Hyperlocal, Hypercomplex: My Experience on Manhattan Community Board 8

Reflections on decision-making, public engagement, and the evolving role of community boards in New York City

Six months ago, I was appointed by Manhattan’s Borough President to be one of the fifty volunteer members of Manhattan Community Board 8 (CB8), which covers the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island. After spending dozens of hours on board business, I’ve had time to reflect on my experience — and on New York’s community board system in general.

See my previous post for an outline of what New York’s community boards are and why I got involved.

Here are my main reflections:

• The community board members I’ve met care deeply about the city and its residents.

• We spend a lot of time on hyperlocal issues, sometimes with limited broader relevance.

• CB8 sometimes struggles to reach consensus on complex, divisive topics.

• The board appears to be out-of-step with public opinion on some important issues.

Before diving in, two caveats:

1. I’m new to this, while some of my fellow community board members have been serving for decades. These reflections come from the perspective of a well-meaning newcomer who wants to see New York thrive, and who wants community boards to help make that success happen.

2. This post is my own opinion. These are my personal reflections and don’t represent CB8 or any other group I’m involved with.

Dedication to New York and our neighborhood

Serving on a community board requires a significant time commitment, and I admire the effort that my fellow board members make. Each member attends several multi-hour evening meetings each month — at a minimum. Many members serve on multiple subcommittees, and several members have volunteered on Manhattan Community Board 8 since before I was born.

I often disagree with other board members’ opinions on policy issues, but there’s no doubt in my mind that every board member genuinely cares about the wellbeing of our city, our district, and the 200,000 people who call this neighborhood home.

Manhattan Community District 8 covers the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island. You can find your community district on BetaNYC’s map.

A focus on hyperlocal issues

One of the most striking aspects of serving on CB8 is how much time we spend on issues that impact a single building, business, or city block. Examples of these small-scale topics include:

• Changes to parking rules for a couple of parking spots. For example, recently a building in the East 90s asked to change nine parking bays outside their entrance from “No Parking” to “No Standing”. We reviewed and debated this for an hour in the transportation committee and 20 minutes at the full board to eventually arrive at our position in support of the request.

• Restaurants and bars seeking permits for sidewalk tables, roadway tables, and selling alcohol.

• Property owners seeking permission to change their building. Sometimes this is due to the building being subject to historic preservation requirements, and other times this is due to the property owner seeking to use the land for a purpose or structure that’s different from what’s currently allowed.

I care a lot about New York’s land use, public space, and transportation. However, debating these topics at such a granular level is incredibly time-consuming and often feels like a poor use of our limited volunteer hours. I also worry that this hyperlocal focus can discourage participation—from the general public, who may be unwilling to sit through lengthy debates about a single block, and from potential members, who may be dissuaded by how much time is spent on minutiae.

The section of East 90th St which CB8 recently recommended that the Department of Transportation change from “No Parking” to “No Standing”. (Image: Google Street View)

I wonder whether we could establish broad, consistent policies that we automatically apply to frequently recurring topics. For example, we could adopt rules like “CB8 automatically supports all restaurants and cafes to have XX square feet of outdoor seating so long as the sidewalk is at least YY feet wide” or “CB8 automatically supports any building with more than 300 residents having have a 'No Standing' zone outside their entrance upon request”. We’d adjust our bylaws to automatically apply these rules to all relevant proposals, unless some sizable minority of board members request to have a discussion about any particular case.

This approach would expedite our meetings, ensure consistency across the district, and focus discussion on policy topics with broad impact to many residents.

Difficulty forging consensus

One of the biggest challenges I've seen on CB8 is that we struggle to efficiently find consensus on complex issues.

Our discussions on City of Yes for Housing Opportunity (COYHO) reforms — a package of 15 land-use policies aimed at addressing the housing shortage—illustrates this perfectly. It took CB8 roughly 19 hours across ten meetings to reach a position on COYHO, underscoring structural obstacles to effective decision-making.¹

The process started with 14 hours of discussion within the Zoning & Development Committee over six months. Committee members debated the proposals’ merits, held non-binding “straw polls,” and compiled recommendations. However, when these were presented to the full board, it quickly became apparent that the broader board’s views didn’t align with those of the committee. We were still far from consensus.

We spent almost six additional hours in extended full board discussions about COYHO. The City Planning Department explained the proposals, and members launched into passionate debates, trying to persuade each other on COYHO’s merits and drawbacks. Over successive meetings, we attempted several resolutions expressing support and opposition to various parts of COYHO, each followed by a roll-call vote. When these repeatedly failed, we ultimately voted on each COYHO proposal individually and submitted these separate votes as our official position. While I’m pleased we eventually reached a consensus on this complex topic, I wish we’d been able to find that agreement more quickly.

CB8 has also had difficulty aligning on recommendations about transit funding. In June, critical transit upgrades for our district were delayed after Governor Hochul suspended the congestion pricing plan meant to fund them. I worked with other CB8 members to try to urge Albany to find some way of funding these transit reliability and accessibility improvements. Although I support congestion pricing, the board is deeply divided on the topic, so I framed our resolution as neutrally as possible:

“Community Board 8 Manhattan calls on the Governor and State Legislature to avoid further delays to critical infrastructure projects by immediately fully funding the MTA's 2020-2024 Capital Plan, without raising taxes on New Yorkers or increasing for-hire vehicle surcharges.” – my proposed resolution

This resolution passed in the Transportation Committee but failed to win the support of a majority of members of the full board. Some members feared Albany might misconstrue our request, while others opposed it due to their strong stance against congestion pricing. As a volunteer, I didn’t have the time to wrangle the wording that would be acceptable to 25+ board members. Fortunately, Governor Hochul appears to have relented and congestion pricing is back on-track to start in January 2025.

Our struggles to reach conclusions on COYHO and transit funding demonstrates a fundamental issue: community boards lack efficient mechanisms — beyond repeated roll-call votes — to identify majority positions on complex topics. Proper legislatures have caucuses, party whips, and staffers to forge consensus; community boards rely on the best efforts of well-meaning volunteers. This is a topic I’d love to dig into further.

Skewed demographics and perspectives

Notwithstanding the fact that CB8’s members are dedicated, hardworking volunteers, CB8's demographics and policy positions don't seem to always align with the broader community we’re appointed to serve.

In terms of demographics:

• Older residents are 53% over-represented on CB8. 46% of CB8 members are 60+ years old, whereas only 30% of the district’s adult population are 60+ years old.²

• Homeowners are 54% over-represented on CB8. 60% of CB8 members own their home, whereas only 39% of the district’s population are homeowners.³

To be clear, I have no personal animosity towards any of CB8’s members — many of these people are highly experienced and constructive contributors to the board’s work. But it does concern me when it appears that the underrepresentation of younger New Yorkers and renters might be contributing to the board’s policy recommendations being out-of-step with district residents’ views.

In terms of policy perspectives, it seems that in general CB8 is much less supportive of building more homes than the average New Yorker. On the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, twenty of CB8’s fifty members voted against at least half of the COYHO proposals to legalize building more homes in New York.⁴ In contrast, two separate citywide opinion polls show between 70% and 80% of New Yorkers support COYHO overall.⁵ There’s a clear mismatch between board members’ lukewarm stance on building more homes and the apparent pro-housing sentiment of New York’s public.

On transportation policy, I have a hunch that CB8 is more pro-car and less supportive of transit than the average district resident. In our district, 71% of households don’t own a car and only 8% of commuters drive.⁶ I don’t have any specific opinion polling to support my hunch, but given that transit is the primary way most district residents get around, I figure that surely most locals must want more reliable subway service and more stations to have elevators. And yet, CB8 was unable to reach agreement on a statement related to the recent delay of major transit projects in our district.

That said, on other issues there seems to be more alignment with community perspectives — which is great to see. The board approves almost all proposals for street fairs, alcohol licenses, and sidewalk cafes that come our way. Most proposals to renovate historic buildings are approved. I think this matches with residents’ preferences.

In any case, there will be significant turnover of membership across New York’s 59 community boards in 2027, which is when term limits will kick in for the first time. This will provide easy opportunities for borough presidents and city council members to make community boards more representative of their districts.

What’s next

Despite the challenges, CB8 accomplishes a lot of good work, and my time on the board has offered valuable insights into how local governance operates in New York. I’ve loved getting to know a bunch of people who want the best for our neighborhood, and whose paths I was otherwise unlikely to cross.

However, I’ve also observed structural challenges: a tendency to focus on hyperlocal minutiae, a slow and sometimes frustrating process for building consensus, and a demographic skew that may not reflect the perspectives of our district residents.

Going forward, I want to explore ways that community boards could be more responsive and reflective of the broader public. In future posts, I’ll look at:

• How we could use opinion polling to capture more representative community perspectives

• How we could streamline board business to welcome participation from those with less time to spare

As the implementation of term limits portends significant turnover of community board membership, now is the ideal moment to review how these institutions can become more efficient, inclusive, and aligned with the needs of all New Yorkers.

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This post is my own perspective and does not represent CB8 or any other organization I’m affiliated with. Also, I’m now on Bluesky – come join me!

1. By my count, CB8M discussed COYHO for approximately 13h45m in the board’s Zoning & Development committee and for about 5h30m in the Full Board / Land Use meetings.

2. Manhattan Community Boards Demographic Report for 2024 (page 9) and Population FactFinder by the NYC Department of City Planning

3. Manhattan Community Boards Demographic Report for 2024 (page 10) and Population FactFinder by the NYC Department of City Planning

4. My analysis of CB8M’s votes on COYHO

5. COYHO opinion polls by Slingshot Strategies and Adrian Pietrzak at Princeton University

6. Car ownership data from IPUMS / Census Bureau, commute data from the Census Bureau