Participatory budgeting
an interactive story

You moved onto this block in the spring, and you're still learning which neighbors wave back. But you've heard that once a year, this city lets the people who live in its neighborhoods decide how to spend a slice of its capital budget, and this year, that includes you.

In 2011, four districts in New York City tried something new: they took a slice of their capital budget, put it on a ballot, and let residents decide how to spend it. One of the coolest (and most contributist!) things about it is that almost anyone could vote: age 11 and up, citizen or not, incarcerated or free. If you live in the community and pay taxes in the community, you get to help decide where some of those taxes go.

The program is still running, and it has spread well beyond those four districts. For this story, though, we’re leaving New York for an ordinary American city of about a hundred and eighty thousand people: the kind with a Main Street, a community college, and one daily paper. One of its blocks happens to be yours.

As you scroll, you’ll go through one full round, one step at a time. A couple of the numbers further down are yours to change, and if you’d like the whole argument first, the article is here.

It’s the same neighborhood every time, but the room can look very different. With an open meeting, the people who come are the people who can come: not the nurse working a double, not the dad who couldn’t find a sitter, and not the neighbor who’d need a translator to follow along.

New York’s citywide program handles this with sortition, which any city could copy. Anyone can submit an idea online, and then a random, demographically balanced sample of residents is invited to form the assembly (a bit like jury duty, but more fun).

That might sound like a procedural detail, but I think it’s the most important choice in the whole process. Everybody still gets to vote, but only the people in that room decide what’s on the ballot.

Projects get funded in order of votes until the money runs out, and that’s really the whole rule. Somewhere down the list there’s a line, and everything below it has to wait for next year.

Now try going back up and flipping the assembly switch. Two or three cards will disappear from the ballot entirely. Nobody voted them down; they were just never proposed. (The science lab at the middle school, the late-night bus shelter, the translation desk at the library, and so on.) Nobody was in the room to ask for them, so you never got the chance to rank them.

In other words, getting people to vote is the easy part. The hard part is getting the right people into the room.

And that’s one full round: meet, propose, put a price on it, vote, and build. It takes about nine months, and I think it’s remarkably hard to stay cynical about government while you’re standing next to something you personally helped vote into existence.

Of course, on the scale of American government, one round is a rounding error: one district, one year, about a million dollars, and a handful of projects.

So I don’t think the real question is whether participatory budgeting works; it plainly does. To me, the biggest question is what it looks like when it grows.

There are a couple of things I’d point out about that map.

The first is how cheap it is. At $35 per resident per year (roughly $1.75 million for a typical district of fifty thousand people), covering the whole country costs about $12 billion a year. That’s around 2% of what the Giving America Fund gives out in its twenty-fifth year, which the Fund would barely notice. It’s the cheapest proposal in this series by a wide margin.

The second is that it grows by repeating itself; none of the rounds gets any bigger. It’s the same nine-month loop, in the same church basement, with the same argument about whether the empty lot should be a garden or a ball field, just happening four thousand times a year instead of four. I think that’s also why it builds on itself: turnout tends to go up once people have watched something they voted for actually get built. The second round is bigger than the first because the first one produced a playground.

Finally, try flipping the funding switch, because it matters more than it looks. When rounds come out of a city’s own budget, they’re the first thing cut in a bad year, and the first thing a new mayor decides not to keep. Brazil is the cautionary tale here: participatory budgeting spread to 137 municipalities by 2004, but only 58 still had it by 2016, and whether a city had spare money to invest was one of the strongest predictors of which programs survived. A per-resident allocation that arrives by formula isn’t a line item anyone has to fight for every year, and no politician’s name is attached to it.

That leaves one more way participatory budgeting could grow: instead of running more rounds, we could make each round bigger.

Somewhere between your district and your state, the ballot starts to feel less like a ballot and more like homework. (If you’ve ever voted in California, you’ve seen roughly what the top of that slider feels like in real life.)

And honestly, most people don’t want to run the whole city. They want it to be run well, and they want a real say over the part of it they can see from their window. I think that’s a pretty sensible division of labor, and I wouldn’t call it apathy.

The trick, I think, is to limit the scope of the question.

If you narrow down the question, the size of the place stops mattering much. For example: here’s one empty lot and $900,000. Here’s the menu: a community garden, a playground, a ball diamond, better lighting, or a dog run. Pick as many as fit. That question takes about four minutes to answer whether you ask it in a small village or in Los Angeles, and it still ends with something real getting built. The same trick works for something like a youth programs fund: put out a call for proposals on one specific question, and then put the finalists on a ballot.

A narrow question, a capped budget, and a menu instead of a blank page: I think that’s what could carry participatory budgeting past fire hydrants and sidewalks, and it’s what would let even a state or federal round stay about four minutes long.

So, here’s the proposal

The good news is that cities can start doing this tomorrow without waiting for anyone, and many of them already have the money. What most of them are missing is the right people in the room.

Participatory budgeting takes a process that's usually entirely passive and extractive (taxation) and makes from it a truly free, active, and relational act of giving.