Photo of David

Renew the Upper West Side

Rebuild New York

Reimagine America

Why I’m Running

I’ve been an Upper West Sider since January 1973. I shopped with my parents at Zabar’s back when all the nova was sliced to order and the floors were strewn with sawdust. I learned to ride a bike in Central Park in the days when the guidebooks warned away the tourists, leaving neighborhood kids like me with a great green expanse of danger-tinged adventure.

Plenty has changed since then, and I’ve lived through all of it. I’ve lived it myself and also through the eyes of five decades of UWS friends and family, including my wife, a life-long UWSer herself; my parents and hers, all still in the neighborhood; and our two boys, who also learned to ride a bike here, and still ride, sometimes with each other, or with friends, or on some of my luckiest days, with me, in the same, but very different Central Park.

Now the UWS and New York are at a critical juncture, a moment of suffering and anxiety, but also one of rare opportunity. Before the pandemic, the City had faced two major crises in my lifetime: near bankruptcy in 1975 and terrorist attack in 2001. In both cases, we survived. In both cases, though, we also made critical mistakes that still torment us today. Our extremes of economic inequality, racial segregation, and environmental degradation, the inadequacies of our housing, schooling, and transit, even our unpreparedness for a public health emergency, are all to a substantial degree rooted in the choices we made, or failed to make, when we had the chance.

That’s why I’m running. More so even than in 1975 or 2001, we have the chance to shape our shared future through the assertion of our best values. I have spent most of my adult life investigating the ways that people find meaning in life and how law and politics can make us better off, materially and morally. During the past six years, my focus has been on two structural changes that would improve our neighborhood and the world by improving our democracy. Both are based in local politics.

One would achieve better, more democratic resource allocation. At a time of economic recovery and shoestring government budgets, it would allow us to address NYC’s housing crisis and shape the renewal of the neighborhood in favor of local businesses that enrich our lives. It would also equip us with a truly democratic basis for attacking knotty problems like the proper balance between policing and alternatives, such as social services, education, housing, and healthcare.

The other would make New York City the leader in an effort to make our federal election system fundamentally democratic. The way we elect the president and Congress is anti-city and white-supremacist, and is the world’s greatest single obstacle to averting environmental catastrophe—to name only a few of its direst traits. Only cities can change it, and now is the time for New York City to take the lead.

While I fight for these structural changes, I will fight for UWSers and UWS values through legislation and holding City officials accountable. I’ll fight for affordable housing, safer streets, environmental sustainability, more consistent and accessible public transit, aid to local businesses, a resurgence in the arts, and justice and dignity for all New Yorkers.

If you believe that the values of the people should shape the future, please get involved in our campaign.

Democracy

Most UWSers share many of the same progressive values. So do most NYers. And the politicians we elect generally aim to introduce and support legislation that their constituents would support.

And yet on many of our most pressing challenges, we are stalled or backtracking.

That’s because solving our problems depends on more than elected officials who share our values. It depends equally on the democratic systems we have in place to give force to our values, making them effective on the real world. And our systems are failing us.

The terrible crises we face today are in large part a consequence of these systemic failings, but they have also created a rare opportunity for change. If we act now, with courage and creativity, we can repair and upgrade our democracy in ways that will allow us to emerge stronger than we have ever been, and to ensure a better future for generations to come.

As your representative, I will never lose sight of this imperative. I will work in support of every effort to make our democracy more effective, and I offer two specific, novel proposals that would dramatically alter our trajectory.

Policy

Meet David

I’m a life-long New Yorker raised on the Upper West Side. I’m a lawyer and a PhD, and I run Democratism, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that seeks to make our federal election system more democratic.

I’ve been active in progressive and Democratic politics for more than thirty years. I was marching on Washington for a woman’s right to choose way back in the 1980’s, when I was also a student leader in the fight to free Soviet Jews. During my second summer of law school, when most of my classmates took jobs at big law firms, I worked for the Brennan Center for Justice, where we sued the state of Florida for suppressing Black voters through its intentionally discriminatory felon disenfranchisement regime. After law school, I worked as a law clerk for a federal appeals court judge who was one of the leading liberal lights on the federal judiciary. I travelled to Florida to work as a volunteer lawyer for John Kerry in 2004, knocked on doors for Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania in 2016, did voter protection work in an upstate swing district for the New York Democratic Lawyer’s Council in 2018, and have trained other lawyers since. In 2020 I made phone calls to Florida and spent Election Day as a poll observer in Philadelphia. All along the way I’ve been marching and supporting candidates who support equality and justice for all people, a fair economy, and urgent environmental action.

The UWS and I share the kind of mutual love and understanding that comes only with deep connection and long experience. I said above that my wife and I both grew up in the neighborhood, and that both our parents still live here. I didn’t mention that my father lived here as a kid seventy years ago. He went to elementary school at PS 9 and junior high at Joan of Arc, where Manhattan School for Children, the Community Action School, and Lafayette Academy are now. My wife, who works for the City, grew up six blocks up from me (but we didn’t meet until our first year at college in New England). Our older son attended NYC public schools and is now a college student. Our younger son is a junior at a NYC public high school downtown. Their grandparents are not only neighbors of ours but also good friends of each other. On a Sunday night when there’s no pandemic you can often find almost any combination of the eight of us enjoying a meal together at a neighborhood Italian place. And we have other relatives in the neighborhood, too, on both sides of our family, and a lifetime of close friends and longtime acquaintances who live or work here.

Roots like these aren't just a bonus for a Council Member. What it’s like to grow up here or grow old here, to play here or be sick here, to prosper or struggle or falter here? I have personal or intimate experience of it all. I know what it used to be like, what we thought it was going to be like, and what it's turned out to be so far. I'm still learning about the UWS, every day, but it's a special sort of learning, based in a rich foundation of lived participation. Especially at a time of crisis, we need a representative with deep and real experience in the neighborhood.

What else? I’ve taught undergrads and graduate students at a fine university; practiced law as a litigator—exclusively suing powerful interests for rotten things they did to ordinary people; led a community arts and education organization; and founded and led a software company. Relevant to Council, I do numbers and money and budgets. Less relevant to Council, I teach Sanskrit early Thursday mornings; ride a unicycle (but always look as if I’m about to fall, which I am); sing Italian arias with a vocal teacher (about as gracefully as I ride unicycle); am the inventor on US Patent Nos. 8,713,020 & 8,392,417; and during the pandemic have not only baked over a hundred sourdough breads, but also replaced a kitchen faucet, which doesn’t leak that much. My degrees are from Brown (AB), the University of Pennsylvania (MA, PhD), and Columbia (JD).

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Reaching Me

This used to be the 2021 election campaign website. I’m still hard at work on the democracy issues I ran on. To learn more, see Democratism. For a copy of the Common Sense pamphlet or to reach me directly, try me at david@davidgold.nyc.