You have unlimited funds. How do you help your city?

I think this is an interesting topic because I think every major city in the US would succeed under similar plans. Not identical, and the extent and work for the three would be different. I am going to tag-team two cities near and dear to my heart and say both of them would benefit extensively from these three things:

1. Public transit funding: Boston is doing a lot of work on this right now and a lot of my suggestions are actually just funding projects that are already being floated. With infinite budget, I would also suggest a lot of these changes for Cleveland as well. All of this public transportation would be free to use.

• Electric trains for a commuter rail system to bring people who live outside of the city into the city. Trains need to be running at least every 15 minutes for them to be a viable alternative to cars.
• Cabled electric buses + dedicated bus and bike lanes throughout the city. Electric cable buses run for longer than traditional gas buses and cost less in the long run once the infrastructure is in place as well as being more environmentally friendly. Dedicated bus lanes make riding the bus more attractive because not only do you not have to drive, but if there is gridlock traffic a dedicated bus lane allows the buses to be uninhibited by traffic. Boston has been adding a few to major congestion points and have seen a huge drop in delays and significantly better service. Hopefully ridership will follow as buses become better.
• Buses to/from commuter rail stations. A big inhibitor on getting people from the suburbs to take the train in is that they need to get to the train station, usually by car, and leave it there. Parking lots fill up fast and then people end up just driving in anyway or not even trying to take the train because who knows if the parking lot will have space. Buses in suburbs to shuttle people to the commuter rail could help alleviate this.
• Ensure public transit is useful, consistent, and available for low-income areas. I don't feel like I really need to explain why making free public transit useful for the people who need it the most is a necessity.

2. Housing

• Affordable housing with a focus on ensuring high-income people don't force low-income workers out of neighborhoods.
• New housing construction should be built to tie affordable housing with easy access to public transportation.
• New housing construction should be environmentally sustainable.
• This should be a diverse environment type for the various needs of different communities (assisted living for senior citizens and the mentally ill, addition rehabilitation housing, crime rehabilitation housing). The goal of this would be to make housing affordable and do everything possible to end homelessness and address other major issues that affect these two cities (homelessness + opioid epidemic) via housing and public transit.

3. The most controversial, spending on reparations for communities of color. I have a less clear bullet list for what this one looks like, however cleveland is ranked as one of the worst major cities to live by every metric for POC, specifically black women (tildes discussion here). Though the stats aren't much better for men. Similarly, in 2017 the Boston Globe found that the average household savings for a white family in boston was $20,000 $247K (edit: just re-read my source and jesus its so much worse than I remembered) and the average household saving for a black family was $8 (source). In Boston, our communities of color also are disproportionately affected by public transportation issues and because of this have worse life expectancy due to air pollution inequality. My "plan" here would be to work with local groups who have been focusing on this for years.

Edit: Adding a new source for point 3: there is a link between discriminatory housing rules and the average temperature, something that will increasingly become an issue as climate change worsens.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

I see a lot of things here that I'd really like to do (like gigabit fiber), but with only three projects, I have to focus on more fundamental human needs. Gigabit fiber doesn't matter if you've got nowhere to live and no food. I'm a little surprised at some of the projects listed here and the places of privilege they come from. Are there just no homeless people in some parts of the world? Are there no problems with hunger? Healthcare?

We've got a number of serious issues here--we're the poorest big city in the nation, and we have a lot of folks below the poverty line. So bringing people above the poverty line, and providing affordable housing for them, would be a good first step. Making sure people have their fundamental needs taken care of will solve a LOT of issues--not just having the needs met, but also the psychological stress of worrying about not having those needs met.

I'd like to start with a universal basic income to address this. It is my considered (socialist) opinion that it is the job of the government to provide for its people, and I'm quite happy to pay higher taxes in order to do so. If folks have income and housing, the city will improve as folks are able to live their lives more equitably, more peacefully, and free of the stresses of providing for their basic needs. It's not just an investment in the people, it's an investment in the city by way of making people happier and less stressed, depressed, etc. Cities are very much alive, with the citizens impacting one another in subtle and overt ways. Making things better for others makes things better for oneself. And since I have unlimited funds, I'd love to have folks around the level of income that I enjoy right now. I'm in the 92nd percentile for income in the US, and I'm debt free. Everyone should be able to enjoy the level of income that a mid-career software developer does. No one should be rich, but conversely no one should be poor.

Beyond this, we've also got a serious opioid problem in the city. I'm not sure how to address this. Part of it is certainly because life just sucks, so making life suck less would be a very good first step. That's part of the point of the UBI above, to get folks to a point where they don't feel as much of a need to rely on opioids to make life bearable. But more broadly than this, I'd like to provide universal healthcare as well, with a focus on addiction treatment. We have a number of addiction treatment centers in the city, but they don't have the funding (or staffing, which is a function of funding) that they need to do the work we so desperately need. I'm really uncertain what to do here. We've got some hospitals in bad shape because of money, so putting more money into the hospitals would be great, too. Can I say "invest in healthcare" as a project?

Now that most people's basic survival needs have been met, things get more interesting. I'd initially think education, and had a paragraph about that and its relationship to engineering in improving quality of life, but we have a lot of other more fundamental problems, too. A better police force would help--and by better I don't mean more officers, I mean better laws that reflect the times and how people actually live. I'm socially super liberal, even by European standards, and I'd like to support a judicial system that reflects the "live and let live" philosophy.

Project One - Big ass college campus with the best of the best as the teachers and huge amount of advertising money. College tuition is free for the first five years, or whatever is required to get tons and tons of attention from students across the nation.

Project Two - Widespread gigabit or higher internet infrastructure, along with much wider roads and lots of highway infrastructure to allow for an expanding city and new businesses.

Project Three - Massive solar/wind/nuclear power plant to supplant coal/fossil fuel generation.

I can't specify my city as I want to remain private, but I think the above three would be a boon.

One thing I've noticed with cities that it's difficult to build a community from the top down. You can put in a city owned rec center, grocery co-op, college or fiber network, but community is going to be a difficult nut to crack. To try and combat that, I'd focus on providing housing and ammentities to residents, a robust portfolio of work and study opportunities available around the city, and an acceptable number of "third places" be they libraries, churches, cafes, bars or eateries. With jobs taking up more and more of a community angle, I feel obligated to try and work against that.

EDIT: SE Michigan. My city is in pretty good shape economically, but others around me aren't, and isolation is a pretty universal constant.

I live in a small city, Canadian, and I'm mostly happy with it mostly! My three municipal fixes with infinite money:

1. Our bus routes and schedules are not good for people who don't have cars; they don't run on Sundays and only half on Saturdays. Hire a few consultants to work on the routes, hire bus drivers, etc., get me some full service and good coverage and make it free.

2. Infrastructure for biking. I want Little Copenhagen in Eastern Canada. Bike elevators and good snow clearing. Let's get people moving and less reliant on cars in general. :)

3. Pour money into development of housing assistance for low-income people. Our vacancy rate is crazy low and the only new things being built are luxury apartments (we're of course attracting tech companies and thus tech workers lately so rent is going up). We need either rent subsidies for them or more affordable housing, and probably more social programs as well. The current mayor is trying to end homelessness altogether in our city - so I think I might just give him a credit card and tell him to go nuts.

Richmond Virginia

I'd improve the quality of inner city schools.
I'd buy up empty/unused real estate and turn them into green areas to back off the urban sprawl/VCU takeover.
I'd give funding for small businesses, in particular arts/culture based ones.

Now those are my 3 GRAND gestures. With my personal wealth, I'd buy the Byrd theater and reinstate the $2 ticket price and preserve it the way it used to be, forever as a reminder of the perfect sleepy city Richmond was, and can hopefully continue to be.

Auckland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auckland

Unlimited funds. Hopefully from one of those magical sources of unlimited wealth.

1. Buy ALL land and houses in the city (well, in the country). Housing is ridiculously expensive in Auckland compared to wages and other costs of living. The plan is to buy all the houses and basically reset the system to affordable levels. Perhaps not resell the land and only offer leasehold and renting. It would also simplify future development to build up with apartments.

2 & 3. Public Transport infrastructure. Auckland basically has a Y-shaped train line that is largely useless to where the a lot of the people live. Funding a train line from Orewa in the north to Britomart (CBD) would ease a lot of traffic issues. Also fund the proposed light rail system that is getting delayed and crap such that it appears to not actually have any intention of getting it built.

If 1 is invalid (ie: purchasing n properties is n projects, so limited to purchasing 1 property project), then I would replace it with building a apartment building full of 2-4 bedroom dwellings in the middle of either Ponsonby, Freemans Bay, St Mary's Bay, Parnel, Orakei. Those places are the most expensive areas and the residents would likely object to anything like this. The apartments would be rented out cheaply on long term leases (2 years minimum) to allow for as many.

Metropolitan region of São Paulo.

First: Massively boost public transportation and other public amenities. Finish the Rodoanel (São Paulo's long delayed ringroad), build a metro rodoanel in and around the city from the Guarulhos airport around the whole city to Osasco to the ABC (a subregion in the south of the greater region of São Paulo for 3 cities called saint Andre, Bernard and Caetano) to Suzano until it reaches the airport again. Help people in slums actually build good houses. Invest more in education, make it primarily Internet-based with a few exceptions like handwriting, add economics and civics as subjects, turn the classroom into an interactive lecture of sorts and also make it for all ages (because only having your youngest generation be educated means that until they become the majority this will be in vain) and turn Brazilian public Healthcare into something more analogous to Germany.

2: Invest in clean energy and try to expand it into manufacturing and food, promote automation and software development. Once that's done well, automate the whole of public transport, make a bunch of private companies dedicated to lab grown meat which would hopefully replace farming completely and compete with US companies. (link to this.) Fund new privacy conscious start-ups to compete with US companies and promote privacy and make tech be less centered on Silicon Valley.

• Build a bunch of affordable student homes and/or buy existing high-income homes and rent them out for affordable prices to students
• Greatly improve the existing cargo-bike sharing project: More stations, better bikes, better pricing
• Gigabit Fiber to the home for everyone

Public transit

And cycling infrastructure...