YC Cities application essay

The concepts of ownership and citizenship will never perfectly cover all cases and disputes in society, but they are particularly insufficient in cities. Cities are practically defined in terms of public ownership and dynamic control over these shared resources. The entire city and all of its inhabitants, visitors, and transient workers are intertwined in a way that means that the actions of individuals ripple out to affect everyone around them.

The existing rights, responsibilities, and incentives of each of these shareholders do not reflect this interconnected reality. To some extent, this is to be expected – relationships and interests within cities are complicated, and it's unrealistic to expect city governance to reflect and respond to each and every edge case and constituency all of the time. However, the current standard for representation and definition of citizenship and "belonging" within a city grossly misrepresents the interests of people who do or could contribute.

Right now, the proxies we use for representation are home ownership and ability to pay. This can work in suburbia where most households own their own home and spheres of control are more clearly defined. However, this model is broken for cities. In densely populated areas with more shared space, spheres of control overlap constantly. In cities, there are very few places where individuals have clear unilateral control over anything.

When interests are misrepresented and unquantified in government, they are ignored or misunderstood. The current systems in place for determining representation in most cities are:
  • If you are a resident, then you get a vote whether you've lived their for 30 years or 30 days, and
  • People vote on a daily basis with their wallets and attention, by supporting the businesses, institutions, and communities that they care about.

The breakdown of these systems is clear in San Francisco, where there is a raging debate about gentrification. At its core, the issue is about who the city belongs to and, in turn, who gets to determine how it changes and the rate at which it does so. The representation systems of voting and and buying power ignore important factors like history, community development, and community and involvement.

Organizations tend to respond and optimize whatever they measure, so it's critical that we can more accurately represent constituencies within cities. One way cities could do this is by issuing shares to residents. They would vest over time, which means that long-time residents would have more equity than new arrivals. This would formally privilege long-time residents over newcomers for the time they'd put into building up the city, and it would incentivize residents to practice long-term thinking about their city.

The shares could pay dividends, which would have the additional benefit of tying together the fortunes of residents and the fortunes of their city as a whole. It would align the incentives of the individual with the success of the entire community. If for example the city's revenue came from income or property taxes, then the dividends would mean that the rising demand and cost of living in the city could benefit existing residents rather than just pushing them out. It would encourage long-time residents to welcome change that benefits the city as a whole, because they would benefit from those changes rather than just be disenfranchised while they watch the people around them rise past them from what they see as exploiting the system. This sort of redistribution would be more closely tied to the fact that newcomers' success is reliant upon the community base that existing residents have built up before the newcomers ever arrived, and it would formally acknowledge the contribution of the locals to the local culture.

It would not only be a form of redistribution to benefit the existing residents and underrepresented groups within the city. It would also encourage newcomers to be more community-oriented and think about the health of the city as a whole, embed themselves in the local scene rather than as just a place to strike it rich or hide away in their own cultural niche.

The specifics of this approach would have to be ironed out, and details would appropriately vary from city to city. However it is implemented, the important idea is that if we are given the opportunity to start with a blank slate, we could get really creative with how representation fundamentally works.