Local government is slow, thin on capacity, and often nearly empty — and it’s still the clearest place democracy actually happens. A July 4th case for showing up.
Every Fourth of July, someone reminds you that democracy is fragile. All evidence for the last decade points in that direction. Fine.
Democracy is fragile the way a cello is fragile: seasoned wood, thin as it needs to be to resonate when used. Left alone in a case, it’s safe and it’s silent. It only becomes what it’s for when someone picks it up, plays it, practices it again and again, and puts in the hours.
That’s the story Hunters Point and Long Island City get to tell better than almost anywhere else in the country, and it’s the part I want to celebrate this week.
Democracy, as practiced from Washington, is mostly a noun. It’s an institution, a designed system, a thing you inherit and defend. That version matters. But it’s not the version most of us actually touch. At the local level Democracy is a verb. It’s Community Board 2 sitting through hours of testimony on rezoning the neighborhood in order to bring down housing costs. It’s residents packing a room to fight for the parks acquisition ULURP, because an under-parked neighborhood doesn’t get more open space by accident. It’s parents and neighbors pushing on the SCA’s plans for a high school at 47-51 33rd Street, because “the city is handling it” is not a plan.
None of this is glamorous. Half of it happens over Zoom, on a weeknight, after everyone’s already worked a full day. Nobody’s filming it for cable news. But this is what self-government actually looks like when you strip away the fireworks and the bunting: ordinary people, with no special authority except that they live here, deciding they get a say in what their block becomes. This is democracy, an active verb.
Here’s the part I’ll be a little insufferable about: this neighborhood is good at it. CB2 doesn’t always get it right, and it doesn’t always move fast — nobody who’s sat through a Land Use meeting would call it efficient. But show up to enough of these and you start to see something that the national conversation about democracy rarely captures: a genuine, functioning, occasionally exhausting culture of people governing themselves in public, in real time, with real stakes. A disused park is spotlit and DOT is shamed into maintaining it, or handing it over to Parks. A open-space fight that stays alive because someone kept showing up after the third meeting, and the fifth.
While the Norman Rockwell Meme from Freedom of Speech is ubiquitous online and it can feel like a nostalgic town-hall Americana, I’m here to tell you this happens monthly right here in LIC.
That doesn’t mean things are all rainbows and unicorns. Government is slow on purpose, and slow is often the price of legitimate. I used to work at all three levels of government, and I was proud that we worked to make things better using an anti-Zuckerberg saying, “Move steady, and fix things.”
We need help.
Consultant capacity in local government and the community board is thin. Public process can be a grind that rewards whoever has the most free Tuesday nights, which isn’t everyone, and that’s a real equity problem worth changing. Local control isn’t automatically good just because it’s local. It’s good when people actually use it, and hollow when they don’t. A community board with an empty room isn’t democracy in miniature. It’s just an empty room.
Democracy doesn’t run on its own. The commonwealth — the big, abstract, national “we” — only holds together because thousands of small, unglamorous, local “we’s” are doing their part of the work, block by block, meeting by meeting. I hope that as part of a community, we can work together at many levels of government to show up, and work towards a more perfect union.
So here’s the request: if you’ve never been to a CB2 meeting, go to the next one. Bring an opinion. That’s the whole system. It’s yours.