I believe the most important community is the one physically closest to you, and if that's not the case perhaps you should consider moving physicalyl closer to the sommunity that is emotionally closest to you. I am where I want to be, so I want to solve the problems relevant to me. I recently moved 6 blocks, this moved me from Brooklyn Community District 2 to Brooklyn Community District 6, so I am currently applying to join the Community Board of Brooklyn Community District 6. Hopefully the Brooklyn Borough President's office will think I am a good fit and appoint me.

What I care about

In order of importance:

• Abundance: We have so many resources, we shouldn't let them lay fallow, it's so much better to try to exapnd the pie than fight over scraps of it. Specifically the place I think we are most shooting ourselves in the foot with scarcity for no reason is housing. We should be buildign so much more housing, especially here in NYC. From a historical perspective we have built astonishingly little housing over the last 50 or so years. Construction technology has vastly improved since the early 20th century, there is absolutely no reason we are buildign so much less now than we were then. People desperately want to live in NYC and either can't live here or are bidding up the price of available housing to astronomical levels, there is absolutely no reason we shouldn't be tryign our best to make this wonderful city accessible to more people. The mean number of floors that are legally allowed to be built across all residentially zoned land in brooklyn is 1.83, this means that if we built the maximum legally sized building on every lot in brooklyn and then averaged out the size across all lots in Brooklyn to fill all the land it wouldn't even reach 2 stories. For no particular reason we have decided to mostly freeze NYC in amber and only allow those with resources to have any chance at living in let alone owning a house here.
• Living in reality: It's very easy to say what ought to happen in a hypothetical world. We live in a complex world where a good that actually happens is far better than a perfect that never gets done, not to mention everyone has a different view of perfect so compromises are always necessary. The logic flow should look like: Identify the problem -> figure out what interventions would have the highest impact on improving this problem -> figure out how to actually implement the best intervention -> implement it -> move on/iterate if necessary.
• Consider secondary effects: There are about 10x as many traffic deaths as fire deaths in the US. How many fire death lives will be saved by widening roads to allow for bigger fire trucks vs increased traffic deaths from faster average car speed on city roads vs how much does trip time change with wider roads (could be faster from wider lanes if we widen all roads (perhaps by replacing some sidewalk with road which carries it's own costs) could be slower if we don't widen roads and end up with fewer lanes due to each lane being wider), etc etc etc.
• Have fun: If I'm miserable working towards on a specific local problem I will do far far less. Either find a way to make it fun, or find problems that aI care about more or are more itneresting to work on.

I write Ascendant New York, a look into the hyperlocal NYC issues I care about.