unsavory; instead, she took on Trump and chose piano with Yo-Yo Ma over the seedy clubs where Adams got himself in trouble.

Today, Michelle Wu is, in my opinion, America’s most successful progressive mayor. And her triumph offers lessons for leftist newcomers, like Mamdani and Katie Wilson, another Millennial and democratic socialist mayor-elect, over in Seattle. She made buses free on three routes that disproportionately serve low-income riders. She cut red tape by creating a new Planning Department, which sets out goals for urban development. And she lowered crime through a ‘community policing’ model that mirrors Mamdani’s idea for a ‘Department of Community Safety.’ (The police union even endorsed her.)

Of course, she is subject to the laws of political gravity; her critics say she’s been too moderate on campaign promises and policing—echoing troubles already murmured about Mamdani. But she’s been able to match pragmatic politics with persona, delivering impactful policies through an administration that feels human above all else. Transition teams: take notice.

Rising tides

In September, the landscape architect Kongjian Yu and three others were tragically killed in a plane crash over Brazil’s Pantanal. They were filming a documentary about Yu’s life and the concept he popularized—’sponge city,’ which reimagines our built environment as one massive absorbent to soak up the wetter world we’ve entered. The other victims were the directors and the pilot.

Yu’s work is world-renowned: his firm took lessons from ancient architecture to pitch new takes on modern design; systems naturally engineered to engulf tons of water and recycle it elsewhere. That portfolio practically created a school of thought around how we can live with water, rather than run from it or wall it off. Today, the ‘sponge city’ idea is a crucial model for climate adaptation—and Yu’s sudden death spurred a long list of tributes that spoke to its impact.

In March, an editor at The New York Times I had worked with before (shout-out to Dan!) asked me for a few ideas about the future of New York City. What would be our major challenges or issues? I spitballed a bunch, and one current was clear: to me, the growing omnipresence of water presents a near-existential threat to life as we know it in the five boroughs—a future determined by how we stay afloat. I had followed Yu’s work for years, so I presented it as one of three options available: absorb, fortify, or move. Dan replied: how about all three?

So, for months, I joined a team of 10-plus people—editors, cartographers, graphic designers, photographers, videographers, and myself as lead writer—to quite literally map out the flooding risks that we face, as well as potential remedies and the scales needed for them to make a dent. What always struck me is how much New York City is already doing to prevent flooding (seriously, it’s a lot!), so the goal was a solutions showcase: here’s what we can do; here’s what we’re doing now; and here’s what we’ll need to do in the future.

The result is a deep-dive interactive feature out last month as part of the Times’ ‘Future of New York’ series (which is worth checking out in full). I shared a byline with Nick Underwood, who miraculously strung together different data to chart out realities like future floodplains, housing units at risk, and where storm surges could collide with sea-walls. (Props to Mannahatta author Eric Sanderson, whose research team provided us with fresh source material.) And in the weeks since, when New York City saw yet another fatal flooding event, Nick and I have received reels of feedback on what isn’t exactly an easy pill to swallow. But the frank conversation was the point.

Here’s the piece—let us know what you think.

Secondhand surge

I have been yapping about e-bikes for a while now. I’ve reported on how cargo e-bikes can replace truck traffic; how e-trikes could be good for older adults in suburbia; how electric bike-share is reshaping the mobility landscape; how smart regulation could rein in this rapidly changing industry; and how we’re trying to keep up with an ever-growing network of chargers, batteries, and electrical hookups. But really, it all stems from a core belief I hold: that e-bikes are the most profound change to our streets since the advent of the automobile.

Yet cost has remained a constant. E-bikes are expensive. (No doubt cheaper than cars, but I digress.) Your average model goes for a few thousand dollars, which not only prevents people who need this ride the most, namely low-income commuters living in transit deserts, but also, it encourages the low-cost junk that sparks the bad headlines of battery fires and injuries. So if cities want to get serious about maximizing the many benefits of e-bikes—lower emissions, shorter trips, less traffic—then cutting the price tags is just as prevalent as building out the bike lanes.

That’s what drew me to Upway. (Shout-out to Streetbeat reader Melinda Hanson, too, for the hat-tip.) The French startup pegs itself as the ‘Carvana of e-bikes,’ patching together a sprawling supply chain to sell recycled models for cheap. They’re betting big on the market potential stateside, with warehouses opening in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. And paired with subsidy models, their success hints at an opening for e-bikes to reach a lot more people.

I heard from the Upway team and experts in my latest for Bloomberg CityLab.

Eyes on the street

I distinctly remember this moment. It was 2019, and I was sitting in a graduate seminar called “International Case Studies in Transport & City Planning” — we jokingly called it “Scandinavian Case Studies…,”* because of the subject matter’s tendency — and our instructor paused his lecture to show us Streetfilms.

This took me by surprise. And he wasn’t the first person abroad to show me videos made by my neighbor, Clarence Eckerson Jr., thousands of miles away from our home. Classmates were sharing links in group chats, including videos in presentations, and citing them in papers. For anyone even thinking about the future of streets and transportation, Streetfilms, it seems, was required viewing.

That power that Clarence has wielded—with just a camera, a bike, and a little help from his friends—has always fascinated me. Because the now-thousand-plus videos aren’t necessarily polished or well-produced. (In fact, they’re quite minimalist.) But they’re impactful—which, in this content-laden, quick-cut era, feels profound. His work has inspired a generation of planners, designers, architects, engineers, urbanists, influencers, and more—a rare moment of mainstream breakthrough for often niche interests.

I tried to untangle just how he does it, and how it all came to be, for this paean to Streetfilms in Hell Gate last month. Check it out.

OSA: Community Theater

It’s November, which means the days on the Open Streets are getting shorter and the season’s end approaches. I’ll do a proper year-in-review next month—because there’s a lot to cover—but in the meantime, this section will act as an ode to sharing public space for one of my favorite pastimes: watching movies together. (This one goes out to all the fellow fans of Cinema Paradiso out there.)

That takes us first to 31st Ave, where we worked with Astoria Horror Club to show the fourth movie on the street this year (the 1998 Disney Channel classic, Halloweentown, of course) just in time for the holiday. Movies may be our most popular programming—they garner press, viral videos, and delightful photos of people watching from fire escapes or atop Citi Bikes. Neighbors bring their own setups of lawn chairs, stools, and picnic blankets. (On Facebook, the cranks roar: ‘Why would they sit in the street?’ But it’s hard to hear them from here.)

Even at the end of the October. Because who doesn’t love a (free) movie?

Thousands of miles south, we see the same phenomenon unfold in Rio de Janeiro’s Rocinha, the largest favela in South America. My partner, Angela, spent the last year working with the Associação de Moradores da Rocinha, which deliver crucial services to an estimated 200,000 people spread over less than one square mile. They host food drives, events, and workshops, all while liaising with a multiverse that may not always be friendly to one another; they are equal parts community development group, mediator, incubator, defender, and more. Seriously, watching what this tiny group pulls off firsthand is something else.

Recently, the Associação helped Ange and her crew with an episode of David Blaine: Do Not Attempt, a new National Geographic docuseries with the thrill-seeking namesake. With their permission and promotion, several scenes were filmed in the favela, but residents didn’t have the streaming service nor was Portuguese translation available. So they couldn’t see their home on the big screen, let alone understand it. But for one evening this fall, on the main street leading up Rocinha’s hilly spine, Ange and the Associaçao made it happen.

I’ll let the photos, courtesy of Disney BR, tell the rest:

Bright Side: Active Frontages

Thanks to a lethal combo of sky-high rents, market volatility, and industry changes, our world is littered with empty storefronts. And beyond a mark of missed opportunities, retail vacancies are a drag on our streets. Decades of research show that they dampen foot traffic, lower property values, and deter safety. (This is the non-policing part of ‘broken windows’ theory.) So figuring out how to fill them should be paramount to us all.

I first heard of temporary activations when I interviewed Aaron Greiner, who founded a nifty nonprofit in Massachusetts called CultureHouse. (I’ve written about them here before.) Their model is to partner with property owners to do short-term placemaking (think pop-up store, reading room, workshops, etc.) at vacant spaces. I heard this word recently: ‘pre-vitalization,’ or using temporary means to bolster interest now to draw investment later. And in this fragile economic time, something quick, easy, and cheap has specific appeal.

Tactical makeovers of empty storefronts are gaining traction amongst business associations, municipalities, and cultural nonprofits. But one of my all-time favorites is the Vacant Unit Activation Program in the New York City subway system. Blame changing consumer behaviors, but newsstands and other subterranean outlets have been struggling for a while now. So in 2023, transit officials crafted a new idea: art installations, really just for vibes.

Enter dinosaur bodegas, Afro-Latino sounds, gate paintings, and more.

On the Radar

It’s a long one this month, so recommendations will return in December!

Streetbeat Gig Board

• Join the other >60,000 CVs that have been uploaded to the incoming New York City mayor-elect’s transition portal since his election. (New York, NY)

• (But in all seriousness: this Manhattan borough planner position at the New York City Department of Transportation would be neat.) (New York, NY)

• Get your climate jobs! (Everywhere)

***

Tell us where the jobs are at by submitting them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Wampanoag, in honor of the original Thanksgiving.

Uè*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:

- Leveraging community input;

- Affixing process to outcome;

- Living with late-stage capitalism.

& much, much more.

Like Lizzie McGuire herself (gasp!), Streetbeat went to Italy. For the first time in its five-year history, this newsletter went on the road for Utopian Hours, a festival that unfolded over three days earlier this month in Turin. Started in 2014, the event harps on a statistic urbanists drop if you can bare (us) them long enough: that by 2050, the United Nations estimates two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in or around cities. We’ve already passed the halfway mark—the highest rate in humanity’s history on this planet.

So: what to do with the places that more and more of us will call home?

This question was floated repeatedly by Luca Ballarini and Giacomo Biraghi, the boisterous co-founders of Stratosferica, the company that oversees the festival, over the time that I hung out—and drank 16+ espressos—at Centro Lavazza, the former power station and now HQ of the Italian coffee titan. The setting was ideal for talks of ‘urban innovation’—Turin, especially: the ‘Detroit of Italy’ has undergone a few familiar cycles of figuring itself out post-industrialization.

But as I’ve said before, this wouldn’t be a travel diary or log. (FWIW, I did find bicerin and plin—two Piedmontese delicacies.) Instead, I’m going to focus on some takeaways that, I think, are worth sticking around for.

Let’s get into it. (Or, rather: Allora.)

If you can’t fly the plane, build the runway.

Since I’ve been back from Turin, I’ve joked with a few folks that I traveled 3,964 miles to hear a headliner talk about a project in my own backyard. But that’s okay. To be honest: it was pretty neat to watch a room in another country see the public pool (Astoria Park!) that I frequent often. And, more importantly, hear about the years-long struggle to make + Pool a reality.

There’s a lot to say about + Pool. A brief background: it was an idea hatched by urban techie folks in 2012 to build a floating (plus-sign-shaped) dock in the East River that would filter water to be… well, swimmable. A feasibility study raised almost $42,000 on Kickstarter, and recently, the city and state backed it in a serious way. Jury’s definitely still out on the engineering, but that’s actually not what I want to talk about here.

Kara Meyer, the head of its nonprofit, spent most of her address diving (sorry) into something that, I think, is less discussed: before + Pool, New York literally did not have a governmental process for erecting a pool in its waterways. Like, forget the hardware (built stuff)—we didn’t even have the software (permits, reviews, etc.) to allow people to enjoy the river like they used to. So, for the last few years, the team’s work almost wholly focused on creating the infrastructure to let + Pool even exist in the first place. That includes: creating an entity; testing the water; testifying at hearings; lobbying; writing op-eds; and doing anything else they could to rally support around this idea that, hey, we should be able to legally do this again—and maybe, by doing so, we might even save a life. And they’re getting there: the pilot is being built as we speak.

Admittedly, I’m a sucker for the growing global movement for urban swimming. I’ve written about the experience of floating in Paris’ Canal Saint Martin, which was so popular this summer that they had to literally extend the hours on the Seine. I see Chicagoans dipping their toes in their waterways for the first time in forever, and Philadelphians considering it. And I’ll have some research to share soon about the idea of revamping free, low-cost recreation as a public good in cities, which water safety and access plays a big part in. But we don’t talk enough about the institutional barriers that we put in place after decades of degradation to prevent the populace from touching all that blue space around us again. And it’s time that we should.

Sometimes skaters know best.

For years, skaters were characterized very much the same way teens are. They’re loud. They’re a nuisance. And what they do for fun is perceived as dangerous. The film Mid90s, which follows a gaggle of skaters as they dodge cops and occupy parking lots around Los Angeles in the 1990s, comes to mind. More recently, though, that’s changed—increasingly, towns and cities recognize that skating as an activity isn’t going anywhere, and instead of cracking down, it’s easier to designate somewhere where it can be done safely. Thus: skateparks.

But what’s always struck me about skaters is how they gravitate to parcels of public space long overlooked or left behind: parking lots, alleyways, industrial plots, strip malls, etc. In fact, the abandoned materials that work best—rebar, poles, benches, fixtures—are most readily found in settings we, societally, have moved on from. And they activate them through sport: vendors emerge; safety comes in numbers; people start to be (and stay) there. This place-making, as it’s known, was on display at Utopian Hours in a photo exhibit called ‘Skate Urbanism,’ which showcased the unique ways in which skaters are, perhaps even unconsciously, doing the tactical work of breathing life back into places.

It reminded me of Gotham Park, a project I’ve featured here before. Since the 1970s, the site, located underneath the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side, was home to Brooklyn Banks, the “Mecca of New York skateboarding.” If it wasn’t for the skaters and BMXers there, hardly anyone would be walking by: the area was derelict and highly securitized after the attacks on September 11th, 2001, though it sat next to thousands of mostly low-income and foreign-born residents. (Chinatown is next door.) When the city decided to use the space for storage, the Banks closed for almost 20 years.

But an active effort—encouraged by none other than Tony Hawk, whose retirement includes building out skateparks—has finally brought it back, reviving a space that skaters saw potential in before anyone else did. They incubated the idea, kept it alive in its darkest days, and then helped catalyze the campaign for what it’s become today. The rest of us should take note.

Trust the local talent.

A graduate school group project I look back fondly on (hi Celine! hi Lhazin! hi T!) was all about Poplar. We were tasked with a community vision for the mostly immigrant, working-class East London neighborhood, which was just over the (light-rail) tracks from the hyper-developed, white-collar haven of Canary Wharf. The latter was slowly bleeding into the former, as they always do, so through interviews, field notes, and sketches, we had to chart ways the two could grow together, preventing displacement and preserving local culture. Our idea focused on tying together the ‘social infrastructure’—the parks, the plazas, and, because this is Britain, the pubs—in what could act as connective tissue for people of different socioeconomic backgrounds to meet and gather.

Poplar came up in a presentation given by Jan Kattein, a renowned architect (who teaches at my alma mater there) and author of ‘Londoners Making London.’ It preaches community-based design, which is when private or public realm projects are driven by the ground up, rather than the top down, which we see far too often: the flashy renderings of what firms think the community should have, in lieu of just asking. Kattein’s work takes that notion a step further: beyond a survey or workshop, his team invites neighbors to tangibly inspire the end result.

Case in point: Poplar. Kattein’s team was asked to re-envision Aberfeldy Street, a drab high street plagued by vacant storefronts and limited foot traffic. For years, Poplar was a garment district. (Fans of Call the Midwife will know it.) Once factories left, jobs did, too. The newer arrivals who filled the now-affordable spaces have largely hailed from Bangladesh. And in local markets, Kattein’s team noticed the country’s tradition of kantha, where old fabrics are recycled to make vibrant dresses, headscarves, and suits.

Could designers look locally for inspiration to give the high street a renewed sense of civic pride by honoring its past and heralding its future? In other words: could there be a way to link those histories? To try, residents were invited to submit patterns they had lying around in their closets and drawers. They were then projected onto a total of 26 buildings with over 800 liters of paint. And—I’m sorry—but no internal consultation could ever come up with all that color.

Make the economics work.

Apologies in advance, but I’m gonna use a word I desperately try to avoid: something is so goddamn neoliberal about having to find an economic rationale for just good public infrastructure. Like, we should build and fund it because they help people thrive, not because they have a great ROI, right? We shouldn’t need private development to justify public investment; we should do it because it’s the right and just thing to do. And frankly, that thinking is part of the reason we’re in the deeply inequitable spot we find ourselves in today. My god.

Okay, phew. Sorry. Now that’s over, some level-setting is in order. Admittedly, this is a topic I struggle with a lot when I draft ideas around paying for parks and open spaces for policymakers. But where I typically land is here: we have to work within the confines of the hand we’ve been dealt. Sure, it may be late-stage capitalism, reader, but it’s the late-stage capitalism we’re all living in. And while I’m here for the long-haul, systemic change—truly, truly, truly—I’m more focused on the people who don’t have time to wait for or ponder the revolution; the people who need the system to work for them now, not tomorrow. Because purity tests don’t pay the bills. Or, in this case: build the cities we need nor want.

This pendulum swing of emotions—incrementalism versus overhaul—was top of mind as I watched Liz Diller, one of the world’s most famous architects, give the keynote address about the High Line and The Shed, two projects on Manhattan’s Far West Side that her firm (Diller Scofidio + Renfro) led design on. (Again, another ‘How did all these New Yorkers get here?’ moment.) Diller herself seemed to struggle with it, too: that the High Line could only work if City Hall was convinced developers would benefit. The park was contingent on the condos. But she also recognized the hard truth: if that’s what’s needed, so be it.

Now, people have been arguing about the High Line since it came to be—this ‘poster child’ of green gentrification; this Disneyified attraction for tourists; this place where public housing residents nearby don’t feel particularly welcome. And all those things can—and probably are—true. But let’s not deny what it also is: a place visited by 7 million people each year; a strip of metal retrofitted into a garden oasis amidst a climate emergency; a source of jobs, leisure, escape. A good thing, in a time of bad things. And I think the work we all have to do is broadening this ‘market-based approach’ to include a heck of a lot more people in the process. Break open the rationale of what’s possible to the powers that be so everyone benefits.

Sure, it’s late-stage capitalism, reader, but while we’ve got it, let’s make it work.

Back to our regularly scheduled stateside Streetbeat next month. And again, a heartfelt thanks to Stratosferica for inviting me to the motherland. Grazie mille.

See you then!

*This month’s greeting is in Neapolitan, in honor of the sojourn.

A guten*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:

- Living with trucks;

- A parks policy platform;

- Climate theater;

& much, much more.

Editorial note: In July, I mentioned that I, on behalf of this missive, was invited to attend Utopian Hours, an urban innovation conference happening next month in Turin, Italy. It’s the first time that Streetbeat is summit-bound(!). And, to that end, a heartfelt thanks is in order—both to Stratosferica, for selecting it as a premiere newsletter; and to subscribers for even making that possible, through your readership and support. (Aw shucks. Or, rather: Che bella.)

What that means for readers, though, is that the next edition will be exclusively dedicated to what I hear and see there—like, a travel diary mixed with some commentary, sans food and sights. (Which, I guess, is a dispatch?) I’ll be pulling out key takeaways from visits, seminars, and presentations that say something about where our cities are, or headed. So consider this a heads up—and hope you enjoy the brief break from our regularly scheduled programming. Allora.

Strength in numbers

Right now, most conversations that involve me sharing that I work in higher education induce some sort of eyebrow raise. Because—not sure if you’re aware—but American universities in 2025 are having a moment. Just to give you a sneak peek of what happens when authoritarianism comes to academia: for the first time ever, “content checkers” are visiting our local college radio station to ensure that its segments don’t attraction the attention of the FCC à la Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert; a graduate DEI office was hastily renamed to “global inclusion;” and an upcoming planned exhibit was dashed for its subject matter, which was deemed “too political” in this current climate. (TLDR: it wasn’t.) There’s more, but I’ll spare you (and my colleagues) the details.

But in this moment when our institutions are shuddering in the face of far-right extremism, my fellow adjuncts and I have decided to do the exact opposite—by announcing a union-led campaign to win Paid Family Leave from the university administration. Over 200 instructors have signed on to demand this crucial benefit—to plan for the future, care for our loved ones, and so much more–that is currently enjoyed by full-time faculty but not the professors who make up the bulk of the teaching staff. And now we’re readying a months-long campaign to make a whole lot of noise when universities have otherwise gone quiet.

This year, myself and (the great!) Liza Featherstone are serving as the shop stewards for NYU Journalism, in an effort to build community and solidarity amongst colleagues. We’re like reps; if you want something—like an adjunct lounge—we’ll advocate to get you it, with some fun hangs and socials along the way. (FWIW: We actually did get that lounge, and had our first-ever adjuncts social!) Because now feels like the right time to organize. And I hope wherever you are, there’s a chance to do the same.

Keep on truckin’

Over the course of the 20th century, we (in royal fashion) shifted all the stuff we move around the planet off of trains and barges and onto gigantic trucks. Our world of products is built upon a sprawling supply chain of 18-wheelers. And I’ve yapped on here before about what that means for the air we breathe and the space we share. But I’ve spent a little less time on the immense impact that economic configuration has on the streets we traverse.

In short: our cities weren’t really built for them. The weight carried by tractor-trailers is gradually degrading our built environment—our roads, our bridges, our tunnels—hastening the end of natural lifespans designed for much longer. And at a time when infrastructure dollars are disappearing into thin air, municipalities face an uphill battle in their maintenance and upkeep.

I’ve covered a few solutions to this—last-mile deliveries, where precious cargo is divided up amongst smaller e-bikes; reviving waterways and rail for freight; drones; and others. And it’s tricky, right? Our world increasingly relies on shipments; the trucks have only gotten bigger to accommodate our needs. (Having to cart around cranes to replace water mains and pre-fab homes to address a housing shortage stumped me.) But a rare success story has been what’s known as weigh-in-motion technology, where sensors ticket overweight vehicles on fractious thoroughfares. And where I live, it’s catching on.

I did a deep dive into WIM and whether we’ll ever solve our trucking problem—because I’m low-key a freight reporter now—for Bloomberg CityLab. Chegg it out.

Taking its toll

Earlier this month, I was invited to moderate a panel on Staten Island about congestion pricing. Now, these are two phrases that often don’t go together in New York—the borough, which is heavily car-dependent and conservative, was the most outspoken about the new tolls. (The borough president quite literally joined a lawsuit with the state of New Jersey, which was very on brand.) And so, naturally, I was expecting to field a lot of frustration.

But actually, quite the opposite happened. Barely anyone had a comment when the time for Q&A approached, or even a retort to the convincing presentations put on by representatives from the agencies—the New York City Department of Transportation, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority—as well as the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation. When nothing came in, we had to pass the mic around the crowd, and the only question we got from an audience primarily made up of business owners was how New York City can lead in the future. (To be honest: I spent the rest of the time improvising.)

But that’s because—and I’m going to borrow the words of a panelist here—congestion pricing is old news. It’s hard to believe it, but the first-in-the-nation tolling scheme, which charges drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street in exchange for transit upgrades, is nine months old. And today you rarely read about it, once spurring a story *every single day* in the tabloids to few mentions, if any, this last week. What we do get now is just the results: the 2.7 million less cars, the 70% decrease in honking complaints, the 60 percent approval rating.

There’s a hard lesson learned here in how we praise policy wins. If something’s working, you don’t hear about it. Instead it becomes a part of our daily lives, and eventually, something we can’t imagine living without. So how do we celebrate progress? Or, rather, how do we convince decision-makers that the short-term struggle of public dismay will be all but forgotten soon enough?

Parks politics

This month, the 110th mayor of New York City—Eric Adams—announced that he will no longer seek re-election. (More on that soon.) And so, his four-year tenure will come to a close on New Year’s Day, leaving behind a legacy that many will be parsing through for some time. (More on that, also, soon.)

But a notable omission from his time in office was a vision for New York City’s parks. Adams is one of the only mayors in recent history with no big plans for the space that consumes an eighth of the city’s landmass. This runs contrary to his predecessors: Rudy Giuliani’s two terms saw the revival of the city’s signature parks; Michael Bloomberg’s three terms saw almost a thousand acres of new parkland; and Bill de Blasio’s two terms saw a renewed focus on community parks and playgrounds. Eric Adams, with just one term, patched together a few initiatives into a fairly muted platform that never took off. Instead, he’ll likely be remembered for projects carried over from previous administrations and deep budget cuts he levied that his Parks Department hasn’t yet recovered from—a microcosm of a much larger critique of his reign.

It’s still unclear what a future mayor has in store. Zohran Mamdani, the likely victor and Democratic nominee, often cites Bloomberg’s work as inspiration. Andrew Cuomo, the independent nominee and former governor, hoists his record of state parks up often. And Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee and Guardian Angels founder, promises cleanliness. (Mamdani has taken the pledge to dedicate 1% of the budget to parks; Cuomo and Sliwa have not.) But for what it’s worth, parks haven’t exactly been a hot-button issue on the campaign trail.

So, to apply pressure, advocates recently came out with their own platform: Parks 2030. Its aim is a world-class system, with thriving parks in every neighborhood as part of an affordability agenda to keep New Yorkers here. That means more upkeep, more efficient spending, more jobs, and… well, more parks. The research that I’ve led at Center for an Urban Future actively played a role in the plan’s development with New Yorkers for Parks, and I’m thrilled to see a whole plank for funding, including ideas for dedicated parks revenue that we’ve previously proposed. (Mamdani has publicly endorsed a ‘community parks surcharge’ placed on high-value real estate transfers.)

In sum, Parks 2030 serves as a blueprint of action to make the vitality of green spaces integral to governing America’s largest city, as it once was. Game on.

OSA: Pull up a chair

Fall is peak Open Street season. The weather’s not too hot, not too cold, and the summer malaise has slowly let up. But each year, our organization jokes that the last few months of operations feel like a sprint to the finish line, with a rush of programming to put on before we hibernate. So that’s what we’ve been up to, with about 20+ free events each weekend and six full-on vendor fairs just this last month. (Regular reminder that this is a fully volunteer effort.)

But a particularly special moment came in early September, when we hosted ‘The Longest Table’ on 31st Ave. For those less familiar, the name says it all: a series of tables and seating is unfurled down a city block, and everyone is invited to partake in the picnic. The tradition has its roots in Egypt, but today, a New York-based nonprofit has inspired replicas elsewhere. And from what we’re aware, we organized the first one Queens has ever seen.

There’s much to be said about the organizing, and I’m happy to DM with folks who interested in hosting one where they are. And wow, I’m still recovering from some of the spreads we saw: the granite block buffet! the bollard bouquets my friends brought! the Indonesian rice table! It was a magical evening, no doubt.

But I’ll just say two things here, to keep it brief. The first: it took a village. A local beer garden donated the furniture, local creatives designed the placemats, local artists performed, and local eateries contributed to the raffle. Not tapping talent in would’ve not only be taxing, but also, it defeats the whole purpose: if it’s a community potluck, then everyone should bring something.

The second part? People are pros. With 31 tables and 186 seats, we were worried that we’d have a musical-chairs-level mad dash on our hands. Sure, it took coordination (and a 300+ person waiting list), but our neighbors fell into an organic rhythm, arranging groups and meals to accommodate one another. Our greatest lesson learned, in my opinion, is that we over-engineered; if you give people a place to sit—and the actual ability to do so—they’ll figure out the rest.

Bright Side: Breakthroughs

This month’s Climate Week in New York reminded me of how difficult it can be to stay positive these days. Celebrating climate progress when we appear to be making anything but—actually, maybe even moving backwards—will do that. But one has to remind themselves that the systems by which we’re receiving information about the world–and, thus, constructing our reality—thrive off of algorithms and financial models that prefer negativity. And because of the way our brains are wired, the bad stuff hits harder and lasts longer.

Case in point: in the same set of days the leader of the free world spewed out genuinely deadly misinformation about vaccines and Tylenol, scientists (at my alma mater, nonetheless!) used gene therapy to successfully treat Huntington’s disease for the first time ever. The neurological illness, which is most similar to ataxia, something I’ve discussed here before, starts to show in your 30s or 40s; life expectancy after is about two decades. But for three-quarters of patients treated, its degrade was slowed by almost 400%—so what would take one year would take four years, with treatment. That’s literally a lifetime of difference.

Oh, and researchers recently made advances in treating sickle cell anemia, curing pancreatic cancer, developing a sunshine-powered car, and understanding what causes lupus. But we’re probably not seeing any of that when we swipe. That’s all to say: good news is out there. We just have to get better at finding it. (I guess that’s what this section is all about, eh?)

On the Radar

Flood Sensor Aunty

Communicating climate readiness—namely: our mitigation and adaptation to a rapidly warming planet—is increasingly essential as we face down worsening weather events and wonkier seasons. We need to be able to translate very real and scary concepts (like, if you live in a basement and it floods, or your older neighbor lacks A/C during a heat wave) so they become common parlance in how we perceive and understand the changes unfolding around us. And that can be done through a variety of media: public service announcements, journalism, classrooms, popular culture, or—today’s favorite—theater.

This month, I had the pleasure of seeing my friend Sabina’s play (on a 140-year-old boat in the East River, no less). The description online is apt: the production finds itself “halfway between really funny devised theater and community disaster prevention.” In it, Sabina incarnates a flood sensor with Hollywood ambitions who works at a Queens chai shop on the brink of closure. Scenes are interspersed with practical tips from actual city agencies on what to do in case of climate emergencies. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn to head to the roof.

But what Sabina and her cast nail is the comms part of it all. If we’re going to make these ideas digestible to the masses, they shouldn’t feel like patronizing. They shouldn’t feel like homework. And they shouldn’t be boring. And, who knows… maybe they can even be fun.

Flood Sensor Aunty continues to travel around—catch it if/when you can!

Streetbeat Gig Board

• Gowanus Canal Conservancy, the group helping to spearhead the revitalization of one of the most polluted waterways in America, is looking for a deputy director. (Brooklyn, NY)

• We need a transit nerd to teach at CUNY Hunter! (New York, NY)

• The Mayor of London needs someone to help implement—I mean, combat—climate change. (London, UK)

***

Tell us where the jobs are at by submitting them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Yiddish, in honor of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Byenveni*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:

- Rethinking Flushing Meadows;

- AI, AI, AI, and more AI;

- Baltimore’s success story;

& much, much more.

Editorial note: Just wanted to take a brief second to send my regards to so many readers who reached out after last month’s edition. The moment felt right to finally share my family’s story, as we watch our safety net get gutted like a fish. And for that to resonate with people was all the more reaffirming. Thank you.

The people’s park

It’s difficult to describe Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in one sentence. Sure, it’s my home borough of Queens’ signature green space: its 897 acres make it the fourth largest park in New York City, topping Central Park, and serves some of the country’s densest, most diverse communities. But it’s also home to two sports stadiums—one of which is hosting its marquee event this week. Two lakes, too. And a pitch-and-putt, a marina, and five cultural institutions (zoo included). I often joke to people that FMCP is equal parts everything.

Okay, I may be bias—literally as a Queens resident and parkie—but Flushing Meadows is a marvel. The history is profound: designed by Robert Moses (!!!) for both the 1930s and 1960s World’s Fairs, many call it the first modern urban park, as opposed to the grandeur of Victorian-era gardens and rambles. Instead of strolling, this is a place for play. And any visit is proof, from teams playing ecuavolley on makeshift nets and dragon boaters floating off Flushing Bay to community cookouts and Citi Field fandom. FMCP has something for everyone.

But its cracks are showing. Like everything else Moses built, FMCP has not only exceeded its natural lifespan, but also, no longer fits how the city is today. The sewer mains and water lines are all broken. It floods regularly—partly because of its infrastructure, partly because it’s a former wetland and ash dump. It was designed as a fairground for cars, not a park for people. It’s way overbuilt and takes forever to traverse. And even though beaucoup bucks are made there, it hasn’t fostered the public-private partnership that supports other major parks.

So, what to do? About a year ago, the Center for an Urban Future’s executive director Jonathon Bowles and I began posing that question to park users and experts. The prompt wasn’t that FMCP needs to be overhauled; in fact, as one of the most visited parks in New York—if not America—it had anything but a usage problem. Instead, it was clear that this crown jewel wasn’t reaching its full potential. FMCP never garnered a grand vision from City Hall. And the dollars spent pale in comparison to parks of equal use and stature. In the end, our pitch was: Flushing Meadows is incredible—but it could be even better.

That resulted in ‘The Park Queens Deserves,’ a new report that lays out 20 ideas for how city leaders can better harness what this park could, and should, be. (Ideas include: a ‘flood fund;’ capping the highways; and ripping open the asphalt to revive Flushing Creek.) But at its core, what we’re really demanding is sincere and sustained investment for the first time in decades in this invaluable asset.

The response so far has been immense. We got clips in The New York Times, Time Out, QNS, and Queens Daily Eagle. We received notes from elected officials and their teams. (Our borough president has the report’s top quote.) And we’ve heard from countless readers who love the park dearly and want to see it shine, which was our whole point. Now comes the hard (but fun) part: keeping that momentum alive so these ideas actually come to fruition.

But first, it’s just worth mentioning that the reports we put out at CUF are not usually place-based. So, for Jon and I, this was a dream project, both as Queens residents and hardcore FMCP fans. To put it plainly: visiting, talking, learning, and brainstorming about this place that means so much to so many was a joy.

That’s all to say: Long live Flushing Meadows.

Magnum opus

I often try to mentally map the points in my past where the direction that my interests were headed was obvious. A particularly prominent moment was my senior year at NYU, when I dedicated 8 months’ worth of reporting to Michael Bloomberg, who was leaving office then after 12 years as New York City’s mayor. (A voter referendum allowed him to tack on a third term.) I wasn’t sure what it was, but something about Bloomberg—and how New York City functioned vis-à-vis state and national government—fascinated me. And I spent almost 10,000 words trying to make sense of how this billionaire changed the way the city looks, feels and acts. (A snippet of it was published in The Brooklyn Rail.)

Such an endeavor was a journalistic tour de force at that age. But it taught me a whole lot: how to write at magazine length; how to learn and speak to an intricate web of power players; and how to weave so much disparate information together to create some sort of coherent narrative. (Verdict’s still out on whether that was successful.) It’s an experience that I think back on often.

So to be asked to oversee that same experience for undergraduates hits home. Starting next month, I’ll be leading the honors seminar at NYU Journalism, where the top undergraduate students will piece together a 8,000-9,000-word longform story of their choosing by May. It might be the first time a former participant is teaching the course, and it’s something I’ve never done before: one class over two semesters, resulting in almost a book’s worth to later edit. But if it’s as impactful for them as it was for me, then it’s worth the words.

Tech for good

I average about 10 (maybe 20?) conversations a week about AI. Ofc I’m uniquely perched for this overload: I teach/do journalism, and work in policy. But what’s so throttling about AI’s advent is its ubiquity, and we see that in how we’re talking about it: fretting, fuming, or proselytizing about what AI could do—and what it is doing—is an all-ages activity, from Boomers to Gen Z. Its geography knows no bounds; it’s the subject of both cocktail parties and family dinners.

But what I find with most of these discussions is that they’re limited to just ChatGPT. (Extra points if your aunt can name-drop Midjourney.) Right now, the generative AI platform is sort of the limit of our imagination with what this technology is capable of—and that contains a whole lot, for what it’s worth. And that’s unfortunate, because I think the hard-built stuff that AI can do for the common good is far more compelling. Actually, I think if people knew more about AI’s potential to help deliver public services, address the climate crisis, or shore up age-old infrastructure, it’d dampen some of the worst proclivities and fears that ChatGPT, by no fault of its own, is stoking.

Because that was the case for me. When I was asked to do some research on how New York City could really leverage AI right now, my response was the facial equivalent of this: -____-. Not just because of the conversation drool I just mentioned, but also, I’m admittedly not a big AI user myself, outside of transcriptions and super-rad Instagrams. But then I met a bunch of people who are thinking about AI as a tool to solve urban challenges. Like tracking where heat or cooling energy is lost in buildings to cut down on their enormous carbon emissions. Or monitoring the conditions of crosswalks, bus stops, and bike lanes. Or sensing where flooding could worsen in the coming years. Or, as I elaborated on last month, flipping parking regulations to keep up with the onslaught of delivery trucks. To think of it plainly: the public sector is inherently reactive, and AI could shift it to be more proactive. And that’s a good thing.

This notion of what AI could offer cities—and how this may unfold once humans and their politics get involved—is the subject of a (potential) panel that I was invited to be a part of at SXSW 2026, where I’ll be joined by the Mayor of Phoenix Kate Gallego, the CIO of San Jose Stephen Caines, Esq., and What Works Cities managing director Rochelle Haynes. I say ‘potential’ because the way it works at SXSW is that panel ideas are put up for a public vote, held throughout August, and then picked based on substance and reception. Shout-out to the folks who I pestered via LinkedIn and emails to get their ballots in. Fingers crossed we’ll be able to host this increasingly crucial conversation next year in Austin.

OSA: Next five years

On July 26th, 2020, neighbors blocked off car traffic from a portion of 31st Avenue in Astoria, Queens with metal-grid barricades and held its first-ever ‘Open Street.’ The then-new city program offered them a chance to create more space at a time when it was limited, and they jumped on the opportunity. That first year saw barbecues, rallies, yoga classes, hydrant parties, and more.

This summer, we celebrated our five-year birthday with the completion of a near-permanent redesign of the Ave; one that literally bakes what the Open Street does so well—traffic-calming; pedestrian space expansion; safer movement—into the streetscape. That handful of neighbors has grown into a 501©3 nonprofit with more than 200 volunteers, not counting the countless more vendors, programmers and performers who come by the block every weekend. Those barbecues are now maxed-out movies. Those rallies and yoga classes are now common place. And that hydrant is now on all summer long.

So this feels like a good time to ask: what should the next five years look like? And that’s both an internal and external question.

As an organization, we’re always contending with dueling pressures; we think about scaling up, but we also have to staff the street as volunteers ~40 weekends in a row every year. We’re at a junction of what we could be, with community development corporations and land trusts as models, but ours feeling somewhat unique. And we’re also now pulling off a programming slate that matches some of the biggest business improvement districts in the city, handling a level of revenue and stakeholders that we haven’t seen before.

Then there’s everything else. This year alone, outside of the ‘bike boulevard,’ we’re immersed in activism around a life-saving redesign of a dangerous corridor close by as well as universal daylighting district-wide. And next year, volunteers are starting to strategize a push for a pedestrianized plaza just down the block, as well as a presumed ‘Phase III’ of the 31st Ave project, which will take it further east. The Collective, not so unsurprisingly, has become this incubator for local livable street advocacy—and the completion of our Open Street redesign has inspired many to consider what else is possible.

So, a lot to consider as we blow out the candles on five years and enter our busiest season (fall!) with a re-envisioned Avenue at our disposal. More soon.

Bright Side: Baltimore

It’s bizarre for Washington to wage war on ‘urban crime’ right now for many reasons. But one in particular is the poster child itself: Baltimore—a city long synonymous with theft and shootings (cue The Wire reference)—is staging an epic comeback. Since 2020, the homicide rate has sunk by 40% with decreases seen across all crime categories. A town that clocked a record-high of 333 homicides in 1992 hit a historic low of five this April.

How’d that happen? The mayor, Brandon Scott, tailor-fit policies to match what most experts already know: violent crime is usually committed by just a select few in specific areas. The Office of of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement takes a public health approach; treat crime like a disease by stopping the vectors before they’re contagious. Remedies include mediation, where ‘violence interrupters’ try to talk down tensions before they flare (I wrote about this tactic long ago for VICE); life coaching; victim services; and community outreach.

But my favorite is the role of recreation. In high-crime neighborhoods, the city pinpointed investment in public parks, pools and gyms to keep them open during the time when youth crime is most likely to occur: spring break, summer vacation, and Saturday night. For the first time since the 1970s, all of the city’s recreation centers are open late on weekends, offering teens a (healthy) haven.

No National Guard needed here.

On the Radar

Remembrance of Earth’s Past, by Cixin Liu

No matter if it’s TV or books, I rarely read a series straight. I’ll return to a second season or sequel months later, just to give myself breathing room in between. Never been a big binger; maybe it’s my focus, or disdain for too much screen time. So when it happens, I’m always shocked—because for me, it’s for a reason.

I first heard about The Three-Body Problem—the first of Liu’s sci-fi trilogy—the same way many Americans did: when Barack Obama, then president, put it on his annual book list, which was a big deal for America’s commander-in-chief to cite a Chinese author. Times, of course, have changed (lol). But when Netflix announced an adaptation, I quickly read the first book in anticipation. And like with so many cracks at feature-film conversion, I loved the book way more—and the show’s dismal approval discouraged me from continuing.

But after some gentle nudges from friends, I soldiered on to The Dark Forest, which was arguably one of the best sci-fi books I’ve read in years. So much so that immediately after, I went out and bought the finale, Death’s End, which is just as good, if not better. And what I’ll say, readers who are probably wondering why I’m gushing here, is that the trilogy’s best asset is its mirror.

The series’ premise is this: what would happen if humanity found out that it had 400 years to stave off annihilation? And anything we did to prevent that was doomed to fail? It’s a remarkable look at how we’d collectively handle a literal larger-than-life situation, with vast implications for the climate crisis, nuclear war and AI. (Sci-fi is but an allegory, folks.) It’s hopeful. It’s terrifying. It’s exhilarating. And maybe, just maybe, it’s fiction.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• Johnson & Asberry Communications, a comms firm for city infrastructure projects, is looking for a community construction liaison. (New York, NY)

• The Mayor of London has some ambitious emissions goals, and needs a few energy-proficient folks to help achieve them. (London, UK)

• The Urban Field Station is one of the neatest research teams around—and it’s in need of a project development coordinator there. (New York, NY)

• If you love the last mile, the new ‘Department of Sustainable Delivery’ within NYCDOT is looking for policy analysts. (New York, NY)

• Climate Tribe, a jack-of-all-trades for climate comms, wants CVs. (Remote)

***

Tell us where the jobs are at by submitting them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in French Creole, in honor of J’Ouvert.

Välkommen*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:

- All those damn packages;

- Adult learners;

- The *media*;

& much, much more.

Editorial note: In 2010, my parents got divorced. Not because they had fallen out of love, but rather, my mother had gotten too sick to live at home any longer, and required around-the-clock help. The cheapest bed at a rehab center cost $12,000 a month—or $144,000 a year—a price tag my family couldn’t muster with three kids in college. And if my mother died while married, mountains of medical debt would sink the rest of us into bankruptcy. So, by severing marital ties, my mother—now single, making nothing a year—could declare herself legally unable to work, and join the ranks of the other 71 million Americans on Medicaid.

This is what’s known as a ‘Medicaid divorce,’ and while its numbers are not officially tracked—although it’s more common amongst older adults facing down hospice care—the practice is telling of the tragic lengths to which families go to maneuver through a healthcare system that is, at its very core, abundantly cruel and inhumane. For years, we paid sky-high premiums because my mother’s condition of cerebellar ataxia was considered ‘pre-existing.’ (The Affordable Care Act, thankfully, made that illegal.) We hid diagnoses so we wouldn’t lose coverage. And my father doubled as a full-time caregiver on top of a full-time job.

That summer—when I returned home from my freshman year of college to discover my parents, after 30 years together, would separate just to pay a bill, forcing my mother out of the house that I was born in—was on my mind this month, as I watched the Trump administration shoehorn legislation through Congress that will cut about 12 million Americans from Medicaid over the next decade. Any of those people could be like my mom, Alice Tatti Surico—someone who, by no fault of their own (ataxia is hereditary), asked for help from the government because they had nowhere else to turn. At least now our message to them is as brutally honest as the healthcare system was to my family then: tough luck. But, believe me, there is nothing big and beautiful about that.

Last mile

All of the stuff that we accumulate pretty much gets to us the same way: it’s flown over by plane or shipped in by boat; hauled off on a big truck to a distribution center or warehouse; and delivered via smaller truck to our shops and doorsteps. In most of the industrialized world, that supply chain has stayed relatively intact since we moved away from industrial rail over a century ago, with advances, like GPS and refrigeration, to make the Great Capitalist Operation hum along smoothly.

But in the late aughts, e-commerce arrived. Suddenly, the number of trucks on our streets skyrocketed. The supply chain quite literally went into hyperdrive, all to feed our seemingly insatiable hunger for, as George Carlin once said, more stuff. And it’s hard to understate how much this broke cities. It clogged traffic. It made our streets less safe. It halted any gains made in cutting transportation emissions, one of the world’s worst sources. And perhaps most prevalent to this conversation, it’s squeezed the space we hold so dear at the curb.

One of the small but mighty experiments of how we’re adjusting is unfolding right now on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where three tiny parcels of parking have been reallocated to the e-commerce gods. There, the final piece of the puzzle is being resown: forgoing trucks, packages are offloaded onto e-cargo bikes for what’s known as the ‘last mile.’ And if the pilot proves successful, it could be a model of how cities deal with all those damn packages.

For New York Magazine’s Curbed, I spent time talking to folks at every step of the process, from the delivery drivers to the ‘smart curb’ stans. Check it out.

Clips, clips, clips

The journalism industry has an economics problem. To put it simply: the way we consume media has drastically changed, and the way we fund media hasn’t kept up. Take a look at the landscape out there: local papers are dying; public media has been defunded; billionaires treat outlets like playthings; podcasts are pulling back; streaming companies ran out of money; and maybe The New York Times has cracked the code with Wordle and the NYT Cooking app (which we love, of course), but *phew* is that really all we’ve got?

To be fair: it’s been like this for some time. When I graduated with a journalism degree in 2013, we were writing obituaries for The New Yorker and The New York Times, while heralding BuzzFeed andVICE as saviors. (For those keeping score: the former have hit record subscriptions; the latter are more or less defunct.) I’ve been freelance ever since, and while so much of the industry has followed suit, it’s not a prescription you can write to everyone. Instead, journalists have to relearn the game every few years, with the right mix of skills and resilience to make a buck. And, pardon my French, that’s really fucking hard.

It starts in the classroom. Journalism school is amazing at teaching you how to report as a journalist, but it’s not so good at teaching you how to make a living as a journalist. And I’d argue the two are equally important—because you can’t report if you can’t afford rent. That’s why Whitney Dangerfield and I created a new course at New York University last summer called “Newsroom: From Pitch to Publish,” which is all about crafting relationships with editors to get paid (!!!) for your work. Each student is then required to pitch out at least two stories of their own, with the hopes of getting an outlet to bite.

We just wrapped up our second summer teaching it, and the results were exciting. (In other words: we got a lot of bites.) There was reporting on the history of the Dyke March for GO. A piece on birding’s revival amongst Gen Z for Salon. A profile of the set designer behind SNL for NYT. And forthcoming stories in NPR, The Guardian, The New Arab, The Huffington Post, and much more. Whitney and I, fellow dance mom and dad, couldn’t be more proud.

But really, the class helps build confidence amongst prospective storytellers to put their necks out in what often feels like a distorted and confusing media market. (Because it is.) And what a difference an email can make.

On the radio

Every few months, Diane Jenks invites me onto her podcast, The Outspoken Cyclist, to talk about anything and everything under the hot asphalt sun. The clock struck midnight yet again this month—so if you want to hear us chat congestion pricing, a potential Mamdani administration’s transit ideas, and much more, feel free to tune in and drop out here.

OSA: Glow Up

It’s that time of the season when visitors drag the outdoor seating to the shade and most volunteers, programmers or vendors stick under tents to stay cool. Yes, we’ve officially entered the dog days of summer, and while the neighborhood thins of vacationers, the streets stay busy, albeit sweaty. And frankly, I think it’s high time to give our roadways a break from the heat and exhaust.

The month started with the city’s official announcement of our new ‘bike boulevard,’ which landed us with a whole lot of press. (If you want a tour, my DMs are open!) And we coupled it with some news of our own: the 31st Ave Open Street Collective is the latest recipient of a Public Realm Grant from New York City’s Department of Small Business Services (SBS), which rewards us $25,000 (!!!) to bring five public art installations to the Ave over the next year. Boom.

It’s the largest grant our organization has received to date, and the most extensive project we’ve ever undertaken, too. So needless to say, we’re equal measures nervous and excited. But one thing giving us some calm is that Talisa Almonte, who painted our bike corral (and many other lovely things), will help guide the process of engagement and creative direction as our first-ever ‘artist-in-residence.’ Because, like with anything else, we can’t do this work alone.

Bright Side: Reconnect Statewide

I’ve truly yapped for far too long about CUNY Reconnect here. (And sincerest apologies there: seeing the ad every day at my subway station just makes me feel some sort of way!) But if you still need to be brought up to speed, here’s exhibit A, B, C, D, and maybe even E (?). I’ll save the space in the meantime.

Now, to pivot ever so slightly: last November, my colleagues at the Center for an Urban Future released a data brief entitled “It’s Time to Launch SUNY Reconnect,” where they crunched the numbers to find that there were almost one million New Yorkers outside of the city who had some college credits but no degree. And, like the five boroughs, Black and Hispanic working-age adults made up the bulk of this population. The remedy offered? A statewide expansion of CUNY Reconnect, which tailors aid and academics to the needs of adult learners, who may be balancing demands like jobs or childcare.

Earlier this month, Albany listened. Starting this fall, ‘SUNY Reconnect’ will roll out to community colleges across the Empire State. A $5 million budget allocation will fully cover the cost of tuition and equipment for students, ages 25 to 55, pursuing associate degrees in high-demand fields, which include green energy, A.I., engineering, tech and more. And folks, it is wild to see these words spoken by the governor herself: “The Reconnect program will continue to pave the way forward for students as they enter our State’s future workforce.”

🥲

On the Radar

Stratosferica’s ‘Utopian Hours’

Streetbeat is going to Italy! Or, rather: Streetbeat va à Italia. Or, rather: Streetbeat was invited by the good folks at Stratosferica to attend Utopian Hours, a three-day festival in Turin all about cities, innovation and *the future*. Va bene! (Sorry, I really did learn Italian for six years and live there for a time, I swear.)

I’ve been following the event for a little while now—it’s a collection of notable luminaries across urbanism spheres, from design and architecture to transit and housing. This year’s theme is United Cities, or how cities can knit us together in an otherwise polarized time—all topics that this monthly missive touches upon each month, and cares about deeply. So game!

Still mapping out my itinerary for October and what role Streetbeat will play in the conversations, but you can expect dispatches from talks and tours there. I know how difficult it can be to make conference coverage interesting to literally anyone who wasn’t there. But I promise it’ll be worthwhile. Pinky swear.

Stay tuned :) (Or, rather: Allora.)

(And if you want to tag along with me to Torino, tickets are here.)

Streetbeat Gig Board

• Our neat pop-up placemaking friends at CultureHouse are hiring a graphics design intern and urban designer. (Somerville, MA or remote)

• Open Plans, the preeminent livable streets org in New York City, is looking for a new comms director. (New York, NY)

• The badass NYU Adjuncts Union, which I’m a proud card-carrying member of, is seeking two part-time organizers. (New York, NY)

• And as always, we’ve got a ton of climate jobs.

***

Tell us where the jobs are at by submitting them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Swedish, in honor of Midsommar.

Cia’*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:

- Parks vs. transit;

- Post-pandemic buses;

- A new chapter for the Open Street;

& much, much more.

Editorial note: I first met Zohran Mamdani in 2022. By then, he had already shocked Western Queens politics by toppling an incumbent to become our district’s state assembly member, mid-pandemic, with little to no name recognition. He tapped into the same coalition that catapulted AOC to Congress, Tiffany Cabán to City Council, and later, Kristen Gonzalez to the State Senate: an energized base made up of diverse worlds—young, mutual aid friendly, establishment-skeptic, queer, urbanist, even sometimes YIMBY—fueled by an impressive ground game, courtesy of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). (This lineup has inspired the title, ‘The People’s Republic of Astoria.’)

Even as a nonpartisan 501(c)3—don’t worry, IRS!—the 31st Ave Open Street Collective has been adjacent to that movement since we started. The public space we’ve created is perhaps most activated and utilized by that same base, given naturally shared interests and politics. Mamdani included: often, he’d canvas with us on weekends; stop by with his partner, illustrator Rama Duwaji; and, later, allocate grant funding to scale up our programming and operations.

Mamdani’s past advocacy for a crucial bike lane project nearby was an early education in livable streets organizing. Once in office, he was a regular at the public workshops for 31st Avenue. He attended meetups with just a handful of local advocates. And, in 2023, his office worked with us on the Western Queens Street Safety Plan, which posits Astoria as a model for what our streets can be. He has repeatedly shouted-out the work we do on the Open Street, to which we are endlessly grateful. (Thanks for letting Hasan Piker know about us.)

Last Tuesday, the rest of the country met Zohran Mamdani, when, once again, he shocked national politics by toppling a incumbent to become New York City’s Democratic nominee for mayor, with little to no name recognition. I’ll have much more to say about his campaign in the months leading up to November’s general election. But in the meantime, I’ll leave it at this: I know Zohran to be someone who truly knows and loves cities—who doesn’t see New York as somewhere that needs to be “cleaned up,” but rather, a place like no other that has the potential to thrive even more. And while his victory is now America’s biggest political story, it’s one that started in our own backyard, giving new meaning to a phrase heard often around these parts: Queens is the future.

Green corridors

Who—or what—are parks meant for? People have been debating this question for as long as there have been parks. But in recent years, answering it has taken on renewed urgency on the issue of mobility, as we navigate a paradigm shift in how we move around, akin to the transition from human feet to horse carriage, horse carriage to bicycle, and bicycle to automobile—all of which upended park design in their day. That, of course, is the era of electric micro-mobility.

I see the contours of this everywhere in New York City. I recently helped edit a proposal for a linear park in Queens dubbed Paseo Park. And this question—do we allow fast e-bikes?—was a central theme, as if in conflict with the Spanish word for stroll. (Their answer: yes, but maybe somewhere else.) Further south, the city’s parks department faced concerns that this new fleet of e-vehicles had turned a seaside boardwalk into a highway. (Their answer: no more.) And on Staten Island, a pandemic-era ban on driving in a popular park spurred a MAGA-coded backlash after a jogger was sexually assaulted. Less cars and more bikes, they argued, had made it perilous. (Their answer: yes, but only on weekends.)

But there is perhaps no greater arena for this argument to unfold than the busiest urban park in the city, née the world. In 2022, during my time at the Central Park Conservancy, the surge in physical activity along the park’s 6.1-mile-long loop—otherwise known as ‘the Drives’—had become a pressing issue amongst visitors and staff. With most cars banned in 2018, a space that sees almost 50 million people a year was now regularly awash in movement of varying speeds and sizes, but the 'Drives' still prioritized its namesake. A refresh was clearly in order.

Now, years later, I'm thrilled to tell that story for Bloomberg CityLab, as the Conservancy weighed that aforementioned question, which is as old as the park itself. I followed work crews as they repaved and re-striped the loop for the first time in decades; heard from other cities experiencing the same dilemma of division; and called up the advocates challenging the city to think big. The solution, should it work, could serve as a model as parks try to be all of the things to all of the people. You can read the full story here.

Bain of existence

There are very specific moments I can recall in my life when I felt truly overwhelmed by something I saw. I’d describe this emotion as the opposite of the sublime: rather than a scene that sparks utter joy or happiness for being alive, it instead induces fear and despair for what we exist alongside. And a memory that certainly qualifies for me is the time I turned a street corner in the Bronx, and the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center came into view.

VCBC—or known more notoriously as “The Boat”—is a 625-foot jail barge. Boasting a 870-person capacity, it’s absolutely colossal, with a brutally blank austere of gray and blue. It looks like the movie Waterworld if you were to distill it into maritime form. The floating correctional facility rolled onto the shores of Hunts Point in 1992 to reduce the inmate count at Rikers Island, America’s largest municipal jail just across the water, after it ballooned in number thanks to the then-growing fervor for broken windows policing. Just to repeat this for good measure: New York City was locking up so many people, they had to literally bring in a boat to make space. And it stayed there, in active use, until 2023, when it was decommissioned.

In 2015, I visited VCBC for VICE, to report on how arduous it was for family members and loved ones to bail out someone who was behind bars. (Reminder: VCBC and Rikers are jails, not prisons, meaning everyone there is awaiting trail, not convicted.) It was far. It was cash or cashier’s check only. And it was one of only four places in the whole city where you could directly post bail. VCBC, with its history of unjust death and squalor, was this living embodiment of the everyday cruelty America’s criminal justice system exacts on its most vulnerable. And I’ll never forget what it was like to visit then.

Ten years later, though, this blemish on our social conscience is finally being removed. This month, City Hall announced that the ship would soon leave port, never to return. It would be replaced by a marine freight terminal as part of the city’s “Blue Highways” initiative, where waterway freight is offloaded onto cargo e-bikes and other micro-mobility vehicles, in lieu of big, polluting trucks. It’ll never erase the legacy of lives taken, families who suffered, and all who had to ever make the trip there. But it’ll ensure future generations will never have to.

OSA: Victory

This month marked the completion of the 31st Avenue ‘bike boulevard.’ The two blocks that we close to car traffic on weekends, from April to December, are now, officially, mini-plazas. And a joy of late has been finding people sitting and chatting on the big granite blocks late on weeknights, or walking without worry in the middle of the street at all hours. It has been emotional, to say the least. A time-lapse video I made—of how we went to a few tables and chairs with lawn games to what we are today—made me teary-eyed. We have come so far.

And so, we’ve been celebrating. A few weekends ago, we invited elected officials, local advocates, families who have lost love ones to traffic violence, and organizers to commemorate the occasion. As the Collective’s chairperson, I emceed (eek!) what ended up being a big ol’ block party, and so I’m resharing a revised version of my opening remarks here:

In 2020, as the pandemic ravaged New York, Astorians needed space—not just to freely walk or bike, but also, to check in on friends, breathe fresh air, and see one another. The world felt inconsolable and, instead of wallowing away, our neighbors looked locally for a solution. They applied for a new program being created then called Open Streets, and the rest, as they say, is history.

We started with six blocks, seven days a week. Volunteers dragged barricades out to the street and hoped they stayed intact, from 8am to 8pm. As we learned the Avenue’s daily patterns and our own bandwidth, we decided to double down on these two blocks the next season. And people kept coming—to throw birthday parties, to host classes, to learn how to ride a bike, to perform, to barbecue, or merely just to sit and take it all in.

Now, five years later, the 31st Ave Open Street Collective is made up of over 250 volunteers—and that’s not counting every programmer, entrepreneur, or performer who help make this space happen 36 weekends straight a year. We’re a certified nonprofit, which allows us to fundraise and expand what we’re able to deliver to neighbors entirely for free. And we receive regular support from the Horticultural Society, our elected officials, and NYCDOT.

But most importantly: for five years straight, we’ve shown what’s possible when you create streets for people. Public spaces based around the concept of joy, even when it can feel like everything else at the moment is lacking in it. A place where community can come together, not break apart. And I like to point out that I’ve lived in Astoria for over a decade, and I didn’t know any of these people here today until just a few years ago. And now, I consider so many of these strangers close friends, in what has been one of the most fruitful experiences of my life.

Today we’re here to celebrate the true culmination of that effort: a brand new “bike boulevard” that bakes our successes into the streetscape itself. A 31st Ave that is calmer, safer, and more livable for all—Astoria’s front yard, backyard, and living room. But this work never happens alone. I want to give out a shout-out for our partners at NYCDOT for their seamless execution of this ambitious street redesign. And I want to thank our elected officials, who, at every turn, supported what we were doing and urged us to keep going; that the fight for safer streets and for joyful public spaces is worth it in the end.

Bright Side: Express Bus

Yesterday, the bus network for the place I call home began to change. Lines were amended. Rush routes were added. Stops were streamlined. It’s the first major overhaul of my borough’s surface transit since it replaced the streetcar decades ago. By summer’s end, a map serving 2.3 million people will look different.

On a trip this month to Washington D.C., I came across a sign at bus stop in Mt. Pleasant, where I was staying, that read: “All Metrobus Routes and Schedules Will Change.” Ironically, on the exact same day as Queens, the Capital’s bus network would also see its first facelift in 50 years. ‘Better Bus’ had arrived.

Gradually, the post-pandemic transit landscape is starting to take shape. The public health crisis upended commuting patterns, forcing a reckoning at transit agencies as they faced down spiraling revenue. The result: a return to the local. Like the 49 bus in West Philly, SEPTA’s first new addition in two decades, which linked a residential neighborhood to an emerging job hub. While ridership fell, the 49’s grew, with the fastest Covid-era rebound in the whole system.

I think back often to a 2021 profile I wrote in MIT Tech Review of Tiffany Chu, then the co-founder of Remix, the preeminent planning platform, and now chief of staff to Michelle Wu, Boston’s bus-riding mayor. Her argument was simple: what if the pandemic actually makes transit better, by refocusing our attention on where people want to go rather than where we expect them to go? The experiment to find out, it seems, is finally underway.

On the Radar

Miami in the Anthropocene, by Stephanie Wakefield

Recently, I was invited to join the Judging Committee for The Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities Book Award, hosted by Metropolis. Or, as I’ve been telling people: I got asked to read a lot of books about cities this summer and give my opinion on them, which I gleefully accepted. But at the heart of the contest is this idea that in a confusing and complicated world, long-form narratives can help break down complex issues for a wider audience, and, in doing so, inspire us to think big—which, ultimately, I can get down with.

One of the texts that has stood out thus far transports us to Florida. Miami, the author posits, is this living laboratory of climate action, warts and all. It’s where the ultra-rich complete for land that will likely be under water in our lifetime, low-income residents evade displacement without the privilege to relocate, and ‘solutions’ are tested at a grand scale.

Although it sounds overly academic at times, Wakefield’s book puts forward a compelling narrative that casts the city as a frontline for what comes next. In a way, Miami is the extreme. So if we can crack what’s happening there, maybe we can hash out ideas that are equal parts workable and equitable elsewhere.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• Another neat gig from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA): head of its dinosaur-bodega-creating arts and design team. (New York, NY)

• And again, up in the Bronx: the Bronx River Alliance—yes, there is a river in the Bronx—needs a director of environmental justice. (The Bronx, NY)

• NACTO, the preeminent transit leadership body in the U.S., is hiring a program associate for engagement. (Remote/hybrid)

• World may be on fire, but climate comms jobs are all the rave.

***

Tell us where the jobs are at by submitting them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Neapolitan, a recent obsession of mine.

হ্যালো*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:

- Saying goodbye to the seniors;

- The rise of serious injuries in New York City;

- Interregnum politics;

& much, much more.

There has always been a disconnect in solidarity between the media and the people who make it up. The industry thrives on the horse race: who has the scoop, who can outgun who, how to do better than everyone else. But in my decade-plus career as a journalist, I’ve found the reality on the ground to be quite different: most reporters, editors, photographers, and other creatives know and help one another, bonding over a career path few others understand. And that camaraderie is rarely reflected in the way the news is portrayed or reported out.

And that’s what I like about Substack: it’s one of the few platforms I’ve ever used where recommendations to read elsewhere are refreshingly encouraged. Today, most of my new subscribers (hey!) are coming from other newsletters that list Streetbeat (aw, thanks!), and I wanted to give them a quick shout-out here:

• Sarah Barnes’ Along for the Ride;

• Movements;

• Matt Choi’s Street Stack;

• Chandler Forsythe’s Parks on a Bike;

• Benjamin Schneider’s The Urban Condition;

• Yasmin Güleç’s Between Bites;

• Daryl Fairweather’s Hate the Game;

• Diane Jenks;

• Elyssa Goldberg’s Bokeh;

Give them a follow 👍

Commencement

Teaching seniors at the tail end of their undergraduate journeys each year tends to be this moment of annual reflection for me.What world are they inheriting? In 2022, it was a pandemic that robbed them of memories and experiences crucial to your late teens and early twenties. In 2023, it was a fidgety recovery, made hazier by global instability. In 2024, it was college campuses tearing themselves apart over war and protest. And in 2025, it is, somehow, so much more.

I’m often nervous to admit this to the students point blank, but each year feels less clear than the last for them. I’ve shared this sentiment here: that history appears to be on some sort of parallel track, where not much makes sense anymore and the only constant is chaos. Now imagine having to translate that in a classroom setting—with guest speakers unsure of what advice to give aside from “be resilient,” topics that boil down to how crazy everything has become, and the news cycle as something we sigh over, even in a journalism class (!). It makes each semester’s end rough for me, if only because I’m left with few words to leave them with. What would I tell myself at this age? Good luck?!

But I derive such determination from their resolve. I started the semester with a proclamation that I wrote here in January: this would undoubtedly be the most uncertain period for New York City since the pandemic. (Do I have to explain why?) And in the months since, the cohort of 12 took that prompt—or, frankly, my own anxiety—and ran with it, delivering some of the most impressive and wide-ranging pieces I can remember in my six years of teaching.

We’ve got words on the cost of childcare in New York City. Zohran Mamdani’s insurgent bid for City Hall. The adult program at School of Rock. Federal cuts to public libraries, arts, and mentorship programs. The revival of indy bookstores in Brooklyn. The future of public housing. Gen Z’s influence on marketing, food, and fashion. And the fears of being an international student in the U.S. today.

It is a time for reflection, sure, but also a reminder—maybe most resoundingly to myself—when it’s all said and done: the kids will be alright. Congrats grads :)

Seriously off

I’ve been reporting about street safety for some time. Not only the life-saving fixes we can make to our roadways—which are on par with Russia for deadliest in the industrialized world—but also, the tangle of trends we’ve seen of late. At the end of 2023, I wrote about a sudden spike in cyclist deaths across New York City—a phenomenon pushed by faster e-bikes colliding with super-sized cars, yet rendered slightly less dramatic once you peered at it per capita. Three months later, I reported that New York City had just capped its safest year on record for pedestrians. What was left was a “huh?” moment all around.

And not just from me, trying to make sense of the statistics. But from readers, too. The top reaction I’d receive from any story I’d pen about New York’s ability to clamp down on traffic violence to some degree of success was genuine disbelief. How? The streets didn’t feel safer. (And frankly, I couldn’t argue with them.) People’s lived experiences were detached from headlines: near-misses with two-ton steel boxes zipping past them were still rampant, made even more dizzying with the rise of e-bikes. The zeitgeist seemed out of whack.

So when Transportation Alternatives (TA) reached out to me with never-before-seen data showing a spike in serious injuries—where someone’s life is permanently altered from a car crash—it stood out. This, to me, was an explanation for the discontent; that whatever way you cut it, New York City’s streets—and, by extension, America’s streets—are still causing severe bodily harm to far too many people, which amounts to one of the greatest aberrations of societal norms I can think of. We accept a system that kills every day as a cost of modern society—and until that changes, something is going to feel off.

But what was behind it? And what could we do to reverse the trend? I tried to answer those questions and more in a new feature for Bloomberg CityLab, whose talented graphics team parsed out TA’s tragic data. As one unnamed Streetbeat reader said, it reads as a “street safety greatest hits.” Enjoy the dive.

Much ado

The revelation last month that New York City’s 110th mayor, Eric Adams, wouldn’t run as a Democrat in this year’s election for his seat barely broke the news cycle. Most people assumed that already—or, rather, weren’t even asking. A tsunami of troubles—federal corruption charges, coziness to the White House, an inability to break New Yorkers out of the deeply held cynicism that has captured most of the country, if not the world—has rendered him New York’s most unpopular mayor on record. (There are other things, but I’ll leave it at that.)

For a while now, Adams has been a lame duck, American English for someone in power who’s stuck in place until time takes its toll. And that malaise leaves everyone in the policy world in a holding pattern. Each day, you’re sussing out what can feasibly happen between now and January, when the 111th mayor—who, almost definitely, will be the 111th man—comes along. You’re keeping tabs on who’s even still around to make change, now that his smartest deputies have jumped ship. And you’re fine-tuning your pitch for whoever comes next.

Not knowing how things will go—both locally, nationally or even globally, for that matter—is underpinning all the work we’re doing at the Center for an Urban Future around bolstering the city’s parks and open spaces. It was the backdrop of a recent testimony we gave at City Hall, where we told lawmakers that now is the time to dig in on sustainable funding streams, with so much up in the air. It loomed large over a recent panel I moderated with the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance, where any major rezoning is really the work of the next administration, not this one. And it will dominate every conversation around what New York City is—or, rather, wants to be—for some time.

We’ll have some shrivel of an answer soon. In the meantime: register to vote.

OSA: Accolades

No spoilers: this section next month will be reserved exclusively for the redesign of 31st Ave into a ‘bike boulevard,’ which is underway as we speak and will likely conclude by then. It’s lookin’ beautiful. (Naturally, I have a lot of photos.)

But this month—our first full one of the season—felt like a good time to (briefly) pat ourselves on the back for putting on a pop-up public space for five years straight. That’s 180 weekends, 360 days, and 2,880 hours of operation, led entirely by volunteers. Seeing the block transform in front of our eyes has been this remarkable reminder of what that work can do for a community.

Earlier this month, the 31st Ave Open Street Collective was nominated for—and then won—the best ‘Public Space Activator’ title at the Public Space Awards, a ceremony put on by livable streets outfit Open Plans that recognizes the individuals and organizations behind New York City’s thriving public realm. We now display the plaques on our table each weekend, to show neighbors what their support has meant to us and others. It was an honor, to say the least, folks.

Bright Side: Good Kid, Mad City

When someone says a child is at “an impressionable age,” there is science to back that up. A child taught literacy early on is more likely to read (and succeed) when they’re older. A child offered poor dietary choices early on is more likely to hold the same habits later in life. And a child exposed to trauma early on is more likely to suffer its consequences down the road. The list goes on and on.

As creatures of our environment, these experiences shape who we are—and so fostering opportunity and creativity at a young age seems like a no-brainer for public policy. (This is what makes universal pre-kindergarten so impactful.) It can show kids what’s possible for them, without the barriers society wants to put up. A bit from Sarah Silverman comes to mind: “Stop telling girls they can be anything they want when they grow up. I think it’s a mistake. Not because they can’t—but because it would’ve never occurred to them that they couldn’t.”

Over a year ago, I was asked to be an advisor on a new exhibit at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) called CityWorks, which opened to the public this month. Instead of projecting children into deep space or the deep sea, it instead asks them to look around. The city itself—this system of systems that, somehow, sustains 8.5 million people every day—is a living laboratory, from its parks and transit to its sanitation and sewage. It teaches children to see themselves as a small part of a much greater story—and imagine what their role could be in it.

As I toured the exhibit earlier this month—which, lemme tell you, is just so neat—I thought about this point a lot. What did we want to tell children was possible? How can they change cities? And why, for god’s sake, didn’t I have this as a kid?

On the Radar

No OTR this month—but we may have been one of the few who made it through The Handmaid’s Tale’s six-season run, and while it was heart-wrenching to watch, I’d argue that we need more shows like it right now. Same goes for Andor.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), America’s largest mass transit body, is looking for a UX designer. (New York, NY)

• Help develop the soooooounndscapeeeeee at The New York Botanical Garden. (The Bronx, NY)

• Street Lab, which designs, equips and outfits public spaces around New York City, is hiring for a few positions. (New York, NY)

• Speaking of neat design work: go fabricate some stuff at CultureHouse, a placemaking outfit (and Streetbeat vet). (Somerville, MA)

• Shout-out to longtime friend and colleague Michelle Smawley for regularly sharing climate media/comms jobs, explicitly for this newsletter. Thread here, thread here, and thread over there. (All over the place)

***

Tell us where the jobs are at by submitting them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Bangla, a language spoken by 285 million people.

Bene Advenis*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:

- New York City’s mayoral race;

- The meteoric rise of daylighting;

- Cities as networks;

& much, much more.

On the trail

I photo-bomb so many shots in 2016’s Weiner, a documentary about former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s rise and fall from City Hall aspirant to Democratic nightmare, that I should’ve gotten a line credit. New York City’s 2013 mayoral campaign, where Bill de Blasio practically tripped over the finish line after a series of frontrunners—Weiner included—crumbled, was a journalistic baptism by fire for me. Editors needed cub reporters to cover every inch of what was then the wildest mayoral campaign in a generation. Fresh out of college, I volunteered as tribune—and my first day was somehow this press conference.

I’m not a campaign reporter anymore. But the quadrennial race has since arrived at different stages of my career. The 2017 edition—which saw de Blasio waltz to re-election—came at a time of immense political fatigue for me, having survived the 2016 presidential race and everything that conjured up. The 2021 edition—which saw Eric Adams eke out a Covid-era victory—came amidst a return to New York from overseas. (I wrote about it here, but as an outsider looking back in.) And although I’m firmly in the city now, the 2025 edition—which makes 2013 look like child’s play—is coming at a time where I now straddle the lines of journalism, policy research, and organizing. That makes my input scattershot.

For example: the candidates could inherit a public space portfolio hobbled by the current mayor. Parks have been defunded. Open Streets and outdoor dining are disappearing. (More on that later.) And projects are measured by who has the mayor’s ear, and how loud they are—like the pause of a pedestrian walkway over a major bridge, even after five years of work and the start of a first-in-the-nation tolling scheme. It’s just the latest from a (likely lame-duck) mayor whose leaving behind, amongst other legacies, a workforce that is demoralized and defeated.

So I’m particularly interested in what this cadre will do differently. Or, rather, how can voters trust them after the current mayor reneged on so much? This was the case for parks—to advocates, Eric Adams was the first person to win office having pledged to ‘one percent for parks,’ or the campaign to dedicate at least one percent of the city’s $112 billion budget should go to the parks department. Four years later, they’re still waiting. (In fact, parks was actually one of the only things to get cut in this last budget and not later restored.)

So at a recent mayoral forum on parks (which my capstone class covered!), I was thrilled to hear that on the topic of future funding for these vital spaces, the candidates are thinking bigger than just the budget dance. Now, of course, I am biased; new revenue streams have been my focus of late at Center for an Urban Future. But the ideas we’re putting into the world seem to be breaking through.

Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani supports a “community parks fee” on the real property transfer tax. State Senator Zellnor Myrie supports a modest fee on ticket sales for parks maintenance. Former Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer supports more public-private partnerships. And Comptroller Brad Lander supports an expansion of parks concessions.

All of these ideas are featured in a report we did last year. That last one, in fact, was the subject of a policy brief we released right before the forum. It breaks down why and how the city’s parks department could retain revenue generated from concessions in parks (cafés, rinks, kayak rentals, etc.) for upkeep—which, if you can believe it, isn’t the case right now, unless a conservancy or other private partner exists there. (Cue the inequities.) We suggested mechanisms to hold onto that money; a “concessions investment fund” to shore up properties; regulatory reform so it’s not impossible to work with the city; and a pilot to test modular setups. In the end, these are policy, not legislative, changes.

Like 2013, we’re at a transitional moment in our body politic—where we could either double down on the status quo, or imagine something new. We’re just under two months until primary day, a literal lifetime in politics. (People often mention that at this time in 2021, Andrew Yang was the frontrunner.) And so I, along with others, will be spending this next stretch pushing policies into the discourse, if only for the chance to shape the city for the better.

(Note: Crain’s New York Business had a great write-up of CUF’s outsized impact. It made our day.)

Have a seat

This always feels dark to say, but there were some (keyword!) good things to come out of the Covid-19 crisis. One that most people can agree on—based on what I hear in the countless conversations I’ve had since—is that places of all shapes and sizes loosened up their rules around people eating or drinking al fresco. Like the public parks that arose from pandemics past, indoor restrictions actually forced towns and cities to get creative with how they use and allocate space. And five years later, I still encounter these changes everywhere I go.

I’ve written too much here about what has stuck since then. And this month, New York City had a front-row seat to a post-pandemic stress test. In early April, its permanent outdoor dining program went into effect, converting what had previously been an emergency response for an industry teetering on collapse into a now-seasonal framework, with stricter rules and certainly-not-Covid speeds of permitting. (By the season’s start, the city had approved just 32 applications, with most operating under conditional approvals.) The proverbial “sheds” came down; new structures, informed by design guidelines that prioritize light, airflow, and accessibility, are slowly replacing them.

And in short: they’re beautiful. They blend with the streetscape better. They’re imaginative. And they’re easier to clean. As someone who helped guide that process, as an advisor on Al Fresco NYC, I’ve been anxiously awaiting this moment. For me, seeing outdoor dining return to our streets this month feels like a reset, where we can finally do the work of reassembling our cities to a higher ideal after they stooped to their lowest in years. And it provokes a question on my mind often: how much did we actually learn from the pandemic?

Now, answering that honestly is a glass half-empty/half-full situation. It’s hard to ignore that the program is a shell of itself, hallowed out by high costs and the lack of a year-round option. (All of those nifty structures will have to come down at the end of November, which restaurants are dreading.) Perhaps figuring out the pandemic’s aftershocks is easier to do on paper. Or, better yet: perhaps the biggest lesson learned from the pandemic is how inane our systems were beforehand—and will still continue to be long after, if left alone.

But humans adapt, even if it takes a while. Comparative models in Paris and Montréal took time to thrive, as eateries eventually figured out their way around city government. (There is, often, no playbook.) That doesn’t happen by chance, though; municipalities must create infrastructure for a market to succeed, or else they risk squandering the opportunity. (They should write that damn playbook.) Don’t sweat the small stuff; just make sure the experience isn’t debilitating.

I felt the same this month, as I watched the city propose a rule change for the amount of private seating allowed in public spaces. (No more than 33 percent of total square footage, for those wondering.) It very much shoved one of the pandemic’s organic outgrowths through the artificial grinder of government. I covered the hearing for Streetsblog, which had been dealt a sensationalist reaction in advance. And like outdoor dining, it raised some important flags for what comes next to make this stuff stick. If the pandemic’s first five years after were about recovery, then maybe the next five should be about resilience.

Lit up

It’s been a little while since we talked about ‘daylighting.’

For context: this is the approach in street design where intersections are made more visible, by: a) not letting cars park right up to the crosswalk; and b) putting a variety of things—hard (i.e. boulders, planters, concrete) and soft (i.e. signs, hydrants)—to prevent that from happening. And since so many crashes occur at a turning point, daylighting can effectively save lives.

Inspired by Hoboken, New Jersey–which saw no traffic deaths for years due in large part to daylighting—I wrote about the concept in 2023 for Bloomberg CityLab because I was genuinely stumped by why more cities weren’t doing this very cheap, very sensible fix. (It’s really rare in cities you get a proven solution that’s both cheap and sensible—and even drivers agree!) A lot has happened since then in New York. First, the Adams administration committed to daylighting a 1,000 intersections a year. Then over 20 community boards—the first being the one where I live, after 7-year-old Dolma Naadhun was killed at a opaque corner down the block from us—backed ‘universal daylighting,’ fed up with the administration’s piecemeal approach. And finally, legislation arrived both downstate and upstate to end the city’s exemption from a state law.

The momentum of an entirely grassroots effort was exemplified earlier this month on the steps of City Hall, when throngs of people rallied in support of a universal daylighting bill in the City Council, which now has a more-than-decent shot at passing. (Members of the 31st Ave Open Street Collective testified that day, citing our neighborhood’s history on the issue and a hyper-local push for intervention that we recently led, seen above.) In terms of how we actually design our streets, daylighting has had one of the fastest upticks for a policy talking point that I can remember. (I mean, community boards—yes, those community boards—back it, for god’s sake.) At that speed, something’s gotta give.

OSA: Flex

Earlier this week, a segment of 31st Ave flipped one-way for the first time.

The second phase of the ‘bike boulevard’ redesign—which will see traffic direction changes, a two-way bike lane, and quasi-permanent public plazas—is officially underway. City crews are out there as we speak, changing signs and re-striping the corridor. If, as an iterative design process, Open Streets is AOL 1.0, we’ve officially started the upgrade to AOL 2.0.

April is the launch month for the Open Street. And each year, that timing comes with a unique set of challenges: in 2022, we were mediating with business owners; in 2023, we were incorporating as an actual entity; in 2024, we were fundraising as a certified 501©3 nonprofit and streamlining processes. And in 2025, we’re very much looking beyond our actual weekend-only operations to maximize our impact. (Separately from that, our actual opening weekend this year was, unfortunately, cancelled due to thunderstorms and a wind advisory.)

I’ve mentioned two of them already here: our push for ‘universal daylighting’ district-wide, and the resumed redesign. But another joined the list this month: a campaign backing the city’s proposal for life-saving measures this summer on 31st Street—which, in true Queens grid fashion, bisects 31st Avenue. When businesses there organized in opposition, the Collective helped write a petition to affirm local support for redesigning one of the borough’s most dangerous stretches. Two weeks later, that petition now has over 3,100 signatures, and over 20 people showed up at a recent community board hearing to testify.

Again, technically, some of these projects have nothing to do with 31st Avenue. And this is not, necessarily, new for us: previously, we advised on the Western Queens Street Safety Plan with our elected officials, and we often speak out publicly about the program, most recently on the need for funding and reform. But the extent to which we are stretching out our map has risen substantially. Because with a wide reach locally—be it through our 100+ volunteer base, 15k+ online following, or physical two-day-a-week presence—we’re increasingly confident that we can move the needle. And of course: these issues, like our streets themselves, are connected, whether they happen on the Avenue or not.

Bright Side: Life on the farm

A lot has been written about the ‘city as a network’—of neighborhoods, innovation, ecosystems, and so much more. And when we think of our ideals for the way something works, it’s typically well-connected: a parks network; a road network (for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians); a subway network. And that’s because networks have power: a network connects places, and makes those places feel more connected; if people are involved, networks can be a way to share resources, information, and best practices.

A network that has always impressed me for even existing in the first place is London’s City Farms. The Big Smoke has 12 such spaces, in total; together, they piece dollars together from various sources, like local authority grants, donations, and concessions. Most are charities (British English for nonprofits) and part of a larger member group. And everyone is welcome to visit.

I spent some time teleworking in London last month—saw friends, scooted around, ate some pies, enjoyed the sun when she came—and while I was in town, I was invited to Surrey Docks Farm. It was a special occasion: this year is the farm’s 50th anniversary. The site, nestled along the River Thames, was bustling when I arrived: families enjoying flat whites and sausage rolls from the café there; toddlers ogling the sheep and donkeys that grace the fields; groups touring the amenities, which include a blacksmith, greenhouse and stable.

Carla Conte, a friend of a friend who helps lead youth programming there, showed us around. She introduced us to a few of her regulars: high-schoolers who had piqued interest in journalism, sustainability, and construction trades. The tiny plot does so much; it’s equal parts climate jobs incubator, teenager third space, parent hangout, compost provider, and natural respite. It even provides youth livestock programs, which have marked success, to young offenders.

The farm, Conte explained, is educational at its core, which feels pressing. “Something about being around animals is really good for people,” she said. “They teach us how to treat each other, but also, they show us what’s possible.”

On the Radar: MISTO

When I was in London, I was introduced to a team from Kyiv, and we linked back up in New York at the Smart Cities Expo earlier this month. Now, I don’t go to these events often (and personally, I’m a skeptic on smart city stuff). It was held at Manhattan’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which I had only entered previously for the New York International Auto Show (true life: I was a motor head kid) and a bizarre security conference I covered for VICE way back when. The place is a revolving door of trade shows; in fact, with multiple conventions unfolding at the same time, it can be hard to know which once is which.

But aside from seeing a few colleagues, I wanted to hear more about MISTO—and today, Anatolii Vovniuk, its business director, was giving me a tutorial. The closest thing I can compare MISTO to is Mobility as a Service, or MaaS for short. This is the idea that all of your transportation needs—your bus ticket, cab, parking, bikeshare, etc.—can be accessed on one app. (I’ve written about the concept here before.) But imagine if MaaS applied to an entire city’s planning and operations. Forget paying the meter, what if you could weigh in on a redesign of the entire street.

That’s the idea behind MISTO, an all-in-one platform where people can get alerts (like Citizen), get around (like MaaS), get to engage in local debates (like Change.org), get air quality updates (like AirNow), get bills paid (like Venmo), and get municipal services (is there actually an app for that?). Some call it City as a Service, or CaaS for short. MISTO is the technology underpinning Kyiv Digital, the city’s official app, which currently sees three million users a day.

But for me, what’s most fascinating is the backstory. MISTO started in Odesa at the height of the pandemic, when contactless transactions became a matter of public health. Then the platform took on another dire role: when the conflict with Russia broke out, citizens needed real-time alerts for incoming missiles, and directions to the nearest bomb shelter. Unfortunately, Ukrainians still need those services, and then some. But the MISTO team has relented, expanding to other cities (now just arriving in America!) and what it can offer people.

When I asked Vovniuk about that strange dichotomy—a smart cities app in the midst of an awfully dumb war—he argued the technology itself is a form of resistance. “We wanted to show the world that Ukrainians could still innovate,” he told me, “even in the worst of situations.” Slava Ukraini.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• Summer interns! Streetsblog USA, the only media company solely dedicated to covering greener forms of transportation, is hiring. (Remote)

• CultureHouse, a nifty placemaking outfit that I blab on about here often, is bringing on a full-time operations position. (Somerville, MA)

• The New York City Department of Transportation, one of the largest municipal agencies of its kind, needs an urban designer. (New York, NY)

***

Tell us where the jobs are at by submitting them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This edition’s ‘Welcome’ is in Latin, to commemorate the passing of Pope Francis.

خوش آمدید*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:

- The race to be New York City’s next mayor;

- Funding five years after the pandemic;

- How mutual aid can save lives;

& much, much more.

Platform shift

Later this year, New Yorkers—or, at least, some fraction of them—will choose their next mayor. And, to put it bluntly, the race is a shitshow. With record-low approval ratings, sagging even further after it became quite clear that he cozied up to the president to see his corruption charges dropped, the current City Hall occupant (Eric Adams) may run as an independent, if he even stays in. The former governor (Andrew Cuomo) is leading the pack, with a campaign fueled on the hope that New Yorkers have short-term memory. An insurgent socialist (Zohran Mamdani) has cemented himself as the election’s progressive darling and a top contender. The head of the city’s legislative body (Adrienne Adams) joined the fray to little fanfare. And a potpourri of liberals (Brad Lander, Jessica Ramos, Zellnor Myrie, Scott Stringer, Michael Blake) are vying to be everyone’s third or fourth pick. (New York City has a ranked-choice voting system.)

Through a variety of measures, public space is on the ballot. The future of Open Streets seems unclear—which I’ll explain later. People are noticing that city’s pandemic-née-permanent curbside dining program is a shell of itself since it went seasonal. Congestion pricing, now in its third month, has knock-on effects for how we can rethink our streets, but it remains threatened by Washington. On the world’s stage, New York has fallen far behind the rollout of busways, bike lanes and car-free zones. (For comparison: Paris just voted to pedestrianize 500 blocks.) And all of that is unfolding in a post-pandemic paradigm where a growing chorus of politicians, business leaders and planners recognize that a robust public realm underpins a thriving urban economy in 2025.

I’ll be keeping tabs on the race as it relates to the conversations I have here. In the meantime, I was excited to advise on the Urban Design Forum’s Vision for a Better City, an ideas blueprint for candidates on the issues that matter most to urban designers, planners, and practitioners. Like making it easier to activate and care for public spaces, improving their design, and actually giving them the funding they so desperately need. Now begins the process of parsing out campaign promises from actual policy commitments.

(On a related note: my cohort for the Forum’s Rewire initiative last year penned an op-ed on our idea to transform the city’s peaker plants into biodiversity hubs, which was recently published in City Limits. Check it out.)

On the radio

I aired most of my thoughts on congestion pricing here last month. Not too much has changed since; if anything, it’s only been baked further into the cityscape: honking complaints are way down, Access-a-Ride and bus speeds keep rising, and Broadway is experiencing a mini-renaissance. (There’s also a lot of revenue pouring in.) As I’ve reported previously, the longer that all drags on, the harder it will be to undo. But if you do want to hear a bit more context to the drama surrounding the most profound challenge to America’s car culture in our lifetime, I returned to The Outspoken Cyclist podcast to chat with host Diane Jenks about the courts, the White House, and the other complicated chapters of this never-ending story. You can give it a listen here.

Alternate streams

The bulk of my waking hours is still dedicated to devising ways to better fund New York’s parks and open spaces. And that work increasingly feels urgent: the city faces a budget deficit of at least $8 billion in the years ahead, and when this happens, parks have been first on the fiscal chopping block. Then there’s the specter of spending cuts from Washington. What’s Trump got to do with local green spaces? Not much. But Biden’s infrastructure and climate bills colored Gotham green in grants for things like street trees, a new linear park in Queens, and jobs training. And now those dollars are in political purgatory.

Our latest proposal at the Center for an Urban Future: a thoughtful expansion of concessions, with more of the money they generate staying in the parks they’re based in. (Seems sensible, right?) I’ll have a whole lot more to say next month when the brief’s out, but if this is as much of a tantalizing topic for you as it is for me—hands up if you enjoy a coffee in a park!—then tune in virtually or stop on by IRL to a forum we’re hosting this Wednesday at WNYC’s Greene Space, where I’ll join the leaders of some pretty renowned green spaces and other experts for a panel on the potential of parks concessions. RSVP here.

Our other recent proposal—a modest surcharge on ticket sales that would directly support parks maintenance—is the tougher slog, just given the politics. (Which grew fuzzier this month with the protest resignation of the city’s deputy mayors.) But we were delighted to see the idea included in the legislative platform put forth by Alliance for Public Space Leadership (APSL), a collection of influential advocacy groups in New York. The dominant narrative emerging is this: with the stakes this high, something’s gotta give.

OSA: Funding

Pandemic-era programs have always walked a tightrope. Sure, you can enshrine something into law, but it’s up to leaders, expending the appropriate amount of resources and capital, to actually see it through. (Also: times change, and so do those leaders.) Hence why we’ve seen so much disappear (remember the child tax credit?) or get diluted (or Build Back Better?). If you read even an iota of the Covid five-year anniversary content out this last month, one uniform message rang clear: we, collectively, squandered a generational moment to think big. Making it last is the real challenge. Progress alone is fragile.

To that effect, a telling moment came recently: half a decade after it started as an emergency response to a public health crisis that made outdoor space scarce, the Open Streets program is running out of money. The pandemic relief dollars from Washington have all but dried up, and there is no definite plan to replace them in the city budget. Add in the already shaky ask of volunteers to pull off an intensive program and a generally blasé, if not sometimes outwardly hostile, attitude from City Hall, and you’ve got yourself somewhat dire straits.

But pressure isn’t always such a bad thing. An implicit warning from city officials about future finances helped spark the biggest rally yet for Open Streets, where organizers, advocates and local leaders came together to call on the city to fully fund the program with almost $50 million over the next several years, which would pay for their upkeep and expansion. (I couldn’t be there myself, but the team from 31st Ave Open Street Collective helped in advance with outreach and letter drafting.) It forced our vast array of (largely volunteer) partner organizations—who have sounded the alarm for some time now—to align on a single message, make it an issue in the mayoral race, and take to the streets in full force. Now, we wait to see how that work pays off in budget negotiations.

In other news: the 31st Ave Open Street’s fifth season starts Saturday, April 26th.

Bright Side: Lives Saved

This is a newsletter about cities, so I don’t normally write about the scourge of substance addiction here. But about a third of Americans know someone who has died from opioid addiction, and I am one of them. I’ve attended my fair share of wakes and funerals that should’ve never happened, where the cause of death listed is either vague or left blank. My hometown, like much of Long Island, succumbed to successive waves of barbiturates, heroin, and, most recently, fentanyl. And their addiction has impacted countless loved ones close to me.

Like traffic fatalities, drug overdose deaths had largely plateaued until about the mid-to-late aughts, when opioids became vastly accessible thanks to a web of bad actors. (The Sacklers, Big Pharma, greedy doctors, and America’s deeply broken healthcare system, to name just a few). We went from 10 to about 30 deaths per 100,000 people in just 20 years. That’s the equivalent of 200 more people dying each day. The pandemic, of course, only made matters worse.

You might be asking: where’s the good news? Well, something is afoot. After a peak in 2023—where 300 people died of drug overdose each day in the U.S.—the numbers are suddenly dropping. This last year saw the fewest drug overdose deaths since June 2020, with a 24 percent decrease in total deaths, from 114,000 to 87,000. It’s a one-year decline never before seen by public health officials.

Again, why write about that here? Because a top reason cited by experts for this precipitous fall is the distribution of Narcan en masse. In a brief period of time, tons of Americans got their hands on tiny kits of naloxone, which can resuscitate someone in the throes of synthetic opioid overdose. The nasal spray is available in pharmacies, health clinics, and district offices; it’s typically stocked at raves, festivals, and parties; and it’s now common to see at people’s homes, next to first aid. (Related: our Open Street team is trained in its use, and regularly hand it out.) Like vaccines and food aid, it’s a testament to mutual aid, where resources are made easy to use, cost virtually nothing, and placed directly into the hands of as many people as possible, without institutional barrier. The bottom-up approach is now saving about 70 more lives each day. Just… wow.

On the Radar

The Wrecking Crew, by Thomas Frank

Each day, Americans have front-row seats to the systematic dismantling of their government. Over the last three months, thousands upon thousands of civil service workers—the people who regulate banks; the people who make sure our food doesn’t kill us; the people who distribute medicine to developing countries—have been fired. There has been perhaps no other time in this nation’s history where an insular circle of elites pulled off such a swift Barbarians at the Gate-style raid of post-war bureaucracy, with implications so vast and debilitating, it’s difficult to keep track of just what, exactly, is happening.

But while it may seem without precedent, there is a playbook for all this. In the 1980s, the ‘Reagan Revolution’—using terminology that the MAGA tent would later borrow (“Let’s Make America Great Again” was Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan)–swept into D.C. with what it viewed as a mandate to drastically shrink the size of government, fueled by discontent with 1960s-era social expansion and 1970s-era economic stagnation. But instead of abolishing agencies, which takes an act of Congress, Reagan’s troops chose a different tack: hollow them out from the inside. Lay off employees. Don’t fill their positions. Neutralize core functions. Deregulation through starvation.

If there is a book to understand this moment in American history—and this goes to readers abroad, too: if you don’t think it can happen where you live, Trump is writing the manual—look no further than Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew. (Frank’s other seminal text, What’s The Matter With Kansas?, which explores how conservatism won over the working class, is also a must-read.) In painstaking detail, Frank deconstructs how a pack of right-wing businessmen and ideologues ganged up to stack federal agencies with people who simply didn’t believe they should exist. It all then came crashing down, usually (unsurprisingly) to the financial benefit of the saboteurs.

But Frank’s real message is what that does to the public sector. A decade of picking off government bit by bit shoved the U.S. (and elsewhere) into the neoliberal age, where government was seen as “the problem, not the solution.” Bureaucracy failed because it was designed to fail, greatly shrinking Americans’ imagination of what Washington could do for them. This persisted for some time, with Clinton’s centrism in the 1990s, Bush’s neoconservatism in the 2000s, and Obama’s liberalism-lite in the 2010s. The Eighties set the tone for what was possible, and it wasn’t much. And only recently, when Biden’s agenda staffed up agencies to enact a scope of work not seen since the Great Society, did that shift.

Like the wrecking crews before it, ‘DOGE’ is responding to what it perceives as a threat; this naked pursuit of profit under the guise of ‘efficiency.’ History is merely repeating itself, only this time at a much faster clip. And unless opposition is stiff, Frank teaches us, it’s going to leave a mark.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• Transportation Alternatives, the street safety heavyweight, is hiring for a national communications and policy director at Families for Safe Streets and a director of development. (Remote; New York, NY)

• If smart policy concerning urban safety and criminal justice in New York City is your forte, Vital City has a job for you. (New York, NY)

• More climate comms positions! (All over)

• Second Nature, a think tank that focuses on climate and higher ed, is looking for a new climate policy fellow. (Remote)

• Regional Plan Association, probably the most influential civic group in the tristate region, needs a transportation associate. (New York, NY)

***

Tell us where the jobs are at by submitting them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is ‘Welcome’ in Persian, to honor Nowruz, the Iranian New Year.

Editor’s note: Audio isn’t great this edition, but c’est la vie. It’ll be better next time!

Bonswa*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:

- Congestion pricing, at long last;

- BOLLARDS;

- The high cost of free parking™;

& much, much more.

Highly trafficked

In the late 1970s, Donald Appleyard noticed something about his neighbors: they weren’t talking to each other as much anymore. The English-American urban designer, who taught at UC Berkeley, was picking up on what is, in my opinion, the social phenomenon of our time—the loneliness crisis. Never at any other period in human history have people been this socially disconnected: we’re not joining as many clubs and community groups; we’re increasingly living alone; and our social networks are steadily declining. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic recently labeled this era as “the anti-social century.” And the list of potential reasons why is lengthy: the doom-scroll of technology; the degrade of the post-war safety net; the numbness of late-stage capitalism (ofc); and the growing fracture in our belief of civic society. It’s a lot to take in.

But Appleyard looked locally for explanation. In 1981, for his seminal text Livable Streets, he spoke to residents living on three separate stretches in San Francisco: one with 2,000 vehicles a day; one with 8,000; and one with 16,000. And what he found was fascinating: the residents living on the low-traffic street had twice as many acquaintances as those living on the high-traffic street. Neighbors on the former were on a first-name basis; neighbors on the latter hardly spent time there. In a truly cruel twist of fate, Appleyard was hit and killed by a car in Athens, Greece the next year, but his work has influenced generations of urban thinkers, with a simple yet striking premise: traffic has a socially perverse effect on us, and our lives would be healthier and happier if we had less of it.

I think of Appleyard often when people ask me for my opinion about the first-in-the-nation start of congestion pricing in New York. (The cameras flicked on January 5th.) Sure, it’s a toll, but—and I’ve made this point here before—what makes congestion pricing, or this idea that drivers should pay to enter a city’s central business zone, equal parts profound and provocative, especially in America, is that it labels our society’s acceptance of traffic as a bad thing. It says the quiet part out loud: that traffic is choking us—literally, and figuratively. And it demands us to imagine what our world could be like if we had less of it.

In an otherwise dim time, that alternate reality appears promising. Traffic and crashes are down. Bus speeds, pedestrian counts, and even Broadway ticket sales are up. So is transit ridership and revenue. Yet I’m more interested in what would’ve stuck out to Appleyard if he were still alive today: the number of kids now playing in the street; the number of neighbors more encouraged to sit on their stoop or at an outdoor café and chat; what people can hear now that they otherwise couldn’t before; and what, socially, a Manhattan with a whole lot less cars can be for people—meeting, crossing, walking, and talking. It’s too early to say, but initial signs are positive. (Warmer weather will help, too.)

I’ve been talking about congestion pricing—and all the other policies attached to it—for almost a decade now. The title of a historical piece I did for Vital City last year was “The Long and Winding Road,” which now, it seems, is never ending. The president wants it dead. The governor wants to keep it. And the mayor wants nothing to do with it. Like so much of America right now, its longevity feels fragile, even if the legality of its dismantling is shaky at best. To know exactly what comes next is impossible. But each day the cameras stay on, people are seeing the social dividend from traffic-lite streets.

Bollardian

For much of the modern age, our public realm has grown increasingly securitized. We continue to equip our parks, plazas, and squares with stuff that is both low-tech (i.e. columns, boulders, gates) and high-tech (i.e. cameras, sensors, facial recognition). This effort took on new zeal after the attacks on September 11th, 2001—which introduced measures that are still in place 24 years later—but it’s been underway for decades. The advent of the automobile in the 20th century demanded protection for people standing inches away from fast-moving traffic, and as the perils of mass death, be it from terrorism or reckless driving, become starker, more attention has been paid to walling us off from danger.

But how do we defend against those very real threats and still create places that people actually want to be in? Over-securitized is no fun, but under-securitized may be fatal. In the wake of the New Year’s Eve attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, which is now the worst car-ramming event in U.S. history, I was asked by Bloomberg CityLab to find the best solutions out there for both the hardware and software needed to keep our public spaces safe yet lively. Check it out here.

And on a related note: it is life symmetry that, around this time, I was also working on a how-to guide for Streetsblog NYC related to a recent obsession of mine: fixing New York City’s countless flexposts. These little white rods of plastic and rubber are popping up everywhere—along bike lanes, outdoor dining structures, curb extensions, and more. And while they’re not a best practice by any means (spoiler alert: they break), bollards are a fixture of today’s streetscape that demand our attention. Here’s how you can help.

Reconnect 2.0

Apologies in advance, but I will take any opportunity to yap about CUNY Reconnect because its success is an endless fountain of joy for me. Bite-sized recap: wrote a policy brief at Center for an Urban Future in 2022 -> inspired an initiative from New York City Council —> re-enrolled over 40,000 adult learners in college since. (Fuller picture for those interested here.) We love to see it.

But now, in a twist we didn’t see coming, the program has become a crucial piece of the system’s success. Because like many higher education institutions, the City University of New York (CUNY) saw its enrollment plummet during the pandemic. College was a tough place to be then, to say the absolute least, and universities lost a lot of their allure when the world shut down. Like other trends, student attendance has trickled back, but now, a post-pandemic world where everything feels slightly less but still upside down, colleges face an existential question: what is their worth? And for (likely) too long, higher education sat back and benefitted from a societal mantra of college = good. With that message understandably eroded, colleges will have to be proactive, rather than reactive, in attracting future learners by lowering the barriers to access.

Enter a program like CUNY Reconnect, which targets the nearly 700,000 New Yorkers with some college credits but no degree and adjusts services to fit their needs. Now, in its latest master plan to double-down on recent enrollment gains, CUNY is fine-tuning that outreach even further. Here’s what they said:

Each year, about 30% of CUNY undergraduates withdraw from our educational programs for a variety of reasons… CUNY Reconnect will initially target three growing adult populations: individuals impacted by the criminal justice system (including their family members), students educated outside the United States and veterans.

This approach goes far beyond what we initially imagined for the program, with way more thought given to the specific demographics driving this phenomenon. And it’s not only a marked sign that it’s here to stay, but also, a blueprint of what colleges can be doing to right some past wrongs and figure out a path forward.

OSA: Parking politics

“Nothing is more political than parking.” It dooms projects. It divides communities. It causes fights. It kills. And it fosters this deeply ingrained worldview that there needs to be lots of it exactly where I need to be.

That’s one of my favorite quotes from Donald Shoup, the UCLA professor that inspired a generation (Shoupistas) to think long and hard about the high costs of free parking—the name of his planning tome. This month, he passed away at the fine age of 86. Obituaries were widespread and poignant. Especially because it seems as if his life’s work is finally paying off: cities everywhere are repealing mandatory parking minimums, passing over driver complaints of lost spots to install street safety measures, and reconsidering the acreage upon acreage of space we dedicate to curbside private storage. (A few letters ago, I mentioned Henry Grabar’s great book, Paved Paradise, which captures so much of this.)

I had the chance to chat with the man whose students called Shoup Dogg—these nicknames are just amazing—on several occasions. One time, he emailed me saying how much he enjoyed a story I did for Bloomberg CityLab in 2019 about innovative revenue streams for New York City mass transit, which included congestion pricing then, but that it omitted a key idea: charging market-rate prices for parking. (Of course.) I spoke to him again during the pandemic, when rethinking parking spots was all the rage. He was always happy to talk, and from what I’ve been told, that continued until the day he died.

But I think of Shoup often on the Open Street, when even five years into this markedly successful experiment, we’re still combatting a narrative that the loss of 20 to 30 parking spots along two blocks for eight hours on two weekend days for eight months of the year is destroying the neighborhood. That the availability of parking matters more than the availability of public space. And that we shouldn’t change anything about our streets, even if they’re flawed in so many ways, because some drivers will have to spend a bit more time circling the block.

What Shoup managed to do particularly well is demonstrate how those narratives solidify into worldviews, and how collaborative approaches can benefit everyone (even drivers). One of my favorite ideas of his is a parking benefits district, where neighbors would decide together how to spend meter money on local beautification projects. He took something super sensitive to folks, then wouldn’t shut up about it, and in turn, developed inclusive solutions to get people to think bigger. And he’ll be sorely missed for that.

Bright Side: Recharge

In 2018, after a brutal late-summer heat wave, I set out to learn why subway stations underground were so damn hot.

To my surprise, it wasn’t what I believed to be the obvious culprits: the density of people crammed together on platforms; or the rising temperatures from climate change baking the planet outside. Instead, it’s actually the train itself: its engine, its electrical and auxiliary systems, its actual movement, and—overwhelmingly—its brakes. Or, in short: physics; get a gigantic steel tube to stop short at high speeds in front of throngs of people indoors and you’re probably gonna sweat. (It also doesn’t help that the circulation underground is typically shit.) I wrote a piece then forVICE about what transit agencies were doing about it, and years later, it’s neat to see another smart solution come to the fore.

In Spain, the public transit operator TMB (the Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona) has installed what’s known as ‘MetroCharge’ at 16 stations. It’s a regenerative braking device that uses an electric motor to siphon that energy coming off of trains entering elsewhere—to electric vehicles, to other trains, or even the stations themselves. Over the summer, I highlighted something similar in Paris—where turnstiles were being harnessed for power—but Barcelona leveled up. Because heat has power: to date, TMB said it’s saving 7.3 million euros worth of energy costs, and fully powering 28 Metro stations. 🥵

On the Radar

Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons By Jonathon Tarleton

In headlines, the housing crisis that consumes us—where the roofs over our heads are gobbling up bigger and bigger portions of our paychecks—often boils down to the question: Can we build more? But it’s not just that; it’s also: Can we build affordably anymore? Because we all know that ‘affordable housing’ we keep hearing about is actually… not so affordable. Unlike the climate crisis, which hedges on an effort to deploy new innovative solutions at a speed or scale never before seen in human history, the housing crisis is about our societal chutzpah to do what we used to do—build deeply affordable homes en masse—in places where people want to live. Whether that can happen in today’s distorted market, which often feels like one big mirage, is where things get fuzzy.

In other words: unlike the climate crisis, there actually is a playbook here. And one of those pages would likely be written with the words “Mitchell Lama.” It’s a housing guarantee program from the 1950s that resulted in a shit ton of units for moderate-income families across New York State by luring developers with tax breaks and guaranteed returns. That property is then placed in the hands of residents through limited equity co-ops, which neighbors manage together thereafter. Mitchell Lama is widely cited amongst experts as one of the most ambitious housing programs of its kind—and a potential salvo to today’s challenges, which aren’t too dissimilar to then.

Jonathan Tarleton, an old editor of mine at Urban Omnibus, became infatuated with Mitchell Lama as a particularly prevalent social housing solution that could help dig us out of this remarkable mess we’ve made. But what’s intrigued him more is what’s happened since: a legal loophole in the program where residents can vote to “opt out” of the program and enter the private market, once the building’s mortgage is paid off. It pits neighbors against one another in a dog-eat-dog situation that, Tarleton tells me, “nobody should have to ever be in.” This is the core of his new book, which follows the privatization sagas of two Mitchell Lama developments in order to figure out what this all means for our crisis today.

And we chatted all about it, for a new Q&A in New York Magazine’s Curbed.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• The world is burning, but there are a ton of jobs to cover the flames. (Varied)

• If you really love cycling, then People for Bikes, an industry and advocacy group for the pedaling world, is hiring an infrastructure program manager. (Remote, but Los Angeles/SoCal preferred)

• These climate groups need a consultant, via NRG. (Remote)

• Join the Natural Areas Conservancy, an advocacy group for New York City’s wetlands, forests and so much more, as a community research and partnerships manager. (New York, NY)

***

Tell us where the jobs are at by submitting them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting (“Good afternoon”) is in Creole, in honor of Mardi Gras.

Waah Oud De Na*

And welcome to this newsletter.

It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & their discontents: streets, climate, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:

- Communicating policy wins;

- A proposal for parks funding;

- The new drivers of climate progress;

& much, much more.

Programming note: Wow, Streetbeat is officially five years old this month! I’ve said this repeatedly (probably too often), but this newsletter and the folks I hear from about it brings immeasurable joy—truly, truly, truly. And now it’s surpassed the thousandth subscriber mark, I’ve been thinking a lot about ways it can grow and improve. Long-term, I’d love to feature guest writers, videos, and themed editions—which is honestly just a bandwidth issue, at this point. But short-term, I want to translate this stuff into various media, so it can reach more people.

So taking a page from one of my favorite Substacks—Sarah Barnes’ Along for the Ride—I’m going to flip a voiceover of this very newsletter, where I’ll read aloud text for *all the audiophiles* out there. And I’ll keep it short, likely 20 minutes or less, with maybe some tangents. Things happen when you talk it out!

If you do decide to listen (above), let me know what you think, plz + thank you ✌

Running in circles

Perhaps the greatest lesson from America’s last election (and believe me, there were many) was that policy doesn’t win the day. If that were the case, things would look a bit differently right now. You can uphold a great 'win,’ and it really could be a good thing, but if the voter doesn’t feel like whatever you did helped them directly, or reversed their fortunes in some amorphous way, it’s as good as dead, at least in terms of helping you at the ballot box.

Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t do it; majoritarian democracy is scary, for a reason. And thankfully, there is a steady shadow government, who enter public service to actually help people, that continues to hum along, subtly advancing smart policy at the lower rungs. But 2024 was a warning shot to not rest on these ‘achievements’ as a fail-safe, and a very visceral reminder that communication is 75% of the game. (I have so much to say about how this relates to the start of congestion pricing in New York this month, but that’s for February!)

Case in point: Ashland, Kentucky. My editor at Bloomberg CityLab (shout-out to David!) asked if I could look into something strange that happened there this last year. A group of city commissioners and planners in the small Appalachian city wanted to make their downtown stretch safer and more walkable for all. The result was a streetscape makeover, including the installation of five roundabouts and the conversion of four traffic lanes to two, which is now nearly complete. Their hope was that a more attractive corridor would bring greater foot traffic, thus more businesses and people, which the town desperately needs.

But instead, all but one commissioner—and another who was running for mayor—lost their respective elections. They blamed the roundabouts.

As I dug in more, this hyper-local story felt like a microcosm of where the American populace finds itself today: deeply skeptical of government, distrustful of facts and statistics, and generally cautious of change. And while it may seem that a circle where cars have to yield in perpetuity isn’t the same as, say, climate or immigration policy, I’d argue that street design changes are, in fact, some of the greatest provocations. That’s because of their routine tangibility: you have to pass through it on your daily drive. (Just like one sees inflation because you have to buy groceries.) That has consequences, and the folks in Ashland, Kentucky learned the hard way.

So I spent some time chatting with them and a few experts about how beneficial policy actions like roundabouts—which, objectively, save lives—can reach a weary public. Here’s what I found out.

Ticket to ride

I spend a fair amount of my time these days trying to figure out ways to pay for parks. See, New York City is the place that pioneered the ‘private park operator’ model—in the wake of the 1970s fiscal crisis, Central Park Conservancy and Bryant Park Corporation were both formed to harness private wealth for public good; Central Park, from wealthy benefactors who lived nearby, and Bryant Park, from adjacent businesses. They laid the groundwork for similar models to follow: Brooklyn Bridge Park, which funds its operations through windfalls from properties on site; Domino Park, which was built—and now maintained—by a developer; and The High Line, which receives zoning bonuses from the condos that sprung up alongside it, to name a few. But what we haven’t been able to crack is how to pay for every other park.

In January of last year, Eli Dvorkin and I put out a policy report with Center for an Urban Future (CUF) that detailed 20 potential revenue streams for the city’s parks system. It took inspiration from elsewhere, since seemingly everywhere I looked, cities were crafting smart, sustainable sources of recurring dollars for parks, especially in the wake of their pandemic-era renaissance. Except us. We got press coverage, held a forum, and rang the alarm as the city’s Parks Department absorbed a $20 million cut. (I wrote all about it then, for brevity.)

Shortly after, we received support yet again from the NYC Green Fund to take two of the ideas and really run with them. The first we chose was one that attracted the most attention: a modest surcharge on tickets sold at stadiums located on parkland, which includes Yankee Stadium, Citi Field and the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, where the U.S. Open is held. (The second is on expanding concessions in parks—more on that later this year.)

How, exactly, would that work? This is a rare question for a policy organization to answer—our job is to research and form ideas (hence the term “think tank”), not tell folks how to enact them. But it was a fun exercise nonetheless. Instead of parks experts, I spoke with tax law, municipal finance and budget experts. Our team, which included the great work of research assistant Nicole Lu, crunched the numbers on what different percentages would generate, and what would happen if the surcharge covered Broadway, sporting events, and shows. And we laid out a legislative path for state and city leaders. The result is a policy brief, which I peg more as an action plan, to enact a ‘Parks Improvement Trust,’ which, if passed by lawmakers, would be the first-ever direct funding mechanism for parks citywide. You can read it here.

We’ve been busy since then. A panel we held with parks advocates this month attracted over 150 people, with helpful points made around advocacy, messaging and inclusion. A few different outlets covered the proposal. And we received sincere interest from two elected officials in Albany to sponsor legislation in both chambers—the first step in the process we outlined. Election-year politics prove tricky here, especially with affordability a central theme, but we’re excited just to start the conversation. Stay tuned to where it goes next.

Decarbonize the campus

After a spree of spending on the ‘green transition’—in the United States, the European Union, China, Africa, and elsewhere—the world is returning to a time when substantial climate progress will be driven by localities or the private sector. That shift can be attributed to multiple phenomena at play: the resurgence of far-right and nationalist parties worldwide; legitimate concerns around the cost of living; a general dismay towards international efforts, like the Paris climate accords; and other global conflicts taking priority. For what it’s worth, sucking the oil out of our existence was always going to be bumpy—but the good news: it’s underway. Just who’s leading it is going to change for a bit.

When devolution like this happens, the onus is on regions, states and cities to generate funding, restructure regulations, and pass laws. Right now, what these places need to reckon with is the actual power they have to make change, and how the hell they’re going to pay for it, using primarily the money that circulates through their own economies. But I’d argue: that’s what they’re best at. I like to remind folks that some of New York’s most ambitious climate laws—the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which legally mandates reductions, and congestion pricing, which charges drivers to enter Manhattan—both came during the first Trump administration. That was not happenstance.

Neither was a recent announcement from New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, who proposed applying a portion of the Environmental Bond Act—a $4.2 billion measure for climate spending, passed by voters in 2022—towards decarbonizing the state and city’s aging public universities. Last April, Eli and I called for exactly that in a commentary at the CUF about the City University of New York (CUNY), whose aging buildings and their renovation could provide a generational opportunity for green job training and learning. (More details here.) We also said Washington had a major role to play.

But now, in a political landscape where that’s just not possible, the state finds itself back in a familiar position: front and center.

Orientation

This year’s version of “Advanced Reporting: The City”—a capstone-level reporting course I teach every spring, focused on covering urban issues—came with a caveat: New York City has entered its most unpredictable period since March 2020 and, before that, September 2001.

Its mayor, facing down indictment and a rocky re-election, is weighing his futures, which range from resignation to Republican Party re-registration.The president, seeing red in a historically blue sea, appears emboldened to assert the executive office onto his hometown, deploying federal agents, tying up federal dollars, and upending federally-approved plans. (I wrote about what that could mean in November.) The city itself is mired in a multitude of crises—ones of health, housing, affordability, climate… the list goes on. We have entered a year not knowing how Gotham will fare by its end. Everything feels up in the air.

That’s the reality the undergraduate seniors have entered—the same cohort whose college experience started in the midst of a debilitating pandemic. From what I can glean the first few weeks of class, they recognize these stakes and are eager to write those stories. And I’ll be sure to share them here.

OSA: Foot traffic

For as long as I have lived in Astoria, Queens—which hit a decade (!) last year—the storefront at the southwest corner of 31st Avenue and 35th Street has been vacant. But a few months ago, it wasn’t any more: Coffee Lab, a sleek nouveau café, opened there, its front window featuring stools and a bar that faces the street. Long operating hours (6am to 8pm) add a welcome presence in early mornings and evenings, especially in the dark of winter. It’s already busy.

With Coffee Lab open, only one other vacant storefront on the block—the sorely missed Zenon Taverna, the first restaurant I ever ate at in the neighborhood— remains. On the next block down (33rd to 34th Street), there’s only one, too. So, effectively, we’re at 80 percent occupancy on the Open Street.

That echoes statistics shared recently by the city’s Department of City Planning in a new report on storefront vacancy. Occupancy is up across the board—good news after the pandemic downturn—but it’s notably higher somewhere in particular. Here’s the passage:

“Storefronts along Open Streets experience a 9.9% vacancy rate, lower than the citywide rate of 11.1%. Open Streets are seeing greater recovery to pre-Covid vacancy rates, and many Open Streets are experiencing vacancy considerably lower than their surrounding neighborhoods as a whole…”

It also shows the reverse: public space obstructions actually depress occupancy rates. Check out the contrast:

Storefronts underneath scaffolding have a 17.6% vacancy rate, a rate significantly higher than that of the citywide average.

Together, the findings offer a greater understanding of how we navigate places: when we like being somewhere, we’ll stay a while—and so will our spending, attracting attention from businesses. And what makes us want to be somewhere? Studies tell us plenty, but we know already, right? Safety. A sense of calm. Maybe a little greenery. Somewhere to sit. Activity.

Towns and cities aren’t going to shape larger retail trends—but what they can do is invest in fostering diverse, vibrant places. And, doing the math, that might be the best bang for their buck.

Bright Side: Car Wash

In line with last month’s bollard-à-bench, here’s another bit of inspiring reuse: a group of industrial design students at Georgia Tech retrofitted a retired school bus into a ‘Mobile Laundry Bus.’ The seats were replaced with washers, driers and showers; water tanks were added; and electric was rigged from the battery.

The idea was Nicky Crawford’s; he runs Flowing with Blessings, a nonprofit that provides services to the unhoused in Atlanta. He wanted to address the heavy stigma of hygiene in shelters and amongst the public, but he needed something that could move around, mirroring the population he serves. So Crawford purchased the bus, and approached the school to help execute his vision.

To date, the bus has cleaned the clothes and offered showers to over 4,500 individuals. When operating, it can see about 60 people a day.

On the Radar

The Library Book, by Susan Orlean

***

New Yorkers share a pre-existing condition: they have feelings about L.A.

The traffic is a mess. Nobody walks. Everybody drives. Everything is far. It’s impossible to make friends. It’s clique-y. There are no seasons. The only industry is Hollywood. I don’t care about celebrities. California is… California.

Every New Yorker is guilty of griping about the other coast—and that includes me. But as time has gone on, I’ve warmed up to the place. I attribute that to a few factors: the many friends of mine who live there, who, knowing my prejudices, have dutifully showed me around their respective nabes; its incomparable food scene, which I learned about from fab writers like Tejal Rao, Jonathon Gold, and Dana Goodyear; the ambitious work underway to expand public transit and improve parks, which I’ve seen firsthand myself. And this month’s passing of the great David Lynch reminded me of the countless movies set there that I adore, including his own Mulholland Drive. (The City of Angels is truly its own genre.)

But that journey started with The Library Book. It’s about the immolation of the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986—the worst library fire in modern times, on the scale of Alexandria. Forty thousand volumes burned. And Susan Orlean, a recent transplant, becomes obsessed with figuring out who or what caused it. (It remains unsolved to this day.) What results is this heartfelt homage to libraries as rare democratic spaces, sure, but also, the rich complexities of this sprawl sitting along the Pacific: its history, design, and people.

Of course, this month, I was thinking of another fire that threatened the city—this one less by man or mistake, but by nature herself. And like so many other New Yorkers, I felt powerless watching from afar, not knowing what to do other than message loved ones and assure that they were safe. Lives are gone. Homes are gone. So much of what makes L.A. L.A. is gone. And I don’t know what else to say but: support mutual aid, support advocacy, and support the city.

Streetbeat Gig Board

• The tactical urbanism team at Street Plans, who I had the pleasure working with this last year, is looking for a designer. (San Francisco, CA, or elsewhere)

• Centre for London, which does some of my favorite policy work across the pond, needs a senior events organizer. (London, UK)

• The Horticultural Society, the entity who helps steward the 31st Ave Open Street and so many other public spaces, is hiring. (New York City, NY)

• The Big Dig blessed the world with the lovely Rose Kennedy Greenway, and they have a few internships available. (Boston, MA)

***

Tell us where the jobs are where you live. Submit them here.

Kita Monthly

See you next month!

*This month’s greeting is in Gullah, the language of the Gullah Geechee.