Hack the City: 24 Hours to Fix New York
Spend 24 hours building real fixes for real New York problems, side by side with the city officials who deal with them every day.
We’re teaming up with [City Agency / Office] to bring founders, engineers, designers and policy nerds into one room for a full-day, overnight sprint. You won’t get made-up prompts here. Every track comes from a team inside city government, and the people who own each problem will be in the room to help you get it right.
Problem Statement
New York runs on systems that serve 8 million people: housing, transit, sanitation, small business permits, emergency services, 311. Many of these systems are slow, confusing or hard to reach for the people who need them most. Meanwhile, the city publishes thousands of open datasets that almost nobody builds on. Your challenge is to pick a problem New Yorkers face and build something that makes the city work better, for residents or for the public servants behind the scenes.
The Tracks
🏠 Housing & Affordability: Help New Yorkers find, apply for and keep affordable homes. Think Housing Connect lottery navigation, tenant rights tools, heat and repair complaint tracking, and spotting buildings at risk early.
🚇 Getting Around: Make streets and transit safer, faster and more accessible. Think accessible routing, street safety insights, curb and delivery management, and better service alerts.
🌳 Clean & Resilient City: Tackle trash, rats, flooding and extreme heat. Think sanitation routing, smarter 311 reporting, flood and heat risk maps, and neighborhood cooling resources.
🏪 Small Business & Jobs: Cut red tape for the people who keep NYC’s streets alive. Think permit and licensing navigators, compliance helpers, workforce matching, and tools for street vendors and bodegas.
🏛️ Government That Works: Make city services easier to use and city jobs easier to do. Think benefits enrollment, multilingual access, internal tools for city staff, and making open data usable.
Each track has a problem owner from city government who will brief you at kickoff and hold office hours during the hack.
What to Expect
Problem briefings from city officials and agency teams at kickoff
24 hours of building, Saturday 1 PM to Sunday 1 PM
Office hours with the city staff who own each problem
Workshops on NYC Open Data and city APIs, plus [Sponsor] tech demos
Teams of up to 4 or solo builders (we’ll match you if you need a team)
Meals all day and overnight, a nap space, and late-night programming
Final demos in front of city leaders, founders and investors
Schedule
Saturday, Feb 20
12:00 PM: Doors open, check-in, lunch
12:30 PM: Opening remarks and track briefings
1:00 PM: Hacking begins
3:00 PM: Workshop: building with NYC Open Data
4:30 PM: Sponsor workshop
7:00 PM: Fireside chat: what it’s actually like to build with government
8:30 PM: Dinner
11:59 PM: Midnight snack
Sunday, Feb 21
8:00 AM: Breakfast
1:00 PM: Hacking ends, submissions due
1:15 PM: Judging
2:20 PM: Final demos
3:10 PM: Awards
4:00 PM: Doors close
Prizes
Cash prizes - TBD
Judges
TBD
Who Should Attend
Founders and aspiring founders who want to build for the public sector
Engineers (full stack, backend, frontend, AI, data)
Designers and product people who care about usability
Policy, urban planning and public service folks
Anyone who’s ever been frustrated by a city process and thought “I could fix this”
You don’t need a finished idea or any government experience. Just show up ready to build for your city.
Sponsors
TBD
Hosts
localhost:nyc: Making NYC the biggest startup ecosystem in the world.