Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani: What's going on, everybody? Ninety-two years ago, Fiorello La Guardia took office as mayor of New York City. Over the years that followed, Mayor La Guardia transformed our city. He built incredible public works and an astounding amount of housing. He protected immigrants and uplifted the poor, and he used the most cutting-edge technology of his time to speak directly to the people of New York. In the 30s and 40s, that was radio. But I like to think that if Twitch existed back then, he would have streamed too. Mayor La Guardia spoke to New Yorkers on the radio on his show called Talk to the People. This is our absolutely shameless homage, Talk with the People. We're live on Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and yes, TikTok. If you're watching this on Twitch, drop your questions in the chat and I'll answer as many as I can. We'll also be posting these conversations wherever you listen to podcasts: on your commute, washing dishes, pretending to answer emails. Because government should be accessible. You should hear directly from your city about what we're doing and why we're doing it. So, let's get into it.
Here are a few things we did just this week. Today, we were so excited to announce that we were going to be delivering 1,000 $50 tickets to the World Cup just for New Yorkers. Now, last year when I was running for this position, I spoke about how New Yorkers deserved to have cheaper tickets to actually make sure that they could go and see the magic of the World Cup, not just have to feel it in the city that they know as their home. Today, we announced the thanks to a partnership with the New York-New Jersey Host Committee, we're doing exactly that. These 1,000 tickets are going to be sold, $50 a pop, to New York City residents. All you have to be is older than 15 years old and live in our city. And I'm sorry to Philly sports fans, that does not apply to you. Now, the way that you actually enter into this lottery is on Monday, Memorial Day, at 10 a.m., we're gonna open up this lottery from 10 a.m. to midnight. And it's going to open every day for the [following] five days. You can enter into the lottery once a day. We're capping it at 50,000 entries per day. And if you win the chance to get a ticket, you'll also get the chance to buy an additional ticket, either for a family or friend or whomever you'd like. And with that ticket is going to come free bus travel from New York City to the stadium, because we know that just as much as ticket pricing has been a prohibitive part for New Yorkers dreaming about going to the World Cup, so too has transit. And so, this is going to be part of our initiative to make it easier for New Yorkers to actually be a part of this incredible tournament.
Now, I want to also shout out something that we did a few days earlier, which is make an announcement that we are extending 100,000 offers of Pre-k and 3K to New Yorkers across the five boroughs. This was part of our announcement that we were adding 2,000 new 3K seats. Now, as part of these invitations that we are sending out to children across the city to be a part of this program, to their parents, we were also really proud of the investments we were actually able to make into these systems, which means that this time around we saw that 85 percent of families received one of their top three 3K choices. And what we saw is that the average commute for families, we cut that by six blocks. Now six blocks may not sound like a lot to you and me, but if you're walking with a toddler, six blocks is quite a bit of time. So, we're very, very excited about this, because we don't just want universal childcare to be something that is remarkable because of the fact that everyone can access it at a technical level. We also want it to be something that is easy for New Yorkers to be a part of, something that's in their own neighborhoods, something that they can look at and marvel at the quality of the instruction and say: "This is a program that I want [for] my three-year-old, my four-year-old."
