october 12–25, 2020 | new york 55an agricultural powerhouse. “Urban farm-
ing is a multibillion-dollar industry. If a
person knows they’re going to be providing
960,000 meals a day to schoolkids, that’s
leverage. That gets them access to capital.”
Before the pandemic, restaurants, bars,
and caterers employed nearly 325,000 peo-
ple, many of them the actors, artists, and
immigrants without whom this would be
just another big town. During the worst of
the crisis, restaurateurs mobilized to feed
frontline workers and supply food pantries.
Later, it was restaurants that forced the city
toclosestreetsandcommandeerparking
spaces, effectively a pilot program for a
reduced-car future. Large-scale farming
within the city limits could supply charities,
fussy chefs, and locavores, as well asprisons,
hospitals, and schools. It wouldalso cut
truck traffic, minimize use of waterand soil,
create jobs, and use fallow space. “The next
administration has to stop doing single-
problem solutions,” Adams says. “One solu-
tion must address many problems.”
In BetweenW
e depend on increasinglydecrepit
circulatory systems. The Brooklyn-
Queens Expressway needs to be
dismantled or replaced. The Port
Authority Bus Terminal is a dis-
reputable relic. The trip to and
from the airports would shame a
more embarrassable metropolis.Equally
urgent, we’re ill prepared for climate change.
Despite vows by the city to reach carbon
neutrality by 2050, the past six months have
demonstrated that we can’t fake our way
through floods, fires, heat, and other disrup-
tions. All require coordination among vari-
ous levels of government that can’t agree on
which way the toilet-paper roll should go.
In the absence of healthy cash flow, this is
the moment to plan for more flush times.
New York needs to lean in on the big proj-
ects that have been stalled for years: a rail
freight tunnel across the harbor that would
take tens of thousands of trucks off city road-
ways, the Gateway Tunnel that would sus-
tain service into Penn Station, and defenses
against rising seas. A sane Washington
would see these as national priorities, since
money spent to protect New York pays dis-
proportionate dividends. The metro area
produces nearly 9 percent of theGDP. It
pays far more in federal taxes than it gets
back, effectively subsidizing rural states.
And those numbers don’t account for our
web of connections that churn up money
clouds all over the world. America does not
thrive unless New York does.
Perhaps regime change in Washington
will deliver cash and enthusiasm for those
projects. (Joe Biden, the Amtrak-fanboy
president!) Till then, the city can more nim-
bly and independently overhaul the way we
get around. When car traffic fell and the sub-
way seemed forbidding, de Blasio discov-
ered the appeal of the plebeian bus. The 14th
Street busway, which debuted a year ago,
was the start of a citywide network that
seems suddenly urgent. But it will be up to
the next mayor to plot a wholesale reorgani-
zation of the way we use streets—more than
a quarter of the city’s land—less as a grid of
channels to sluice vehicles around and more
as a collective outdoors where eating, com-
muting,playing,selling,working,andinnu-
merable other activities all coexist.
Pandemic adaptations have demon-
strated both possibilities and pitfalls. Fragile
restaurants are surviving outdoorsfor now,
but often they crunch down the sidewalk to
a sliver. Waiters have to step across a bike
lane to reach outboard tables, risking a col-
lision at each pass. The open-streets pro-
gram is a threadbare stopgap. Cars threaten
to plow through police barriers (and have
done so) or weave among pedestrians at
many times the five-miles-per-hour speed
limit. The current mayor doesn’tneed to
wait until the sense of emergency has sub-
sided to demand design for safer intersec-
tions, evict official vehicles from bike lanes,
and prevent the police from closing side-
walks near precinct stations.
It’s also time to move from improvisation
to planning, from ad hoc closures here and
there to a citywide network ofstreets
designed for different intensities ofuse. We
don’t need to invent this from scratch. In
June, the National Associationof City
Transportation Officials released “Streets for
Pandemic Response & Recovery,” an illus-
trated handbook of designs for school
streets, market streets, transit streets, and so
on. In the Meatpacking District, the
business-improvement district unrolled
lengths of sod to transform a blockof Little
West 12th Street into a mini-showcase of a
greener future. The architect andplanner
John Massengale argues for a mixed web of
“quiet streets,” where vehicles are permitted
but bicycles and pedestrians take prece-
dence. Proposals to pedestrianizemiles of
Broadway pop up with hopeful regularity.
None of this can happen in the absence of
mayoral vision.
In pre-pandemic New York, even small
changes to the streetscape required
immense effort. After covid, quicker tweaks
can yield sweeping transformations.
Smoothing aboveground commutes and
mapping out more ample pedestrian space
mean thinning car traffic and cutting back
on street parking. To many drivers, that’s
infuriating, but to the city at large, it’s a god-
send, scrubbing the air, loweringthe vol-ume, and clearing the way for ambulances
and other vehicles that really need to be
there. (We no longer have to imagine those
conditions: We lived with them.) In this
reengineering of the streets, garbage could
spend the night before collection in munici-
pal dumpsters parked by the curb, rather
than sitting in bags, a smorgasbord for rats.
A fairer city is made out of such prosaic fid-
dling, especially when business as usual is
unjust. “We’re designing inequality into the
city,” says Justin Garrett Moore, executive
director of the Public Design Commission.
Heoffersonetiny, highlyvisibleexample:
Business-improvement districts, somany of
which are in midtown, have the clout to get
high-quality streetscapes and pay for their
upkeep. Everyone else gets rivers ofasphalt.
Moore and others suggest tapping a source
that progressives consider slightly satanic—
those pesky real-estate developers, always
on the lookout for the next boom. The city
could harness their optimism by siphoning
part of the cost of each new building into a
dedicated fund so rising prices in one area
subsidize the public realm of another. “We
have to shift from ‘Build, baby, build’ to ‘Let’s
take care of each other,’ ” Moore says. Except,
of course, that you need the first part to pay
for the second.
As the campaign for mayor gets going,
policing, public health, and racial justice will
loom. But in New York, every conversation
is about real estate. Whether to marry or
divorce, how to stay healthy, where to work,
how children learn, who protests where,
where the unhoused sleep, what businesses
thrive—every one of these questions has an
answer that is partially written in rebar. And
so, as they try to envision a city built for
equity, the candidates may want to swing by
a construction site on Third Avenue in Mott
Haven, where the nonprofit Communitas
America will soon open Heyground, a
45,000-square-foot combination club-
house, office, and community center for
small businesses trying to make a go of it in
the Bronx. Esmeralda Herrera, a member of
the organization’s tiny staff, says the building
can function as an incubator of talent, hope,
and common purpose, supportingwomen
like Maurelhena Walles, who founded
Equity Design to make the borough health-
ier through physical activity, and
LaShawnna Harris, whose company,
sharEDtalent, supplies strugglingschools
with temp staff, websites, and grantpropos-
als. “These entrepreneurs are passionate to
see others succeed,” Herrera says. “We hope
Heyground will be the physical embodi-
ment of that spirit.” Her LinkedIn page
describes her job as “ecosystem builder.”
That’s a title the next mayor of New York
might stencil on the door at City Hall. ■