Three cities, one radical idea: the people closest to the problem are the experts

In New York City, more than half a million kids walked into classrooms this fall and found something missing: the chatbots. The nation's largest school district has banned generative AI for every student in pre-K through eighth grade for the 2026-2027 school year — the most expansive AI moratorium any district in the country has issued.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani didn't mince words. "The tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary," he said. "We do not see it that way."

He's rejecting the premise itself — not just the privacy risks, but the idea that AI in classrooms is self-evidently a good thing. Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels framed it around what kids lose when they outsource thinking before they've built the ability to do it themselves. Teachers and high schoolers are exempt, but the district is adding twice-yearly AI literacy classes so students learn to question the technology before depending on it.

Three thousand miles away, a different kind of map is being drawn — through homelessness, not classrooms.

Mapping a path without a map

Portland State University's Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative, partnered with the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, just released "Without a Map: A Lived Experience Study of the Paths People Create Through Homelessness." It's the final part of the Pathways study, and it began with a striking number: 98% of unhoused people surveyed want permanent housing.

The study's power comes from who designed it. A committee called TREES — made entirely of people with lived experience of homelessness — co-created the research, blending 541 surveys with 29 in-depth journey-mapping interviews. Lead investigator Kathleen Conte put it plainly: "Navigating homelessness is about much more than finding a service and saying yes to it."

The report's title is the thesis. People don't follow a system's map because, for many, no useful map exists. They carve their own routes — successfully, sometimes; in fits and starts, often. The honest finding is that progress stalls and unravels, but it also happens, one improvised step at a time.

The neighborhood that shaved the red tape

In San Diego, volunteers in La Jolla did something most people assume is impossible: they beat city bureaucracy. They raised private money, fought through permitting hell, and got key neighborhood projects built. Now they've built a website to teach other neighborhoods how — and City Council President Joe LaCava is so convinced it'll work that he's proposing a new policy this fall to slash the red tape for everyone else.

Sunset Cliffs volunteers are already onboard, hoping the model helps them tackle anti-erosion work before heavy El Niño rains hit this winter. The stakes are real: many San Diego parks date to the 1960s and '70s building boom, well past their 50-year lifespans, and the cash-strapped city can't keep up.

Skeptics worry private money creates a two-tier park system favoring wealthy neighborhoods. But the volunteers' answer is that San Diego's policy funnel is being redesigned precisely so the process — not just the dollars — becomes democratic.

The through-line

Three cities, three fights. New York deciding that innovation shouldn't mean surrendering childhood thinking to software. Portland mapping the improvised, nonlinear routes people carve toward housing. San Diego recognizing that the neighbors who know a park best might be the ones best equipped to save it.

The common thread is a quietly radical idea: the people closest to a problem — a classroom, a sidewalk, a park bench — are the experts. Not the tech giants, not the faceless systems, not the bureaucrats. When communities insist on steering their own futures, the results aren't just hopeful. They're evidence.