About NYFI

New York City has always been a city of reinvention, but never have the city and country been so explicitly involved in a project of self-reinvention.

Our financial sector, once thought of as vital to our survival as a city, is being rethought from the bottom up.

We have a mayor who has successfully banned smoking, less successfully promoted a rather radical plan to charge drivers who enter the central business districts of Manhattan.

Whole swaths of the New York waterfront are being remade by public investment (Hudson River Park Trust) and private development (the Brooklyn waterfront) and a combination of the two (Queens West; the Con Ed site; Ground Zero.)

Work has begun on a new subway line, and continues on the vital Third Water Tunnel. Once again the prospect of a Rail Freight Tunnel to connect manufacturing businesses in New York and Long Island to ports West of the city is on the agenda.

Green building, cycling promotion, public WiFi, large communications infrastructure issues like cell phone coverage in the vast network of underground subways, urban locavorism, manufacturing jobs, middle-income housing, public transportation funding are all topics right now. These topics have one thing in common: Each digs into the basic infrastructure of the city in ways that are deep.

But what comes out of all this rethinking depends largely on you, our readers. This site is a place to make the conversation real and practical, to get and share information about ways this city can reinvent itself to be the city we want it to be.

The site will have no partisan political agenda, indeed not even a bias in favor of activists, government agencies, real-estate interests. Ideas that are new deserve to be heard, information that is relevant deserves to be assessed, solutions deserve to be tested. These are the agendas, and the only agendas, for NYFI.