How New York City Let Residents Vote on Part of the City Budget

Most people never see a city budget until it is finished. A mayor proposes, a council negotiates, hearings happen on weekday afternoons, and a document arrives that decides which park gets rebuilt and which school gets air conditioning.

New York City has spent 15 years running an experiment in doing part of that differently: handing residents real money and letting them vote on how it is spent. The experiment is big enough to judge honestly — including its limits.

The problem: capital money decided in private

New York City Council members each control a pot of discretionary capital funds — money for physical improvements like park equipment, school technology, library renovations, or street lighting. Traditionally, a council member decided where that money went, sometimes after conversations with civic groups, sometimes not.

That created two problems. First, residents rarely knew the money existed, so the neighborhoods with the best-organized groups and the most access to the council office tended to be heard. Second, budget decisions felt like something done to a neighborhood rather than by it — which feeds the belief that showing up does not matter.

Participatory budgeting, developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil in the late 1980s and adopted in hundreds of cities since, proposes a direct fix: give residents a defined amount of money, a structured process, and a vote.

Who got involved

The launch was a coalition of elected officials, organizers, and researchers:

• Four council members put their own discretionary funds on the line in 2011: Brad Lander (Brooklyn), Melissa Mark-Viverito (Manhattan), Eric Ulrich (Queens), and Jumaane Williams (Brooklyn). The Participatory Budgeting Project reported that each reserved “at least $1 million in discretionary capital funds,” about $6 million across the four districts.
• The Participatory Budgeting Project, a nonprofit that had been pushing the model in North America, provided process design.
• Community-based organizations in each district — tenant groups, immigrant service providers, senior centers, schools — recruited participants and hosted assemblies.
• Residents who became budget delegates: volunteers who took raw ideas and turned them into costed proposals with city agencies.
• Later, city voters themselves: in November 2018, New Yorkers approved a charter amendment creating a Civic Engagement Commission charged with running a citywide participatory budgeting program.

Key takeaway: Participatory budgeting started because individual elected officials chose to give up unilateral control of money they already had. No new law was needed for the first cycle.

What they did, step by step

The NYC model has stayed remarkably stable since 2011.

1. Idea collection (fall)

Neighborhood assemblies and idea-collection events invite residents to name problems and propose fixes. The City Council’s current process runs idea collection from roughly October to November, when “residents brainstorm ideas and recruit volunteers (as known as ‘Budget Delegates’).”

2. Proposal development (winter)

From December through February, delegates work with agency staff to turn ideas into proposals: Is this site city-owned? Does the Department of Education already have this on a capital plan? What does a new elevator actually cost? Most ideas die here, which is part of the point — residents learn what the constraints really are.

3. Voting (spring)

Each participating district holds a multi-day vote. In the current cycle, voting ran district-wide over nine days in April 2026. Ballots are offered online and on paper, in many languages, at libraries, schools, subway entrances, and community events.

4. Implementation

Winning projects are folded into the next fiscal year’s capital budget and built by city agencies, which can take years for construction projects.

Eligibility and rules

Council district votes are open to residents 11 and older with proof of district residency — an unusually low voting age, designed to pull in middle and high school students. Funded items must be capital projects in public space costing at least $50,000 with a lifespan of at least five years, which excludes staffing, programs, and services.

What changed

It grew, then it institutionalized

The Council’s announcement of the 2018–19 cycle reported that “more than 118,000 New Yorkers voted to allocate over $39 million in capital funding for locally-developed capital projects across 32 Council Districts.” That is one of the largest participatory budgeting processes in the world by dollars and participants.

Real things got built

Council releases list the kinds of projects residents chose: countdown clocks at bus stops, improved lighting in NYCHA developments, playground repairs at specific public schools, park pathway resurfacing, auditorium and technology upgrades, street trees and tree guards. In the 2022–23 cycle, winners included $750,000 to fix a public school playground and add lighting in District 1 and $450,000 for pathway resurfacing at Baisley Park in District 28.

These are modest projects. They are also exactly the kind of thing that tends to sit unfunded for a decade because no agency ranks them highly and no single resident can move them.

The city created a citywide version

The 2018 charter amendment establishing the Civic Engagement Commission required a citywide participatory budgeting program. After pandemic delays, the CEC launched The People’s Money. Unlike council district PB, it funds expense items — programs and services — delivered by community organizations.

The first citywide cycle put $5 million on the ballot, drew over 100,000 participants voting between May 10 and June 25, 2023, and funded 46 projects. Eligibility was defined broadly: “New Yorkers, ages 11 and up, regardless of immigration status.” Funding was split by borough, with additional ballots in 33 designated equity neighborhoods, where one project each received $50,000. Funded work clustered in mental health services, job training, education, food access, and support for immigrants, older adults, and youth.

Civic side effects

Two effects show up consistently in participatory budgeting research and in NYC’s own experience. First, people who participate learn how budgets work — what “capital” means, why a sidewalk takes three years. Second, the process reaches people who do not vote in regular elections, including teenagers, non-citizens, and public housing residents, because eligibility rules are based on residency.

Criticisms and limits

The amounts are tiny relative to the budget. New York City’s annual budget exceeds $100 billion. Even at its peak, council district participatory budgeting allocated around $39 million — well under one-tenth of one percent. Critics argue this risks becoming a civic engagement showcase attached to decisions that do not change the city’s direction.

Turnout is small next to the population. Roughly 118,000 voters citywide in a peak cycle, in a city of about 8.3 million, is a real number but not a mandate. Districts with strong nonprofit partners do better, which can reproduce the inequality the process is meant to fix.

Participation is not the same as representation. Reaching residents who are typically left out requires deliberate outreach, translation, and staffing — all of which cost money that competes with the project pot itself.

It is administratively heavy. Delegates spend months costing projects. Council staff run assemblies and ballots. Agencies must produce estimates. Districts drop out when capacity is short: participation fell from 32 districts in 2018–19 to 29 in 2022–23, and participation is voluntary for each council member.

The citywide program was slow and thinly funded. Gotham Gazette reported that the charter required a citywide program by July 2020, that the launch slipped about two years, and that the mayoral administration initially allocated no new funding, leaving the commission to run smaller pilots out of its operating budget. Council Member Sandra Ung said the smaller programs were “a far cry from the citywide program that New Yorkers were promised when they voted to establish the CEC in 2018.” Council Member Shahana Hanif criticized the digital voting platform’s accessibility, and Council Member Gale Brewer argued the commission “should be independent, not subject to anything that the mayor does.”

Capital-only rules frustrate people. In council district PB, a neighborhood cannot vote to fund after-school staff or more frequent trash pickup, because those are expense items. Residents often propose exactly those things. The citywide program was designed partly to fill that gap — with far less money.

Key takeaway: Participatory budgeting reliably produces better small decisions and more informed residents. Whether it produces more power depends entirely on how much money and authority elected officials are willing to move into it.

Lessons you can use

1. Start with money someone already controls. NYC did not need a charter change to begin. A council member, county commissioner, or school board can set aside a defined pot and open it up.
2. Define the pot precisely. “At least $1 million in capital funds” is a promise residents can check. Vague commitments to “community input” are not.
3. Separate ideas from proposals. The delegate stage — residents working with agency staff on feasibility and cost — is where participatory budgeting builds real budget literacy.
4. Set eligibility by residency, not citizenship, and lower the voting age. NYC’s 11-and-up, immigration-status-blind rule is the single biggest reason its process reaches people other civic channels miss.
5. Make voting easy in the ways your community actually lives. Paper and online ballots, many languages, and voting sites at schools, libraries, and transit entrances.
6. Fund the outreach, not just the projects. Without dedicated staff and partnerships with trusted organizations, turnout concentrates in already-organized areas.
7. Publish results and timelines. Trust collapses when a winning project vanishes into a capital plan for five years with no updates.
8. Match the funding type to the need. If your community’s priorities are services, a capital-only process will frustrate everyone. Decide which pot you are opening.
9. Expect the scale critique — and answer it. Be honest that this is a small share of the budget, and pair it with advocacy on the big budget: hearings, testimony, and oversight.
10. Institutionalize carefully. Writing PB into a charter guarantees it exists; it does not guarantee funding, independence, or staffing. Watch the appropriation every year.

What you can do next

• Find out whether your council member, county board, or school district runs a participatory budgeting process — and if not, ask them at a public meeting. Use the local government directory and the New York, NY page to find contacts.
• Learn the basics of the budget you want to influence with our explainer on how city budgets work.
• Propose a project or debate how a pot of local money should be spent by starting a debate with your neighbors.
• Check the town hall calendar for budget hearings in your city; the public comment period on a proposed budget is the most direct point of leverage most residents have.
• If your city has no process, build the case for one: start an initiative and read how to write to elected officials.