Realm Of Possibility

Created in crisis, our city’s outdoor dining program positively changed how we engage with our streetscape; but it’s time for the program to mature—to ensure that it is safe, clean and cohesive and adds to the vibrancy of streetscape. 

New, pre-approved kits of accessible and affordable roadway setups will ensure that outdoor dining is equitable across the boroughs and successful in the long term— by creating high-quality, pest-resistant, movable structures, while allowing New Yorkers to continue enjoying New York’s dining scene al fresco.

Sidewalk sheds are necessary to keep New Yorkers safe from unsafe building façades, but they detract from the look and feel of our streetscape. The rules governing sidewalk sheds have incentivized property owners to delay conducting façade repairs, leaving sidewalk sheds covering our sidewalks for extended periods. 

The City will advance proposals to ensure the expeditious removal of sheds and reimagine  a new, more attractive sidewalk shed for the future.

Street trees keep our neighborhoods cool and improve health outcomes, but planting trees on New York City sidewalks, like many other City construction efforts, can be cost- and time intensive.  

The City plans to reduce costs and accelerate street tree planting through innovations such as launching an in-house tree-planting team. The City is on track to plant 16,500 street trees citywide in FY 24, with over half planned for the most heat vulnerable neighborhoods.

When you gotta go, you gotta go. When you can’t find a bathroom, that’s a problem.

The City will install and upgrade approximately 82 parks public restrooms and site 14 automatic self-cleaning toilets across the five boroughs. The City also created a public restroom map to increase awareness of the nearly 1,000 existing public restrooms in New York City.

Most curbs around the city are dedicated to free street parking, a fact of New York City life that has not been revisited in decades.

The City’s Curb Management Plan will prioritize the use of curb space with maximum public benefit. This will be achieved in part by working with Business Improvement Districts on the "Smart Curbs” initiative, which will rethink curb regulations and programming from scratch. 

Far too often, the City’s capital projects take too long to complete and cost more than originally budgeted.

A new Public Space Incubator will expedite the building of public space projects in communities that are most in need, leveraging new capital delivery methods to cut down on both time and costs.

In NYC, it is too common to see a road get ripped up by one entity, paved over and ripped up again by another. Better coordination and support for City capital agencies can assist in planning and aligning projects without unnecessary disruption for the public. 

The Public Space Avengers, made up of agencies responsible for work above and below ground, will combine efforts to shave off time and deliver projects faster, creating an outsized impact from day one.

Privately-owned public spaces (POPS) can be a crucial tool in giving New Yorkers access to public space near where they live and work. But not all of New York City’s 598 POPS are accessible for New Yorkers to enjoy. 

The City will support incentives to maximize public space, while ramping up enforcement efforts, including an audit of out-of-compliance POPS in 2024, to keep POPS open for New York.  

Creating new parks in a dense urban environment takes time: transforming schoolyards to publicly-accessible playgrounds is a key strategy to expand the city’s public space footprint, especially in communities that lack open public areas. 

The City will address gaps in access to parks in the highest-need areas by opening more school playgrounds to community members after hours. 

New York City is experiencing a post-pandemic skateboarding boom. Skateparks offer inclusive spaces to perfect skills on inline skates, skateboards, and bikes. 

The City will create four world class skate parks in the Bronx and Brooklyn to provide new and improved spaces for New Yorkers to have fun and build community. 

From parks to streets and plazas, the City relies heavily on partners to activate public spaces and bring them to life with creative programming, but there can be a steep learning curve for partners navigating the various rules and requirements.

The City will establish a Public Space Academy to provide technical assistance and resources to Public Space Partners – like plaza partners, BIDs, Open Streets, parks, and community-based organizations. 

The City’s street activity permitting process can be long and arduous; this can especially impact smaller organizers with limited capacity and staff. 

The City will work to improve the user experience of obtaining a permit for street activations.

The City often requires partners to take on onerous costs and risks for maintaining the City’s public spaces.

The City will work to revise maintenance agreements for our streetscapes and parks so that partners can focus resources on the maintenance and activation of spaces within their communities.

BIDs and other neighborhood organizations provide essential maintenance to commercial corridors across the five boroughs, but there are areas that require additional support to maintain consistently.

A new Public Space Clean Team will provide targeted neighborhood cleanups for spaces that provide critical connections to neighborhoods to ensure all of our spaces are clean, vibrant, and safe.

The City has an abundance of data related to the built environment, but none of it is unified to show the economic, environmental, and public health impact of our public space.

The City will seek and leverage public-private partnerships to assess the data to support future investments and ensure we are delivering public space to New Yorkers that need it most.