Since last spring, roughly 100,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City. This is a city of immigrants, welcoming to immigrants, built by immigrants. People who were born abroad make up a third of New York’s population and own more than half of its businesses. Yet the city has struggled to accommodate this wave of new arrivals. Migrants are selling candy on the subways, sleeping on the streets in Midtown, waiting for spots in homeless shelters. Families are struggling to access public schools, legal aid, and health care. They are vulnerable to predation and violence.

It is a humanitarian crisis. The city has scrambled to accommodate these new residents, but Mayor Eric Adams says that New York is officially overwhelmed. “We have reached full capacity,” he said bluntly at a press conference last month. “We have no more room in the city.”

The city’s response to the migrants has garnered fierce criticism from both right and left. Republicans have bashed the mayor for wasting resources better spent on long-standing New Yorkers. Democrats have attacked him for allowing a human catastrophe to develop and trying to shift blame to the state and federal government.

Yet Adams is in some profound sense correct. New York is full. It is too full for young families, new businesses, artists, and retirees. It has been too full for years, if not decades. It desperately, immediately needs to make more space for asylum seekers—and for everyone who already lives here.

The current catastrophe is at one level an acute one: Thousands of migrants began to arrive. Many required temporary housing, housing that the city is obligated by the state constitution to provide. The new arrivals filled the shelters. And when the shelters ran out of beds, the city scrambled to set up new ones in scores of other sites, including hotels, offices, an airport warehouse, and a series of parking lots. But even that was not enough. Migrants are still intermittently sleeping on the streets; others are crowding into substandard, informal housing.

[Derek Thompson: Why Manhattan’s skyscrapers are empty]

Legal-aid lawyers and emergency-service providers have argued that many migrants would have gotten out of the shelters faster if New York City had managed their cases better. “There are a lot of new arrivals who have very specific needs or desires and not a lot of information,” Joshua Goldfein of the Legal Aid Society told me. Some people need driver’s licenses. Some need work permits. Some need a ticket elsewhere in the country. “You would not be full if you had more turnover,” he said. He ticked off a list of the city’s other management failures, including failing to crack down on landlords who refuse to accept housing vouchers.

The state could also do more: barring bedroom communities and towns upstate from refusing new arrivals, for instance. And of course, the federal government—which has an exclusive purview over immigration policy, a multitrillion-dollar budget, and an entire cabinet department devoted to the borders, immigration, and customs—could step in with money, guidance, and administrative capacity.  

Yet the problem is New York’s. And behind this acute crisis is the longer-standing one of an insufficient housing supply.

You can see it by looking at residential-vacancy rates, which have been as low as 2 percent in recent years. You can tell by looking at the size and price of rentals and homes for purchase: The average rent in Manhattan is more than $4,000, and the average home in Brooklyn costs roughly $1 million. You can see it in the shrinking of New York’s middle class and the stagnation of its population and the widening of its income and wealth inequality. Housing supply has simply not kept pace with housing demand, squeezing everyone except for the very rich.

The same forces shunting families to the suburbs are weighing on the migrants. The same forces driving New Yorkers out of unaffordable apartments and into homeless shelters are weighing on the migrants. Migrants cannot afford housing for the same reason that the city itself struggles to raise money for new facilities. New York really is full.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Meet the latest housing-crisis scapegoat]

Isn’t there space in all of those empty office complexes? Couldn’t the city find more space, if not enough? Sure. But converting office towers into housing requires money and time. And setting up new emergency-shelter facilities takes money and time too. The mayor has said the migrant influx might cost as much as $12 billion; this year, the city estimates it will spend more on the migrant crisis than it does on the parks, fire, and sanitation departments combined.

High housing costs have a way of making every problem a housing problem. A homeless person needing help with a substance-abuse disorder needs housing first. A migrant requiring legal aid more pressingly needs a roof over their head. And high housing costs, of course, force millions of vulnerable people into homelessness. “Our homeless-response system has turned into a crisis-response system,” Gregg Colburn, an associate real-estate professor at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments, told me. “So many other systems have failed or delegated responsibility to it.”

The opposite is also true: Low housing costs make other problems simpler to solve. Cheap housing reduces the number of people who become homeless. It also allows the entities providing assistance to do more for less, because their overhead costs are lower. And it frees up lawyers to work on immigration cases, substance-use experts to work on substance-use issues, and mental-health counselors to work on mental-health issues.

There is no easy way for the city to help this wave of migrants, not until housing supply goes up and prices come down, or until the federal and state governments provide much, much more aid. “I don’t know if you guys understand what’s going on right now,” Adams said at a press conference this month. “There’s no housing, folks. There’s no housing.”

It’s always election season in America. Dozens of local contests are taking place across the country this month, from Montgomery, Alabama to the Mariana Ranchos County Water District in California. On August 8 alone, Custer County, Colorado held a recall election for a county commissioner; Ohio asked residents to consider a major ballot measure; and voters in Oklahoma weighed in on several ballot measures.

America has roughly 90,000 local governing bodies, and states do not—at least publicly—track all of the elections taking place on their watch, making an exhaustive accounting nearly impossible. In many cases, contests come and go without any local media coverage, either. I came across a notice for an August 29 election in Marin County, California. When I called the Registrar of Voters for more information, the county assistant had to search a few moments before he could tell me that the town of Tiburon (population 9,000) was selecting a short-term council member.

Jerusalem Demsas: Trees? Not in my backyard.

Americans are used to pundits and civic leaders shaming them for low-turnout elections, as if they had failed a test of civic character. Voters are apathetic, parties don’t bother with the hard work of mobilization, and candidates are boring—or so the story goes. But this argument gets the problem exactly backwards. In America, voters don’t do too little; the system demands too much. We have too many elections, for too many offices, on too many days. We have turned the role of citizen into a full-time, unpaid job. Disinterest is the predictable, even rational response.

“One of the unique aspects of the electoral process in the United States is the sheer number of decisions American voters are asked to make when they go to the polls,” three political scientists argued at the turn of the millennium. “In any single election, American voters face much higher information costs than the citizens of almost any other democracy in the world.”

These information costs are immense. Americans are asked to fill numerous and obscure executive, legislative, and judicial positions, and to decide arcane matters of policy, not just on the first Tuesday in November but throughout the year.

How are we expected to know how the roles of our mayors and city councils are distinct from the roles of county executives, county council members, treasurers, controllers, and boards of supervisors? On what basis should we choose our coroners, zoning commissioners, or commissioners of revenue? Who should we punish when things go wrong? Reward when things go right?

And how can we keep up with the details of hopelessly complicated policy questions? Ohio’s aforementioned August 8 ballot measure proposed raising the threshold for changing the state constitution. It failed 57 to 43 percent, or roughly 1,700,000 to 1,300,000. This apparent matter of process attracted an unusually large number of voters because Ohioans understood that they were engaging in a proxy fight over abortion; advocates expended significant time and energy to explain to the general public what the ballot measure was really about.

Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio

Usually, however, voters are expected to puzzle out even quite complicated issues without the benefit of a government-sponsored education campaign or significant explanatory reporting. In 2022, Georgia voters were asked to approve a statewide ad valorem tax exemption for certain equipment used by timber producers. California has repeatedly asked citizens to vote on regulatory requirements for kidney-dialysis clinics.

Americans are asked to vote too much, and Americans are asked to vote too often. One of the most pernicious ways politicians overburden voters is by holding off-cycle elections. Making time to vote is harder for some people than others; it’s harder for people with inflexible job schedules and needy dependents, for instance. Employers are used to making accommodations for presidential elections—but some random election over the summer? Hardly. As a result, off-cycle local elections are heavily weighted toward higher-income voters, more so than are statewide and national elections.

They’re also heavily weighted toward senior citizens: The most important factor for predicting who votes in city elections is not class or education or race, but age. An analysis by Portland State University’s “Who Votes for Mayor?” project found that people over the age of 65 who live in the poorest, least educated parts of a city typically vote two to five times more frequently than 18-to-34-year-olds in the most educated, affluent parts of a city. Overall, city residents 65 and older were 15 times more likely to vote than those ages 18 to 34.

Ohio Republicans knew that by scheduling the constitutional ballot measure in August, they could dampen turnout and benefit their side. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, had vocally opposed off-cycle elections as recently as December 2021. While testifying in a legislative hearing, he’d pointed to the record voter turnout in November 2020, when “74 percent of all registered voters made their voice heard.” Off-cycle elections, LaRose warned, mean that “just a handful of voters end up making big decisions.” He argued persuasively that “the side that wins is often the one that has a vested interest in the passage of the issue up for consideration. This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work.” State Republicans voted last year to eliminate most August special elections.

But LaRose, who declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate last month, supported the timing of the August 8 ballot measure, arguing that a statewide issue is “very different” and “not unusual.” According to local Ohio reporting, “There have been only two August statewide votes regarding the constitution”: in 1874 and 1926.  

Nostalgic political commentators long for the bygone days when American democracy still worked. But election-timing manipulation has always been a feature of American local politics. The UC Berkeley political scientist Sarah Anzia looked at the timing of local elections in New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia over the course of the 19th century and concluded, “Election timing manipulation was a common event.” Politicians exploited timing as a way to “exert some control over the electorate.”

For example, in 1857, New York’s nativist Know-Nothing Party and its Republican Party, which controlled the state legislature, bumped the city’s voting schedule so that municipal elections would no longer take place alongside federal ones, but a month later, in December. All of the Democrats voted against the change in part because they feared that it would hurt their mayoral candidate’s chances. (City Democrats knew their voters would show up for state and national elections, but that in a lower-turnout environment, their opponents could out-organize them.) They were right to be scared: Their mayoral candidate lost that very same year.

Off-cycle elections continued, and voter turnout in the city’s elections “consistently fell far below turnout levels in gubernatorial and presidential elections,” according to Anzia. By 1868, more than 155,000 votes were cast for governor in the November statewide election; a month later, just 96,000 people turned out for the mayoral contest. When the city went back on-cycle in the 1870s, voter turnout for the mayor’s and governor’s races reached near parity.

Americans rationally respond to such intense and random demands on our time by simply checking out. In November 2021, just 23 percent of eligible active voters in New York City cast a ballot for mayor. That same year in North Carolina, 463 municipalities held elections, comprising 890 contests and more than 2,500 candidates. All told, about 15 percent of registered voters turned out.

America’s voting problem is primarily a local one. When compared with that of peer nations, our general-election turnout is actually middle-of-the-pack. And although more voting at the federal level is desirable, some political-science research casts doubt on whether the results of national elections would significantly change if everybody showed up. Not so in local elections, where the electorate is remarkably unrepresentative.

In 2020, the year before that dismal local turnout in North Carolina, about 75 percent of voters—five times as many people—turned out for the general election and statewide contests. And in 2022, 51 percent of registered voters, or nearly three and a half times as many people as the previous year, turned out for the statewide election. The “Who Votes for Mayor?” project examined 23 million voting records in local elections across 50 cities, and came away with alarming findings: In 10 of America’s 30 largest cities, turnout didn’t exceed 15 percent. In Las Vegas, Fort Worth, and Dallas, turnout was in the single digits. Portland, Oregon, was the only city in the sample that saw the majority of its registered voters turn out, probably because Portland regularly votes for mayor on the federal-election holiday in November. The city’s special elections are more in line with national trends: In November 2019 and May 2023, voter turnout was only about 30 percent.

The failed Ohio ballot measure is an instructive case study in the low expectations Americans have for voter engagement. In the days following the election, newspapers proclaimed it a “boost for democracy.” A Columbus Dispatch article noted “high participation” and quoted a spokesperson for the Association of Elected Officials who marveled that “so many people turn[ed] out,” deeming the results “the will of the people.”

Relative to other ballot measures, sure. But only about 38 percent of Ohio’s registered voters cast a ballot, a proportion that shrinks to roughly 34 percent when you include all citizens of voting age. Regardless of whether you support the outcome, is it laudable that, on major questions, just a third of voters bother to weigh in?

The minority who do vote end up with disproportionate power. In Tarrant County, Texas, a judge recently told a meeting of the conservative True Texas Project how just 75 people could make a big difference in local elections where “the turnout is so low by percentage … By you bringing neighbors, friends, picking up the phone, doing postings on social media, there are races that, quite frankly, we ought not to be able to win that we can probably win just because we raise awareness and get people out.” At least two candidates endorsed by the True Texas Project ended up winning their races in Fort Worth. In a city of almost 1 million, fewer than 43,000 people cast ballots.

Aligning local elections with national ones would increase turnout and likely create a more representative electorate, but just filling out a ballot doesn’t constitute meaningful accountability. That’s in part because most races at the local level go uncontested: In 2020, 61 percent of city races and 78 percent of county races were uncontested, as were 62 percent of school-board races and 84 percent of judicial races. Even when a race is competitive, finding reliable information about local candidates can be nearly impossible, turning voting into an exercise in randomness or, at best, name recognition.

Incumbents have a staggering advantage in local races. In a 2009 paper, the legal academic Ronald Wright reviewed election data for prosecutors, a role that is both well understood and highly important to voters. (Public safety and crime regularly rank at the top of voters’ list of concerns.) Wright observed that when district attorneys run for reelection, they win 95 percent of the time and run unopposed in 85 percent of races.

This month alone, I found three elections in Delaware that were canceled because not enough people were running. In each case, the candidates who bothered to file simply ascended to their theoretically elected positions. In local government, elected office is apparently first come, first served.

Nature abhors a vacuum: Where voters disappear, special interests rush in. In the absence of regular voter direction, our local elected officials are not directionless. Instead of democracy, what we’ve got is government by homeowners’ associations, police unions, teachers’ unions, developers, chambers of commerce, environmental groups, and so forth.

“All is not well in local government, and it hasn’t been for some time,” Anzia writes in her book Local Interests. Anzia finds, unsurprisingly, that pressure from interest groups works. Political activity by police and firefighters’ unions correlates with greater spending on their salaries, and cities with more politically active police unions are less likely than cities with less active ones to have adopted body cameras. In cities with strong environmental groups, Anzia found, winning candidates are significantly less likely to favor policies conducive to economic growth. And in school districts where teachers’ unions are the dominant interest group, jurisdictions that hold off-cycle elections pay experienced teachers more than those that hold on-cycle elections.

These specific policies may be good or bad. That’s not the point. The point is that the government should act according to public need, not based on who has the money, time, and will to create and sustain an advocacy group.   

Blaming the voters is easy: Democracy is on the line; people need to get up off their asses and vote! The problem isn’t the system; it’s the people. Maybe if they saw one more Instagram infographic or heard one more speech about the importance of civics, they would become regular voters.

Putting aside the moral status of nonvoters, this argument is pure fantasy. As the political scientist Robert Dahl once quipped, “Like other performers (including teachers, ministers, and actors), politicians and political activists are prone to overestimate the interest of the audience in their performance.”

Contrary to what good-government types may wish, few Americans want to be full-time political animals. Most of us have absolutely no desire to learn what our county commissioners or district attorneys are up to, let alone take on the herculean task of evaluating their records. Effective representational government must empower voters to hold their elected officials accountable without sucking the life out of its citizens. Even the most dedicated participants in local politics aren’t experts in everything, just in the parts of local government that provide them with benefits they find meaningful.

When ordinary voters do show up in local politics, they’re not walking onto an even playing field. Individuals who become motivated to seek criminal-justice reform after an unjust killing by a police officer, or parents who feel compelled to change school curricula, are entering unfamiliar territory that has been landscaped by special interests. And elected officials know that a flurry of political activity can die out quickly, while interest-group activity remains constant.

When I ask local government officials about this problem, I usually hear denial or resignation. “Nonsense,” Kevin Bommer, the executive director of the Colorado Municipal League, told me a few months ago when I asked him whether he worries that low voter turnout yields an unrepresentative government. He suggested that this view calls “into question not only the legitimacy of a municipal election but the integrity of the people elected, as if they don’t represent their community. Those are the things that academics and people say that have never been to a city-council meeting and don’t go to planning-commission meetings.”

Steven Waldman: The local-news crisis is weirdly easy to solve

I don’t doubt that most local officials have integrity. Many if not most of the local officials I’ve spoken with are kind, hardworking, and genuinely committed citizens. They are pledging their efforts for very few benefits and are forced to face ire and controversy as they serve their communities. But our system shouldn’t depend on the benevolence of local officials. In a healthy democracy, it should depend on the electorate holding local officials accountable through the ballot box.

Giving power to the people is sometimes conflated with giving people more access to government decision making through, say, community meetings or ballot measures. But if only a small, unrepresentative group of people are willing to be full-time democrats, then that extra ballot measure, election, or public meeting isn’t more democracy; it’s less. Most of us are part-time democrats. That’s not going to change, and political hobbyists should stop expecting it to.

“It’s almost like the government’s imposing its will on its residents,” Trayon White, the D.C. councilmember for Ward 8, said at the council’s June 6 legislative meeting. He wasn’t talking about a proposed highway, a subway station, a power plant, or—perish the thought—an apartment building. He was talking about trees: specifically, three linden trees on Xenia Street planted a few years ago by D.C.’s Urban Forestry Division. To my surprise, the legislative body of a major American city experiencing escalating homelessness and a serious spike in violent crime dedicated a quarter of its time that day to discussing three trees.

White said he was concerned about the potential risk to property values and what he sees as a “reasonable fear” that once mature, the trees would “be large enough to make it difficult to see through and around the walkway, which is a public-safety concern.” He asked his colleagues to support an emergency resolution to remove them before this happened.  

For a while, the members carried on as though this were a perfectly normal matter for their attention. A few suggested that perhaps expanding the tree canopy was good, actually. But no one really questioned the underlying premise of White’s proposal: that the community had risen up in dendrophobic opposition.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: A better way to look at trees]

“We want to note that these are homeowners who are worried about the value of their homes,” White said. “I just believe that [the District Department of Transportation, or DDOT] can be more friendly in responding to the needs of the community with their request, and if they’re requesting different trees, I don’t see what the big problem is.”

The council went on to debate the merits of the public-safety question. Councilman Kenyan McDuffie recalled that in his ward the city had planted trees in parking spaces so as not to encroach on the already narrow sidewalks. “I still question whether there is the appropriate level of consultation and engagement in the impacted communities,” he said, backing White.

After more than 20 minutes, the chair of the council noted with surprise that “we spent this much time on the issue of removing three trees.” White, recognizing the lack of sufficient support from his colleagues, withdrew the matter from the agenda, allowing the trees to grow another day.

What initially drew me to this story was the obvious mismatch between the rhetoric at the council meeting and the subject at hand. How could a few trees constitute a threat to public safety or property values? Were these trees particularly ugly? And who was behind White’s push to get them removed? Like many stories about government, this seemingly trivial drama turned out to be about power, and how people justify using it.

Xenia Street is in Ward 8, physically separated from most of D.C. by the Anacostia River. That’s not the only thing that sets it apart. This side of the river is overwhelmingly Black and has had a higher unemployment rate, a lower labor-force-participation rate, and a higher poverty rate than the rest of the city. The census tract that contains Xenia Street is one of the most heat sensitive in the city, a metric that reflects the prevalence of asthma, coronary heart disease, and disability, as well as race and income demographics. D.C.’s Urban Forestry Department, a division of DDOT, planted the trees after a beetle infestation harmed several local ash trees. A senior official told me the department is generally concerned about the unequal distribution of tree canopy across wards: At the end of June, Ward 8 had roughly 500 open requests for new plantings; the higher-income Ward 4 had nearly 6,000.

Tree planting doesn’t meet the bar for more serious types of notification and community-input processes that a new road or train station might. But according to Kay Armstead, a former member of the advisory neighborhood commission—an elected body meant to serve as a hyperlocal voice on zoning, bike lanes, liquor licenses—the city did inform the commission of a plan to bring more trees to the neighborhood. In the fall of 2020, it planted 35 trees, some American linden, some apple, on a publicly owned lot between two condo buildings, 450 Xenia Street and 450 Condon Terrace.

I wanted to see the trees for myself. In the weeks following White’s proposed emergency resolution, I visited the quiet residential street on three separate occasions, asking people if they had any thoughts about the trees. No one I interviewed registered strong opinions, or had even heard of the controversy.

One resident of 450 Condon Terrace immediately redirected my attention to a massive hole in the ground of her parking lot, which she said had been caused by a garbage truck. Another told me he hadn’t heard about the controversy but wanted to talk about trash pickup. “I mean, look at this shit,” he said, pointing to a pile of trash on the sidewalk. Trees? Low on the list of priorities. Another man found my line of questioning confusing, to say the least. “They’re oxygen!” When I said some people worried the trees could encourage crime, he laughed at me. “Now, you know that’s crazy. Who’s going to hide underneath these trees?”

[James Fallows: Start planting trees]

So who forms “the community” so opposed to the trees? His name is Darryl Ross.

Ross has been active in local politics for decades. He is treasurer of the Ward 8 Democrats and of White’s constituent-services fund, a controversial purse that some critics have called a “slush fund.” When White refers to constituent outreach to his office over this issue, he’s talking about Ross. (White and his chief of staff both declined to be interviewed for this story.) Ross doesn’t live at 450 Xenia Street, but he used to. He still owns a unit in the building, which he rents out, and is the president of the Xenia Condominium Owners Association.

Ross has been angry about the trees since the day they were planted. He told me he saw workers digging and began calling around, furious that no one had informed the neighborhood about the project, astounded that the city thought 35 trees (“a forest!”) made sense on the street; and frustrated by hypothetical future private costs that the trees would impose on residents.

His 311 requests to remove the trees went nowhere. So he tried officials at DDOT and the Urban Forestry Department, White and several other members of the city council, the office of the inspector general, and current and former members of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission. He knows he wouldn’t have been able to get so much attention without his connections: “Believe me, I’m using all the leverage I can to get the desired result,” he told me.

After months of effort, in August of 2021, representatives from DDOT, White’s chief of staff, and a senior staffer for at-large Councilmember Anita Bonds met with Ross and a couple of area residents on the site to discuss the problem. The officials agreed to remove 14 of the 35 newly planted trees. The agency also promised to complete a lighting survey, which resulted in the installation of three large streetlights, a data-driven approach to reducing crime.

The “desire to compromise for this individual is because we want to make sure we’re doing this for people, not to them,” a senior official in the urban forestry department (who requested anonymity to speak freely) told me. “If we can mollify someone, engender a sense of ownership … You take someone and make them more of an ally.”

Ross was not mollified. He continued his crusade to have three more trees removed—the ones closest to his condo building’s walkway. He lodged a complaint with D.C.’s Office of the Inspector General, which led to a formal response from DDOT Director Everett Lott, who argued that the department had broken no laws in planting the trees and had in fact exceeded the mandate for public notification. Undeterred, Ross continued his advocacy, which culminated with White’s proposed emergency resolution at the city-council meeting in June.

Ross put me in touch with a few of his allies, most of whom sounded only slightly more informed about the situation than the residents I randomly encountered on my visits. Some had no idea that many trees had already been removed; others were just vaguely aware that at one point the trees had seemed like a problem. One woman told me she thought children might throw fallen apples at cars or building windows. (The trees at issue in the emergency legislation are linden, not apple.)

According to Ross, the condo association was united in opposition. He called the vice president, Hazel Farmer, on speaker in my presence.

“You remember there were four [trees] that were too close to the walkway?” he asked.

“I thought we had finished that,” she said, sounding confused.

“No, no, we are still battling,” Ross replied quickly.

After Ross refreshed her memory, Farmer said she worried that the trees would one day push up the concrete sidewalk, impeding residents’ ability to walk in and out of the building. Ross later clarified that Farmer had already moved out because the steps on the walkway were too difficult for her to navigate.

Xenia Street in 2019 (left) and 2023 (right) (Courtesy of Jerusalem Demsas)

In a July legislative meeting, White withdrew the emergency resolution, citing a compromise reached by the chairman of the D.C. council and DDOT to apply a growth regulator to the offending saplings. This outcome infuriates Ross, who is seeking a meeting with Mayor Muriel Bowser: “At the end of the day we voted for her, we didn’t vote for [DDOT officials], and we had faith in her to do what’s best for the people.”

Ross still has options. If the worst happens and these trees end up extending over the sidewalk, he can call 311 to request tree pruning. According to the Urban Forestry Department, these requests are resolved, on average, within 20 days.

But the more I talked with Ross and his allies, the more I realized the trees were also stand-ins for their broader unhappiness with DDOT, which they see as not acting for them but doing things to them: bike racks “just dropped” in front of some businesses, bike lanes constructed over their objections, and traffic-safety infrastructure—in D.C.’s highest traffic-fatality ward—installed without their consent. This is why Ross was able to enlist supporters in the first place—by tapping into existing anger some residents have with the city’s transportation agency. Anger that, in a ward of nearly 90,000 people, a few individuals do not have the final say.

This is a classic story of local government and its discontents. Government takes action. Angry, well-connected local fights back, annoyed that they weren’t consulted. But when they fight back, claiming the will of the “people,” how do we know if they’re right? Backing up a bit: How do we even decide who the people are?

[From the July/August 2023 Issue: Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis]

In the Xenia Street episode, is it the people who live right next to the trees? How about one street over? Just property owners like Ross? Because the trees are on public land, should all D.C. residents have a say? Is it all Americans? Addressing the reforestation backlog is a national priority. Or, given that trees help mitigate climate change, should all people have a voice? This is the so-called boundary problem, which the political scientist Robert Dahl once quipped has “no theoretical solution,” only pragmatic ones. Even if surveying all of humanity were theoretically desirable, it’s a practical impossibility. One has to draw the line somewhere and delegate representatives or spokespersons.

Arguably the best delegates in this matter are local elected officials, who get their authority from voters. The problem is that, at the local and especially hyperlocal levels, nobody’s voting. In 2018, two-thirds of advisory-neighborhood-commission races were uncontested. Even when these contests are competitive, only a handful of people show up to cast a ballot. In the single-member district that includes Xenia Street, Armstead, one of Ross’s allies, lost her election 137–91. Last year, two ANC races were tied following Election Day; in one of them each candidate had garnered 12 votes apiece, while in the other each candidate had claimed just one (presumably their own). Vox populi indeed.

If the ANC can’t quite speak for the people, what about the D.C. council, and specifically Councilmember White? Council voting rates are also dismal: About 8,700 people total voted in the 2020 primary contest that secured White’s reelection, out of roughly 57,000 citizens of voting age in Ward 8.

How about DDOT? As an agency housed in the executive branch, DDOT gains its authority from the mayor. In 2022, Mayor Bowser received fewer than 4,000 votes from Ward 8 during the primary (the true election in this heavily Democratic city). Only about 10,000 people in the ward voted at all in this contest.

There’s no magical threshold at which elected officials become democratically legitimate. But more than half of eligible voters routinely show up for federal and state contests while our municipal elections struggle to top 15 percent. What we’re seeing in local governments is a crisis of democracy unparalleled at other levels of government.

“It’s not the trees; it’s the disrespect,” Armstead told me. She called tree removal a top priority because “when you come to a community and you don’t listen, then [we’re] being disrespected and disregarded.” Ross made a similar point: “It makes me angry because, like I said, we’re the stakeholders. We’re the taxpayers. We fund the salaries for the D.C. government employees, council … This is our money!”

When we collectively feel entitled to hold the government accountable, that’s democracy. But when individuals do, that’s something else: institutional capture.

Because so few people vote in local elections, the power of those who speak up and claim to speak for their neighborhoods is hard to challenge. If a homeowner’s association headed by the neighborhood busybody says he speaks for you, are you showing up to contest that claim? What’s obvious about Ross’s perseverance is that its effectiveness is largely due to its singularity. If everyone engaged as he did, called and emailed and attended meeting after meeting, filing complaints with everyone from the office of the inspector general on down, his power would dilute instantly. No one can claim to speak for a community if everyone’s speaking for themselves.

Democracy is about feedback loops. We elect people. If they do poorly, we choose alternatives. But when the election system falters from disuse, other feedback loops take root. Elected officials at the local level become accountable to the unrepresentative handful of voters who do engage; and public servants become preemptively sensitive to well-connected people who have the time and energy to demand disproportionate focus.

People like Ross may not get everything they want, but they know how to command attention. No fewer than four D.C. councilmembers have become personally involved in the matter of the trees on Xenia Street. Meanwhile, that massive hole in the ground? It’s still there.