Community organizing is essential to the life of the City.

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday Morning with Us. Is Tom Allen, a longtime friend over forty years. He’s an American newspaper and magazine and digital media entrepreneur of City and State, of Magazine of New York, and in publication he is the founder and publisher and he’s trying to put New York together. You had a great breakfast on Friday morning, Tom, tell the

0:31 world about it.

0:32 Speaker 2 Sure, thank you, John, Then thanks for attending. You were great. So I you know about forty well, about five years ago I met a gentleman named Eric Adams for breakfast and he told me he was running for mayor, and he knew that I had run for mayor as you did back in twenty twelve and thirteen, and he said

0:49 what should I do? And I said, well, you know, you should study my campaign and do the opposite. But what I really said was, you know, you really need to get familiar with the issue, and we need to get experts in front of you. So we started something called Mayor School, and every week I brought in a

1:06 policy expert to have breakfast with Eric, and we did about one hundred of those over the course of two years, and out of that grew this idea because Eric asked me to come work in his administration. I said, you know, you’ve got my son working for years as secretary. You’ve got enough allens in the administration. How do I start

1:23 a stink tank that would help you with policy ideas? And he loved that idea. I was originally going to call it the Brooklyn Institute, but he told me that was too limiting, so it called the Five Borough Institute.

1:34 And when I mentioned the idea to a dear friend of mine, Dick Ravitch, who was, as you know, probably an old friend of yours, a civic giant, Dick loved this idea as well and wanted to co found it and co share it with me. So Dick and I worked very hard. Three years ago. We put together a

1:52 great board of advisors of the most prominent New Yorkers and we then went out and raised money. And I was amazed at how many corporations, you know, tech tech companies and real estate companies and other people. Other franticus in New York were eager to support a think tank whose goal was to come up with practical solutions to

2:15 thorny problems that have been plaguing the city for years. We’re not democratic, we’re not Republican, we’re not independent. We are just simply problem solvers. We want New York to be a great place for our kids, for our grandkids.

2:29 And you know, we know what New York can be, and we know that our leaders need help from the best thinkers in New York on policy ideas, and so we started the five bron suit. I was very lucky.

2:43 I found a woman who I had been an admirer for many years. She was a reporter at New York one Grace Row. She was available, and I hired her to be the executive director. And she has done an amazing job. And we have this great board and we have started doing reports. But you know, unlike most thing tanks,

3:04 we’re more of a do tank. We are you know, we come up with ideas and we execute long reports only if we know that people in government are interested in our ideas and are willing to execute them. So we consult with, you know, the Mayor’s administration before we embarked on a long project, and we did when we

3:27 first set out three years ago, at the beginning of Mayor Adam’s administration. We’re trying to think of what our first report should be about. And people said, you know, you can write all the reports you want, but there’s nobody in city government anymore. There’s so many there’s twenty three thousand vacancies, and nothing’s getting done HPD you know

3:43 stuff like that.

3:44 Speaker 1 Well, Thompson, I enjoyed the breakfast very much, and people these days consider me a Trump Republican. But everything everybody I talked to in that room understands. What I stand for is lord and safety in our streets. And everybody agrees in that too. So I’m trying to find you.

4:05 I was talking, yeah, and I was talking to Ken Shunshine, and I was we were trying to find something we disagree on, and we couldn’t.

4:12 Speaker 2 Find anything exactly. You remember John probably the best mayor in the in the history of New York, or certainly you know in that twentieth cent in the early twentieth century was Fire LaGuardia, and he was famous for saying, there’s no democratic or Republican way for taking out the garbage.

4:28 Speaker 1 Absolutely. And the other thing I brought up with Ken Sunshine was that the fact is what Ed Canti used to say, if you agree with me, one hundred percent of the time.

4:39 Speaker 2 Have your head examined exactly, he said. I think he said, if you if you agree with me five out of ten things, vote for me. If you if you agree with nine out of ten things, have your head. Yes, Yes, you’re absolutely right. Listen, and we you know, we’re in an era now where people are just too polarized and

4:56 and spend too much time fighting about who’s right and who’s wrong. We just want to come up with ideas because you know, we have a mental health crisis in New York, we have a housing crisis.

5:06 Speaker 1 We have to increase the quality of life in New York has to be brought back to normal. And you can’t allow and I said this to Ken, you can’t allow thirty three hundred repeat criminals to run our city.

5:23 And you can’t allow the certain politicians to want to. You know, we want to respect eight and a half million New Yorkers that want a quality of life versus thirty three hundred repeat criminals.

5:41 Speaker 2 At five Borough Insto, we’re gonna be looking at the mental health crisis and coming up with ideas and suggestions for for fixing it. But you know, one of the things that we just did recently about a year ago, is one of the things that’s holding back to the city, John, and we’re losing people to other states like Florida and Texas,

5:56 and families are leaving the one hundred thousand kids have left the public education just in the last four years. We need to come up with universal childcare that’s affordable for parents, so that both parents can work and live in New York. And so the last report we did was a comprehensive report that the mayor’s people have looked

6:17 at closely and are already adopting ideas from on how to execute universal childcare. You know you have two kids, John, and I have four kids. You know I remember you.

6:26 Speaker 1 Know you’re twice as lucky. Tom. We’re at a time. Let’s continue this conversation next week on the show.

6:34 Speaker 2 I would love to John. I always love talking to you, and I love your audience and congratulations of what you’re doing it they’ll be obviously you’ve DoD an amazing job. Thank you, Thank you