Lessons from Headway: people should see their inputs recognized, and inclusion depends on time

Worth reading, from the New York Times's new Headway initiative, Michael Kimmelman's 12/2/21 report What Does It Mean to Save a Neighborhood?, summarized as "Nine years after Hurricane Sandy, residents of Lower Manhattan are still vulnerable to rising seas. The fight over a plan to protect them reveals why progress on our most critical challenges is so hard."

A couple of passages, to my mind, had resonance with Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park.

Recognizing input

From the article:

Ms. [Nancy] Ortiz, who became a co-chair of a community board task force, recalls seniors lobbying for benches and tables where they could play cards and families petitioning for outdoor movie screenings. “People from the neighborhood wanted to see themselves in the process,” she told me. “Over time, we felt we were being heard.” That is the goal of participatory decision-making, after all. To borrow a phrase from Malcolm Araos, a graduate student at New York University who is writing his dissertation about the park, public trust requires participants to “continuously recognize their inputs reflected in the evolution” of a project.

Hmm...  is there any evidence that members of the public “continuously recognize their inputs reflected in the evolution” of Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park? 

Were they told, for example, about the affordability of the latest income-targeted housing? Were they told about the loss of community preference? Not at all.

Expertise and time

From the article:

Government organizations started to include experts of different stripes to contend with big problems. “Of course the more expertise you have, the more entangled you probably are, meaning your neutrality is questionable,” Mr. [Gil] Eyal said. “So the answer to that problem was to add yet more stakeholders — advocates, members of the public — which made consensus even harder to achieve.”

In essence, Mr. Eyal argues, a participatory system designed to build public trust causes people to lose faith in the system.

The remedy, he says, is time. Researchers have a term, “inclusion friction,” he told me, for how bringing more voices into a process inevitably slows it down. Conflicts arise among different stakeholders, and public discussions require explanations and careful conversations. “To do inclusion right you have to take your time,” Mr. Eyal says. “You can’t present people with a fait accompli because they’ll understand the inclusion to have been a sham.”

The problem is that some crises don’t afford the luxury of time.

Or even projects that aren't crises need to move expeditiously, backers of Atlantic Yards might say, because there's money on the line.

However, the public inclusion process for Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park has been notably light on building public trust. Remember, for example, the Blight Study--produced by ubiquitous environmental consultant AKRF--and its pronouncements on crime?