Publications, Press & Outside Writing

Vital City · August 2026
Vital City's reform agenda for the Mamdani administration, beyond what a Charter revision can do. Its case for reviving the dormant commission that retires needless reports rests on my count of 2,231 reporting requirements across 183 agencies, nearly half with no record of ever being filed, and on my tracker's count of more than 5,000 standing obligations imposed on agencies since 2014. Read at Vital City ↗

The City Reporter · August 2026
Katie Honan's report on whether the Mamdani administration's efficiency push should take on the City Council's reporting requirements, sized with data from my Legislation Implementation Tracker and quoting me on the disconnect between legislators announcing what they passed and the agencies tasked with carrying it out. Read at The City Reporter ↗

Searchlight (Citizens Union) · August 2026
Argues that when the Council passes a law it reliably tells an agency what to do and unreliably supplies the money and people to do it, drawing on the 8,185 obligations catalogued by my Legislation Implementation Tracker. Proposes four fixes that preserve oversight: a labor price tag on every mandate, on-the-record funding decisions, default sunsets for new reporting requirements, and a standing docket for the Charter commission that retires dead reports. Read at Searchlight ↗

Streetsblog NYC · July 2026
Clinton Street between Delancey and Houston carries roughly 16,000 vehicles a day, 4 to 6 times its neighbors, because the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp funnels traffic onto a narrow residential block that has seen over 100 crashes and multiple fatalities in a decade. Argues for a Low Traffic Neighborhood redesign that removes the Manhattan-bound off-ramp and redirects through-traffic to Essex and Allen while preserving local and emergency access, on a block where over 80% of residents don't own a car. Read at Streetsblog ↗

Vital City · June 2026
Examines how nearly all of NYC's post-pandemic job growth has concentrated in a single lower-paying sector, leaving the local economy fragile and the city budget squeezed from both ends. Lays out strategies the Mamdani administration can pursue to diversify the jobs base and revive high-paying employment. Read at Vital City ↗

With Sarah Sachs · Reboot Democracy · June 2026
How Block Party built a searchable archive of Manhattan Community Board 3's 20 years of public meeting records, using semantic search and summarization to make institutional knowledge accessible to residents and journalists. Argues that understanding the civic problem, more than the AI tooling, is what created the value. Read at Reboot Democracy ↗

Manhattan Institute · May 2026
Introduces my NYC Council Fiscal Impacts Tracker, built from the 1,563 fiscal impact statements filed with Council legislation since 2014. Council laws added more than $7.5 billion in net costs, with CityFHEPS, the Streets Plan and school paraprofessional pay mandates alone adding over $6 billion in five years, and 97% of the local laws in the tracker name only the General Fund as their funding source. Argues that the 2024 Charter changes to fiscal impact statements did not go far enough, and that Council members should say where the money for a new mandate will come from. Read at the Manhattan Institute ↗

CivStart State of GovTech 2026 · Washington, DC · September 2026
Main-stage session and live demo at CivStart's State of GovTech: why community board decisions are practically opaque, and how Block Party's transcript archive and resolutions database, now covering 26 boards across Manhattan and Brooklyn, open them up. View the slides ↗

With Sarah Sachs · NYC OMB Institute · July 2026
Walks the NYC Office of Management and Budget Institute through Block Party's community board archive, and the story of scaling the resolution engine from one board to eleven: source adapters, parser iterations, and the corpus as it stands today. View the slides ↗

With Sarah Sachs · NYC School of Data 2026 · March 2026
Explains what community boards are and why their resolutions matter, then shows how Block Party turned two decades of Manhattan Community Board 3 meeting records into a searchable public archive with semantic search and AI summarization. View the slides ↗

With Shin-ichi Fujita & Valerie Ramey · Working Paper · March 2024
Examines why U.S. unemployment rose only modestly despite a dramatic postwar contraction in federal spending, challenging standard models of aggregate demand. Applies panel data and decomposition methods to historical employment records.

Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Research Brief · July 2020
Analyzed state-level COVID reopening decisions, identifying which industries were resuming operations at lowest reinfection risk. Informed policy discussions on phased reopening criteria during the pandemic.

With Wenli Li · Rutgers Real Estate Center · September 2018
Post-recession analysis of investor activity, price dynamics, and supply constraints in the NJ housing market using transaction-level data.

Journal of Politics & International Affairs, Ohio State · March 2019
Constructed a cross-national database linking educational attainment to income levels across developing economies; identified non-linear gradients in returns to schooling.

With Peter Slattery, PhD · MIT FutureTech · March 2024
Analyzes how training data volume, diversity, and quality have driven AI capability gains over successive model generations. Synthesizes literature on scaling laws and data efficiency to inform forecasts of future AI progress.

MIT FutureTech · 2024
Benchmarks generative AI economic forecasts against historical precedents from prior general-purpose technologies (electrification, computing). Argues current consensus estimates likely understate adjustment costs and overstate near-term aggregate productivity gains.