The concerns and priorities of 62,000 New York City residents were collected earlier this year in the largest-known public survey in the city’s history. Earlier this month, NYC Speaks, a $2 million citywide initiative for civic engagement funded by a public-private partnership, released the survey results to help guide the public policies of New York City’s new mayor, Eric Adams.

NYC Speaks touted the diversity of respondents to the 27-question survey: Almost 30% were young people ages 14-17; 27% were Black; 29% were Hispanic; and 14% were Asian, in line with the racial and ethnic makeup of the city itself, the group said. As city law requires, the survey was offered in 10 languages in addition to English.

"We invested in boots-on-the-ground operations," said José Serrano-McClain, co-executive director of NYC Speaks and a partner at HR&A Advisors, a consulting firm for city government. His team analyzed survey response data each night to understand which neighborhoods were underrepresented and shifted resources to those communities in real time, he said. One of the main goals of the survey was to ensure statistical significance within every area of the city. "I’m very proud of how closely we're matching Census numbers, it's really uncanny," he said.

Based on the problems city leaders saw in the community, NYC Speaks prioritized 10 issue areas, including climate change, education, housing, mental health, public safety and transit, and the survey asked two or three questions within each issue. For three weeks, beginning on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, almost 150 canvassers – called community engagement fellows and paid $18 per hour – walked through the five boroughs with iPads and connected the citywide survey to people in places such as laundromats and grocery stores.

According to the survey results, New Yorkers across almost all races and incomes named housing as their top priority for creating safer neighborhoods and pinpointed the need to prioritize affordable and safe housing. After housing, middle-aged respondents, homeowners, and those earning less than $35,000 a year said more police would increase safety. Young respondents, on the other hand, called for improved public spaces and improved police-community relations over increased police presence. More than half of respondents, including 83% of Black respondents, wanted the city to provide reparations.

Read the full article about civic engagement survey results by Austyn Gaffney at Smart Cities Dive.