President’s Letter: December 2025
As we head into the New Year, MAS looks forward to working with the Mamdani Administration to advance our shared goals of an affordable and inclusive city—a livable city for all New Yorkers.
One essential component of this agenda must be the public realm—our parks, plazas, waterfronts, and streetscapes. The design, delivery, and maintenance of the public realm is crucial to supporting our city’s growth, enhancing public health, and delivering public services like fast buses.
While the new city leaders will understandably prioritize addressing the housing crisis, it is equally important to focus on expanding access to public open spaces, creating well-designed streetscapes, and building resilient infrastructure to support growing and thriving neighborhoods. The Mamdani Administration has several tools at its disposal to fulfill these needs for New Yorkers.
By effectively leveraging leases of city-owned properties, the administration can deliver thousands of deeply affordable housing units alongside quality public open spaces for local communities.
And by updating the Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) program—last revised nearly a decade ago—the city can enhance these areas to better serve emerging mixed-use neighborhoods, mitigate the impacts of climate change, and meet the needs of diverse communities, ranging from places of respite for neurodiverse users to play areas for families.
Finally, by fostering a culture of collaboration within our city agencies, the new administration can set the tone for more productive relationships with community partners, cutting red tape and onerous requirements for groups who want to maintain and activate their plazas and open streets.
The Adams Administration completed five neighborhood rezonings in just four years. Now the Mamdani Administration must take an active role in shaping the delivery and enhancement of public spaces and infrastructure to support these communities.
We need an affordable city, but also a livable city, so New Yorkers can stay and thrive.
Enduring Culture, a multivocal historic preservation vision for New York City