Introducing the Roosevelt-Riis Association

A hub for active citizenship in New York City

Nothing is more erroneous than to suppose that a corrupt government in this city is a necessity. Neglect and indifference alone have brought us where we are, and energy and determination can alone carry us where we desire to be. Neither passive endurance on the one hand, nor revolution, riot and bloodshed on the other, will do it, but regular, lawful, PERSISTENT efforts will accomplish it… The power, intelligence and capital are here to do it. Remember, with good government we have nothing to fear, and without it, nothing to hope.

— Report of the Citizens’ Association of New York, 1868

The Roosevelt-Riis Association is for “Happy Warriors”

The Roosevelt-Riis Association (“RRA”) is a startup civic nonprofit inspired by the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and Jacob Riis. Many New Yorkers have the desire and capacity to help shape our city’s future, but struggle to find fulfilling ways to do so. We volunteer and find ourselves carrying out tasks that don’t utilize our skills and don’t seem to affect the things we care about. We get fundraising texts, haranguing social media posts, and calls to vote for people we don’t know. It’s tiresome, demoralizing, and just not that effective. The RRA offers a different path. We focus on the fundamentals of civic life that get washed away by electoral obsession. Want to deepen your friendships, and form new ones, while having a good time enhancing our city? Want to actually use the skills you’ve developed through your career and your hobbies for the betterment of New York? Want to meet other people who prize results over tribalism? Want to work to deliver the greatest good for the most New Yorkers? Read on.

We value democracy and self-government. We believe that everyone who values these cornerstones of Americanism has a duty to ensure their perpetuation by contributing to their successful administration. In the words of one of our founders, “sometimes the ‘self’ in ‘self-government’ is yourself.”

This concept was aptly summarized by one of our namesakes, Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1893 address “The Duties of American Citizenship.” He stated:

If freedom is worth having, if the right of self-government is a valuable right, then the one and the other must be retained exactly as our forefathers acquired them, by labor, and especially by labor in organization, that is, in combination with our fellows who have the same interests and the same principles.

We agree! The RRA seeks to be a platform through which those who share our interests and principles can work together to achieve our objectives of growth, efficiency, and order in New York City.

The RRA’s Values

Any effective civic effort must start from a shared set of clearly defined values. Over time we intend to explore and clarify our values, in this newsletter and elsewhere. For now we present them here, as a set of affirmative values and a set of contra-values. We welcome questions and feedback on these lists, and any other suggestions you might have.

We Believe In: Active citizenship, realizable ideals, social graphs, knowledge, technological progress, family, disagreement and uncertainty, partnership, and having a good time.

We Oppose: Cynicism, anti-politics, demonization and demagoguery, identity politics, zero-sum thinking, degrowth, corruption, purity tests, and being mean.

The RRA’s “Realizable Ideal” for NYC

Bigger and better, and more like New York

We all have an idealized notion of New York. It’s why we live here. The details differ for everyone but the spirit is the same. It’s captured in books and movies and paintings and poems. One of our favorite distillations of this idealized New York appears in E.B. White’s essay, “Here is New York:”

The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain illusive… It is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village – the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up.

There are many ways in which today’s NYC lives up to our collective ideal. That’s why we love it. And it’s why we want to work to address the obvious ways in which we currently fall short of the ideal.

These shortcomings curtail New Yorkers’ lives in many unfortunate ways. They make it too hard for too many people to live the lives they wish for. Most troubling of all is the obstacles they present to those who wish to perform the most essential task for any enduring society – to start and raise a family.

Many New Yorkers want to be parents but can’t afford (or find!) an apartment that fits their desired family. They worry about the cost of childcare, or the quality of the schools, or the safety of their future children on the streets. So they delay, in some cases indefinitely. Or they leave, and build their family somewhere else.

A city that makes it so difficult to start and raise a family is unlikely to deliver the dynamism that has defined New York for so long.¹ And these same constraints inhibit all manner of other dreams, including the pursuit of endeavors core to our city’s identity.

Thankfully there is good news: the ways in which we’re falling short are solvable. New Yorkers have faced far greater challenges in the past. Everything we love about New York is a result of successful efforts to overcome the challenges of the past. It’s just the same now.

Our idealized New York is a “realizable ideal,” and thus it’s incumbent on all of us to realize it.

The RRA’s Three Pillars

So how do we do it? We think there are three core objectives, which we consider the RRA’s “three pillars” – growth, efficiency, and order.

Growth – At the root of so many of our challenges is the simple fact that we don’t have enough of the most important necessities. To a significant extent, these shortages are driven by self-imposed constraints. We must fix this. Growth will solve many of our problems directly while making others more tractable. We can’t shrink our way out of the challenges we face, and we shouldn’t want to. We must grow.²

Efficiency – We are lucky! People want to live here. People are willing to pay a lot to live here, and they do so in many ways, including by bearing the highest tax burden of any populace in the country. We collectively spend enormous sums. Over a third of the city’s budget goes toward education, and our per-pupil spending is exceptional relative to every other American city – but the student outcomes our school system delivers are not exceptional. Education is what we spend most on, but this same dynamic prevails across other vital functions, including public safety, housing, transportation, and sanitation. If the quality of our public services isn’t worthy of New York’s status as America’s greatest city, it’s certainly not due to insufficient funding. More often it results from the inefficient deployment of the considerable resources we’ve committed. This is not sustainable or desirable. We need to fix it. We need to do more with more. We should demand an efficient and effective government, and we should work to deliver it.

Order – Jane Jacobs was bang on when she wrote that the “bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street.” On the street, on the subway, on the bus, in our parks, and in our buildings. Our public spaces must be safe, functional, and orderly. If we can’t achieve this, nothing else matters. We’ve got to be willing to prioritize the broad interests of all New Yorkers over the narrow interests of the antisocial few.

Those are the three pillars of the RRA – growth, efficiency, and order. The foundation on which they rest is active citizenship. So that is what we will work to foster.

How We’ll Pursue the Three Pillars

Our objectives for New York are ambitious but achievable. Together they represent a realizable ideal. We intend to realize that ideal through a set of interrelated activities, all of which seek to promote active citizenship and the pursuit of growth, efficiency, and order in New York City.

In future posts we will elaborate on each of these activities, but for now we present a summary of the activities we plan to pursue:

• We will provide information and resources highlighting opportunities for civic participation. Our online hub will enable New Yorkers seeking to increase their civic engagement to find opportunities aligned with their interests, skills, expertise, and availability. For instance, some people may be interested to join or attend meetings of their Precinct Community Council, to contribute to public safety in their neighborhood. Others may be interested to work for more street trees in their neighborhood or create an “Open Streets” day on their block. Still others might like to get their expertise on the record by providing testimony. There are many such opportunities, which we will help to surface through a directory and by publishing guides, making it easier for New Yorkers to contribute effectively and joyfully to the betterment of our city.

• We will organize events for New Yorkers, which we intend to be informative and educational while fostering relationships that will generate excitement and mutual encouragement toward civic engagement. We aim to deepen the connections among civically interested New Yorkers, creating more organic opportunities for collaboration and partnership toward shared objectives. At RRA events, we will provide updates on important issues facing the city, share relevant stories from New York’s history, highlight current opportunities for meaningful civic engagement, and celebrate inspiring examples of successful civic contributions.

• We will organize a membership program for highly motivated New Yorkers to significantly commit to civic engagement in New York. RRA members will provide financial support to enable the RRA’s activities. They’ll volunteer their time and knowledge to enable the citizenship programming described above and will propose and judge the competitions described below. RRA members are people with the wherewithal to substantially contribute to the betterment of NYC (access, influence, knowledge, wealth, expertise, etc.) whom we’ll support in delivering on their civic potential, making them “more like Roosevelt.”

• We will organize a program of prizes to incentivize the creation of works (writing, arts, software, data analysis, etc.) aligned with the mission of the RRA. Jacob Riis deployed his skills as a journalist and photographer toward illuminating the reality of tenement life in New York and identifying solutions to those problems. Among New York’s 8.5 million residents are people with essentially every imaginable skill. Through the RRA prize program, we will encourage talented New Yorkers to be “more like Riis,” by applying their various talents toward improving NYC for all New Yorkers. The works produced through the RRA’s prize program will deepen our collective understanding, helping to ensure that our citizenship efforts are rooted in shared knowledge. (Stay tuned for more information on the prize program, and the first slate of competitions.)

• We will resurface public domain texts with relevance to the RRA’s mission and make them accessible to a contemporary audience. There are so many gems buried in libraries. We enjoy reading these and have benefited immensely from doing so. But not everyone is able or willing to read a scan of a nineteenth century publication in order to further their citizenship efforts. We’re going to address this by making foundational texts accessible to a broader audience. First in print material, and then in other media.

• We will celebrate civic heroism. Examples of the style of citizenship we need abound, in history and in our current day. Saying that we need greater civic engagement doesn’t mean that such efforts don’t exist currently or didn’t in the past. We will celebrate these efforts, including through: 1) a campaign for new statues and monuments to the civic heroes of New York’s history, and 2) a series of awards and honors recognizing contemporary contributions, which will be named for the civic heroes of our past.

Join Us!

We’ve laid out an ambitious set of goals and activities. We will need all the help we can get! If you’re interested in joining our effort, we would welcome your participation. Please shoot us a note (you can reply to this email, drop a comment below, or contact us here).

• Let us know how you might like to participate, if you have an idea of that.

• Let us know of any feedback you have based on the outline we’ve shared here.

• Let us know of any questions you have or topics you’d like us to explain further.

If you’re interested in joining the RRA as a member, please fill out this form and we’ll follow up with more details. Our next gathering will be in the evening on Wednesday 11/19, and we welcome prospective members to join us there.

In future posts, we’ll share more details on everything we’ve described above. Subscribe here for those updates, and please pass along to anyone you think might be interested.

We’ll close with some stirring words from our namesake Jacob Riis, from his book A Ten Years’ War:

New York is the youngest of the world’s great cities, barely yet out of its knickerbockers. It may be that the dawning century will see it as the greatest of them all. The task that is set it, the problem it has to solve and which it may not shirk, is the problem of civilization, of human progress, of a people’s fitness for self-government.

1. Both Theodore Roosevelt and Jacob Riis had much to say about the importance of children to a successful city and a successful democracy. Jacob Riis’s whole life project can be seen as an effort to make New York a place where all children could be raised in conditions that would enable them to grow up to be good citizens. In future posts, we will more deeply explore the thinking of our namesakes on this crucial topic.

2. Tyler Cowen’s book Stubborn Attachments makes the best summary case for economic growth that we have yet read.