The drinking fountain at the north end of the park had been broken for six years. It got fixed because two hundred and eleven people voted for it on a paper ballot at a branch library, in a process the city never advertised anywhere. That is a participatory budget doing the thing it was built to do: a fixed pot of public money, a public list of options, and a vote that actually binds the spending.
The idea is neither new nor American. Porto Alegre, Brazil, ran the first version in 1989 as an anti-poverty measure, letting residents decide where sewer lines and paving went in a city of more than a million people. The Participatory Budgeting Project now counts the practice in more than seven thousand places, from national governments down to single schools.
One ward, one million dollars, one ballot
The American version started inside a single Chicago ward. In 2009 Alderman Joe Moore of the 49th Ward put 1.3 million dollars of his office's discretionary infrastructure money on the table and let residents decide where it went. The first cycle opened with nine neighborhood assemblies, ran through months of volunteer work pricing and vetting the ideas, and finished with a public vote.
The practice survived a change of officeholder, which is the harder test. Alderwoman Hadden has kept it going since taking office in 2019, putting one million dollars of the same discretionary capital funds to a vote each cycle, with the ballot open to every ward resident fourteen and older. From that one ward the model spread across Chicago and beyond.
Where the pot of money comes from
Almost no city hands residents a slice of its general fund. What gets voted on is nearly always a pool that one elected official already controlled personally, and that changes what you should expect the process to deliver.
In Chicago the pool is called menu money. Each of the fifty wards receives an equal annual allotment for local infrastructure, 1.5 million dollars per ward in 2025, roughly 108 million dollars citywide. The alderperson holds final say over how it is spent. A participatory budget is simply what happens when one of them hands that say to residents rather than keeping it.
New York built its process on the same footing. In 2011 four council members, Brad Lander, Melissa Mark-Viverito, Eric Ulrich, and Jumaane Williams, opened part of their capital allocations to a district vote. The City Council process now runs on a published calendar: idea collection in the fall, proposal development with agency staff through the winter, then a nine-day districtwide vote in the spring.
Capital projects only, and what that quietly excludes
Here is the constraint that surprises first-time participants and kills the most popular ideas in the room.
Menu money in Chicago can buy a bench, a speed hump, a stretch of repaved alley, or new street lighting. It cannot buy an after-school program, a staff position, or snacks for a senior center, because it is capital money and those are operating costs. New York applies a similar filter with a hard floor written into the rules: a proposal has to be physical infrastructure in a public space, cost at least fifty thousand dollars, and have a useful life of at least five years.
Read those limits before the idea session. A block that spends three meetings designing a tutoring program will watch it struck at vetting, and those volunteers rarely come back the next year.
Who gets a vote is a local decision
None of this runs through a board of elections, which is why the eligibility rules are unusually generous and set entirely at the local level.
The 49th Ward ballot is open to residents fourteen and older. The citywide process run by New York's Civic Engagement Commission, called The People's Money, goes further and lets any New Yorker eleven and older vote regardless of immigration status. Residency, not citizenship or voter registration, is the usual test.
That design is deliberate. Teenagers, noncitizens, and people who never registered are exactly the residents who use the parks and sidewalks being funded, and a process counting only registered voters would reproduce the participation gap it was invented to close.
What the research actually found in Brazil
The strongest evidence for this model is not American and is older than most of the American programs.
Sonia Goncalves examined Brazilian municipalities from 1990 to 2004 in a 2014 paper in the journal World Development and found that the towns running participatory budgets shifted a larger share of spending toward sanitation and health services, and that the shift tracked with a measurable drop in infant mortality. The mechanism was unglamorous. Money followed what residents said they needed, and what they said they needed was pipes.
American programs are far smaller and the honest claim about them is narrower. A million dollars in one ward buys curb ramps, lighting, and playground equipment, not a change in public health outcomes. What it reliably produces is a public record of what a neighborhood asked for, ranked by vote count, and that record works as evidence long after the ballots are counted.
The two years between a vote and a bench
The most common complaint about these programs is not fraud and not capture by an organized group. It is delay.
A winning project still has to be designed, bid, permitted, and scheduled by a city department carrying its own backlog. A repaving job voted on in April may not be poured until the following summer. Anything needing land acquisition or utility coordination can outlast the term of the official who ran the vote, and residents read that silence as theater.
- Ask what happened to last cycle's winners, by project name and completion date.
- Ask who tracks projects after the vote and whether that tracking list is published.
- Ask what happens when a winning project comes in over its estimate.
- Ask whether unspent money rolls into the next cycle or reverts to the official's discretion.
- Ask how many people voted last cycle, since a few hundred ballots is common.
An office that can answer all five in one phone call is running a real process. One that cannot is running an opinion survey with a ballot box in front of it.
The question to put to your council office
Call the district office and ask one thing first: does this office put any part of its discretionary capital or infrastructure allocation to a resident vote, and if not, what happens to that money instead. Every ward, district, and council seat in a city with menu-style allocations has such a pot, whether or not anyone votes on it.
If the answer is yes, ask for the cycle calendar and the rulebook, which usually exist as public documents. If the answer is no, you have learned something more useful than a rulebook. You now know the size of the fund, the name of the person who decides it alone, and the exact ask to bring to the next public meeting, which is not a bench or a light but a process for choosing them.