Life Beyond Line Items

I love the practicality of Budget Justice. This is something we can take action with now: Yeah, things are really hard. We’ve had half a century of austerity and the privatization of public space and policy, and so our brains and our muscles of creativity are atrophied. But here are some ways to think about moving forward.

How does this information become practicable for the people who may not have the time or inclination to be part of this discourse, without it being: Here’s a system, and you can just plug yourself right in?

Hopefully — knocking on wood — we’ll soon have a new mayor who’s quite different from the last one. But what should we be doing to be ready for that? Certainly, it’s amazing that Mamdani has ‘remade the electorate’ and gotten so many folks who weren’t considered voters to vote for him. But what should his supporters be doing besides canvassing to help build power, and to contribute to decisions? And also, what about everybody else?

I was thinking about that C.L.R. James quote: “Every cook can govern.” A cook at a restaurant in Elmhurst, a cook at a restaurant in Kensington, or Prospect Lefferts, or wherever, what should we be doing to structure some sort of participation that’s not just voting, to help to prepare them to govern?

I think we need more entry points. And that’s why, even though it’s so limited, I go into participatory budgeting (PB).

PB helps people practice democratic habits. Within the context of the participatory budgeting process that I studied, when volunteers had to vet proposals that people suggest at assemblies, they had to render explicit what criteria they had in their head. And we’re not used to that.

Or, right before voting on proposals, a lot of the participatory budgeting districts had these “science fair expos,” where volunteers who helped to pick or develop the proposals then made posters to show everyone else why these projects were exciting. It was striking to see that many of them — from janitors to lawyers — were not ready for this sort of discourse, talking to people unlike themselves, and presenting things in this genre.

The question of whose knowledge gets acted on is an issue of epistemic justice; it’s not just everyday constituents who need to change. The system also needs to change. Every single city agency representative I interviewed, except for one, said that they understood that people’s experiences could help to inform their decision-making, but they just couldn’t talk to regular folks. They had these fancy needs assessments, and they were just trying to do their jobs. This is not all civil servants, of course, but it’s a prevailing norm.

Part of the job of deliberative democracy is to bring people along. There’s a habit of thinking: I said what I needed to say, and no one got it. We need to develop the ability to unpack all our assumptions. We haven’t worked those muscles in a long time together, across lines of jobs, positionality, and identity.

I think social media exacerbates that. But even town hall meetings — ostensibly, people have a voice, but it’s a two-minute prepared speech with no response. There’s something different about building muscles for co-governance that doesn’t feel like you’re talking into the void. Learning to hear a response, even if it’s one of respectful disagreement.

I think there’s a cycle that’s created in the model of two-minute prepared testimony with no response. People think, “They’re not going to respond anyway, so I’m performing for the people I came with.”

I was at a conference on participatory democracy where Gabriel Cabán Cubero, a community organizer for People’s Budget Birmingham, said that sometimes they pay for rides for homeless people to go to budget hearings — relying upon the fact that the budget hearings are, in his words, “pure theater” — so that they then get riled up and organize to put pressure on the local government in other ways.

There’s the notion of a script rather than any semblance that there’s going to be any movement or any change in people’s thinking. People just have roles to play, and they know how to play them. It sounds basic, but introducing situations or spaces where we talk to folks unlike ourselves, beyond friendly banter at the local bodega, about something bigger than ourselves.

What does it mean to work together? There aren’t that many structures in the big systems we encounter every day that help us to walk our democracy talk: How do you cooperate? How do you work with others? And how do we make ourselves into a polity or a public rather than just private individuals in silos?

It’s interesting to consider the budget as the site. I took my students to a Trenton City Council meeting where they had to read every single amendment to every line item in the Trenton city budget. “Item 467B — prior budget for public safety training on new CPR equipment: $76,421.39. New line item number: $77,455.65.” Line by line for 50 minutes. Ostensibly, numbers are neutral; dollar amounts are neutral, and they’re a thing we can collaborate on. But the structure of how they’re presented to the public makes it impossible.

The budget itself feels impenetrable, and maybe participatory budgeting is a part of the process of changing that. The slow unfolding of: If I understand this $2 million allocation, what it can and can’t be used for, I can start asking, with the right guides, some appropriate questions. But are there other ways? People are quick studies. One of the reasons a cook can govern is that they have to deal with the minutiae of budgeting every day. We all have this sophistication. Are there other ways that a larger section of the public can start asking provocative questions about budgets?

One way to make things different is to demand that budgets be legible. The Budget Birmingham organizer tells the people he’s organizing that (the budget documents come in PDF form) PDF stands for “pretty damn fucked.” You could present it in so many different ways, so why in the most alienating way possible? It’s not the individual resident’s job to understand everything; it’s the government’s job to render it legible.

And then, once we have an overall picture, asking, “How come so much is exempt from public deliberation?” Bloomberg bypassed a lot of public hearings because Hudson Yards was part of the Olympics bid. And what’s going to happen with the World Cup next year? What’s going to happen with Penn Station? We’re constantly hearing, “there’s no money, there’s no money,” and then not looking closely enough at certain huge expenditures. Recently, regarding the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, they squished a public process that should have probably taken a couple of years into a few months. Or when there are hearings, it feels like theater.

And then there’s this moral part, pursuing the larger public good that we’re part of. Once we look at budget allocations as political choices, it becomes a bit easier to see that they also reflect what values decision-makers hold dear.

There’s this idea of rejecting the zero-sum game. By us saying, not, “give us money and not those guys money,” but rather, “we support that these things are all aligned,” that makes the budget a moral document. The difficulty of doing that is an effect of austerity combined with the turn toward treating politics as if it’s a consumer affair.

Both a consumer affair and inevitably dirty. So rather than asking, “What do you want to buy with your public tax dollars?” and reifying the marketplace and the model of voting with your feet as the only way to adjudicate decisions, we should ask, “What’s our vision for the city? What’s right and what’s wrong?” Those are questions people can answer. They might not always agree, but they have a sense. This is reflected in other public financial behaviors. For instance, Americans as a whole express low levels of support for taxes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re miserly. They actually give a lot, because they think certain things are right to give money to. But they don’t necessarily know how to deal with the public budget. Or, they haven’t been given a meaningful chance.

The folks who brought participatory budgeting to the US didn’t consider — or didn’t consider enough — how profoundly the context of austerity would reshape PB here, I think. I often hear questions, like, “PB lowered infant mortality in Brazil; why is that not happening here?” It’s because it’s so limited here. The rest of the government is operating the way it always has, whereas in Brazil, PB was part of a huge political project to overthrow a military dictatorship, with a very different civil society. And while they did have budget imperatives and tight budgets, there was this way in which those forced people to be more connected. They closed a lot of the other ways in which local nonprofits could get funds, they tried to cut off everything except PB, so that there were fewer back-room deals, and everybody had to meet and talk in public.

By comparison, the implementation of PB in New York felt a bit demoralizing — especially seeing city agencies lobby individuals to use PB to make up for budget cuts. The combination of both small size and a lack of connectedness really limits the New York process. But it has potential as one of many entry points to get people connected, so that they can organize for more school bathroom funding in general, not for the specific project.

What are the first steps to bringing more people in? I live in a Housing Development Fund Corporation (HDFC) co-op; at this point, a lot of the people in the building just don’t want to be bothered with politics and participation. The process of politics has let them down from multiple angles. But they have an incredible sense of how to budget because they’ve worked on making a building run for 40 years, 50 years. How do they become part of a process like this?

There’s a question here about institution building, rather than finding the perfect institutional design. What do these institutions look like in practice, in real-life contexts, surrounded by predatory financial institutions and hyper-gentrification? It reminds me of some debates about mutual aid, around how it is both an incredibly generative dynamic that helped many of us survive the Covid pandemic, and it can be the poor helping the poor. When do communities that survive then turn inwards and end up resource hoarding rather than resource sharing? What can the city be doing to make a building like yours a sustainable pilot, to figure out what lessons can be taken from that experience?

I don’t think there’s anything magical about the HDFC model versus the Community Land Trust (CLT) model that’s spreading. But they’re both promising, in how they’re trying to change the typical model of housing. What can we learn from one another, and how can we update and tweak models that have a lot of potential? How can we not just focus on the model, but also on organizing to get enough power to make it happen at the scale we need? If we were to have a campaign to expand the number of HDFCs, expand the number of CLTs, do we have lots of people expressing support? And can we talk about what our priorities are? Not necessarily the technical details, but can we say, “we’re in it together,” instead of accepting this race to the bottom, which sucks so badly for everybody? If your neighbors inside the building could talk to your neighbors outside the building about this, if they could say, “We need to fight for a public bank, or a community wealth fund, or appeal to a local New York foundation for some funding for this,” then perhaps it wouldn’t feel like a race to the bottom.

To you and the people in the building, it’s so obvious that this was a good stepping stone to rapidly expanding affordability. Why don’t people outside the building know that? Where are the labor unions? Where are the tenants’ unions? Where are the student unions? And given that these are not mass organizations right now, what are the other participatory spaces where people can talk about this and get organized? Where can we have that sort of conversation? Maybe it could be something like a sectoral council, where different people experiencing a certain policy domain, like affordable housing, come together.

We can get excited if we can picture it. We see that someone else has done it and then think about what our version would be. It reminds me that Brown v. Board of Education was initiated by kids who had to pass a white school en route to their Black school, and may have more readily normalized the poor conditions of their Black school if they didn’t pass a nicer, well-resourced white one on the way. And they were the ones who convinced the local NAACP to launch the lawsuit. So you need to find the catalyst, the comparative analysis, whether it’s a bar graph or sometimes something a lot more visceral.

I often think about a friend who moved from New York to the UK, and told me there were no billing departments in the hospitals there. I’ve spent a lot of time in countries with socialized medicine, I’ve taken advantage of those services, but, in my brain, I was still picturing a hospital with a big thing cut out of it. These things are true and they’re happening. It’s not a dream; it’s an actual reality somewhere.

One of the things the Mamdani campaign did brilliantly was make it fun and have a sense of humor about bureaucracy. There was an ad that came across my social media of this paper shredding event hosted by the campaign. It was awesome. It poked fun at the candidate’s own celebrity status, but it also poked fun at what kinds of things we want to shred about the past. It was hilarious about his opponent, and it was also like: I’m doing a practical thing. People have too much paper. We can get rid of it.

The forms that we work in are ripe for evolution. It’s not just, here’s how to use the tools to get at this form, but also: Here’s how to take them apart through metaphor, through creativity, to make them less daunting.

Whatever we can do to denormalize what we’ve been given is helpful. That’s why some comparative analysis is needed, which some of us get to do through travel, to just have a different sense of normal. When I visited Taiwan, every single metro station had a nursing room. And they had umbrellas that said, “Take one if you need one, and leave one behind.”

It is so simple, and it is so possible. But until I saw it, it sounded so impractical. Isn’t everyone just gonna steal all the umbrellas? Yes, maybe some people will steal some umbrellas. Yes, we need to tweak things to make them fit our cultural context. But there are so many possible things that we have not imagined here.

And our current situation is not sustainable. People know that there is the excitement of the live concert, of the big sports game. People know that things we do in public feel different. But I am emphasizing the rehearsal. I am trying to figure out how to bring that energy or attention to possibilities before the big game, the big performance, the big election, the big protest.

I wonder if you see mapping or other interactive devices as a practical way to introduce people through a side door to something like participatory budgeting. If we all drew maps of our neighborhood that we share, our council district, could we then have the conversation about where our intersection points are? Rather than going straight to: What do we agree with? What do we want to raise money for?

One refrain from my research is that so many things that we feel, that we experience, are interpreted as personal experiences rather than structural, political ones. “I’m not earning enough to afford child care,” rather than “child care is unaffordable.” I think that this focus on maps or conditions helps people to both draw upon their personal experiences and expertise, and to start to depersonalize it and see where they might find connections with one another’s experiences. It was interesting, in participatory budgeting, how people came to certain realizations: for instance, that they wanted to design a playground that helped both kids with no disabilities, and kids with some disabilities, and maybe even some elderly folks. They got really excited, because they were building something so special that would make such a huge difference, and that wouldn’t have come out without first thinking about what they needed.

I think a lot about your surveillance camera examples. My hope is that, whether it’s a map or something else, there’s a tool that could help people recognize: We’re concerned about spaces that need more protection or safety for people, but if there were cameras, we wouldn’t necessarily feel safer. Either because of who’s operating the cameras, or because they’re not doing the work of protection; they’re doing the work of retribution, ultimately.

In my conversations with people around participatory budgeting, they said, “We wanted safety, not cameras, and we ended up with cameras.” But they were readily capable of decoupling safety from surveillance cameras. And sometimes, relying upon slogans, even when they’re thoughtful, makes people feel like their original need for safety was not taken seriously. Starting with the experience — especially when it’s complicated, or fraught —  and then analyzing it together leaves room for so much more texture. So this is where we need some conversations.

And some tools for conversation, too.

There was a really healthy conversation around policing and police abolition that quickly turned into something very binary in the wake of George Floyd. I would like to see a pathway toward police abolition, certainly toward prison abolition, and I think it’s a long path, but I believe in that path. The healthy conversation was about: Okay, that path starts with people taking care of their own neighborhoods, and if that’s in the form of neighborhood beat cops, that’s better than people just cruising by with cameras and guns in cars that they never get out of. But so many people, all along the political spectrum, were put off by the idea of: What, you’re just going to wipe out the police? The binary got in the way of something more substantive. How do you keep the world you want to make in your sights while you’re doing the incremental work?

One lesson I learned is that keeping the horizon in view — or, in other terms, figuring out one’s non-negotiables — is super important. Hopefully this sort of work also helps communities to decide on options that are available in this moment, and that they can feel good about two years from now.

Drawing upon the Covid pandemic and how mutual aid flourished in that context, we know that people can cooperate in times of crisis. Can we connect mutual aid and solidarity economy practices more overtly with democratic ones? So many of the democratic experiments out there somehow still sideline political economy. And at the same time, mutual aid can build muscle for governance. I wonder about the relationship between the mutual aid networks during the pandemic and the uprisings, for instance. A lot of people may have had connections that fed the uprisings partly because they were connected through mutual aid. I remember that a lot of the uprisings were also centering different vulnerable populations.

Why don’t we reframe the moment that we’re in as a crisis deserving of mutual aid? There isn’t a reliable way to get health care. People don’t have bathrooms they can use in public. Why don’t we just reframe some of the things that we think of as normal, because we’re so used to them, but which are part of the austerity manifesti, and just say these are crises, we need mutual aid to solve these crises, and that might mean getting together in a meeting.

I’m thinking about your neighbors; I’m thinking about the parents at my kids’ school. They want to do something. I would guess that they’re not DSA members. They’re not necessarily members of community organizing groups. But they’re riled up. They’re ready to be politicized in certain ways. Some have explicitly mentioned to me that they want to do something besides fundraising. I think we need to build this basic civic information infrastructure of different people working together, not just for themselves.

It’s about developing these different institutions in whichever way we can, through a tiny pilot project, or by getting involved in the larger projects that exist, but also then demanding funding for more of them. And that’s still not perfect because there are still certain groups that tend to be excluded. But there’s something about trying to work together and starting with yourself but looking beyond yourself.

And cooperation is hard. I feel like the community garden I’m part of, the food cooperative I’m part of. . . they can abide by some of the social experiment stereotypes, for sure. But I’m also emphasizing solidarity economy because it’s about meeting immediate material needs. The community garden I belong to, for example, gave me outdoor space when I can’t afford an apartment with a balcony. The food co-op charges so much less than the conventional grocery store.

We’re gonna need escorts and patrols to protect people from ICE. I was just talking to someone at my kids’ school, and they said, “That’s not all we’re talking about, but it’s so much of what we’re talking about, and we have no idea of what to do. We’re gonna watch Sunset Park.” That is not the way it should be. And so that’s one concrete example. There’s a need for ready and provisional spaces to ask: Okay, what is our (admittedly imperfect) plan? So that we’re not caught like deer in the headlights.

During the pandemic, there were a lot of people in the East Village and Lower East Side who were food-deprived. And no one could gather and see theater because theaters were closed. Because Abrons Art Center was part of Henry Street Settlement and Henry Street got money to do food distribution, and because one way to keep staff employed was to switch what their job description was within the same institution, Abrons became a food distribution center. They turned the entire main stage of the big theater into a walk-in fridge and they were staging around 1,000 bags of food going out each week. There’s no reason something like that couldn’t still go on for food. It’s not like people’s food crises went away because the pandemic phase ended.

It was totally imperfect. It was part of the nonprofit industrial complex, but it was still really impactful. Why couldn’t you organize that around ICE?

And when we identify challenges and weaknesses to these plans, why can’t we use the power of the state to help us address them? It would be good if the nonprofit industrial complex were like that. It would be a little bit less industrial.

With the coming federal cuts, I think they predicted 34,000 jobs lost statewide, 3,000 hospital jobs lost just in the Bronx, simply because of Medicaid cuts, due to the number of recipients and associated doctors, suppliers who are there.

How do we use this as a moment to at least articulate what we want, what our demands are, aside from 10,000 Band-Aids? We’re going to need the Band-Aids — there’s going to be a lot of suffering. But we need to concurrently change the conditions that got us here in the first place.

The urgency is that we’re feeling the beginning of something. That’s the scary part, that these cuts are still coming. And so, mobilizing people to have systemic conversations in the face of these really intense crises feels like really important work.

This is happening, and there are still so many people looking for ways to help everyone here make it through.

And to make it through with a vision for a better thing we want to make.

I don’t want to romanticize it or overstate the importance of it, but certainly, not succumbing to the seduction of despair necessitates just having fun. Or doing different things, having a vision of the light at the end of the tunnel. It has to be both this Band-Aid, this nourishment now, and the dreams of the feast later on.