Dear Zohran,

By no uncertain terms, your victory was historic and deeply moving.

As a new day begins for New York City and you prepare to take its helm, we urge you to lead with decisions as transformative as your election win.

For far too long, the public spaces that define our city have been undervalued and underfunded. Fiscal crisis after fiscal crisis — the 1970s, post-9/11, the Great Recession, the pandemic — has widened the cracks in our civic infrastructure and operations, while every new storm tests our tenacity. And into those cracks, public-private partnerships have stepped, not as so-called luxuries but as lifelines.

That’s because New York’s open spaces are not luxuries. They are public health policy for those without backyards; climate policy for a city of water; transit p

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