The issues and arguments pro and con were presented in five films, each shown on every single television channel covering New York City, Newark, New Haven, Bridgeport, Paterson, Trenton, and Long Island, plus two channels in Hartford (outside of the New York Region) - 19 in all. Showings were spread over Saturday-Sunday-Monday peri­ods beginning March 17-19, 1973, then every two weeks until May 15-17. An average of 600,000 of the Region’s households was tuned in to each one-one household of every 11. The films were also recorded in Spanish.

CHOICES did ​“astonishingly well,” according to the TV stations’ liaison to the project. Network documentaries shown in prime time tend to get only about half as many viewers as CHOICES programs did. While the number of households tuned to CHOICES dropped from the 700,000 households or more tuned into the first program to slightly below half a million tuned to the last one, the drop appear­ed to be caused by a general drop in television watching as winter turned to late spring. In fact, throughout the series, CHOICES programs kept about the same percentage of the households tuned in to television at the hours it was being shown - about 5%. Furthermore, its audiences were more stable through the four 15-minute quarters than audiences for television programs as a whole.

Ballots to register people’s choices on the issues were widely available. An average of 26,500 ballots was sub­mitted after each of the five presentations, 41,000 after the first - following considerable organizing effort and publici­ty - tapering to 14,500 after the fifth. Three-fourths of the ballots came from persons who had watched the television presentations.

Some 20,000 persons took part in at least one discussion of the issues following the TV shows, meeting in small groups in homes, churches and offices. Two out of five bal­lots came from those who had discussed the issues first.

Written background information was available in a pa­perback, How To Save Urban America, in book stores and on newsstands and sent free to all social studies teachers in the area. Several companies distributed copies or sold them at a discount to interested employees. About 100,000 copies were distributed.

Participation was encouraged by staff and volunteer or­ganizers, assisted by: a few newspaper ads, a few TV spots, three television programs describing CHOICES, radio pro­grams and announcements, and the extensive newspaper coverage. The six major organizing efforts centered on: 1) church membership, (2) employees of contributing cor­porations, (3) schools and colleges, (4) civic and political groups already interested in urban and planning issues, (5) in New York City, the borough presidents’ offices and their own community planning boards, (6) the black and Puerto Rican communities, which were organized by a separate Committee on Minority Affairs that also commented on the films as they were developed and produced their own bal­lots and background reading for two of the Town Meetings.

All 46 daily newspapers in the Region publicized the project; 36 ran at least one article or editorial on CHOICES every week, on the average, over the 13 weeks just before and during the project. Twenty-six ran at least four of the five ballots as a public service, thirteen published back­ground information on the issues before people voted, and six publicized the ballot results extensively.

Mayor John V. Lindsay proclaimed March 31, 1973 ​“CHOICES for ​‘76” day in New York City, commending the ​“unique opportunity provided by the Regional Plan Association to make [citizens of New York] heard on the issues of housing, transportation, environment, poverty, and cities and government.”

Regional Plan Association was awarded an Emmy and the Architecture Critics’ Citation for CHOICES for ​’76. The CHOICES project should be seen as an effort to im­prove the kind of pluralistic political process that now shapes policies in our large urban areas but not to replace it and not to try to structure civic activities through one frame. The attempted improvements are in five directions:

1. Enlarging the number and broadening the type of people involved in the civic-political process;
2. Providing positive options - citizen groups are adept at stopping proposals but not at finding solutions;
3. Providing better information on which people can base their views;
4. Giving more people practice in the processes of civic­political action, practice absorbing the background in­formation, discussing the issues in small groups, fac­ing the hard trade-offs and making the yes-or-no choice that finally has to be made; and
   
5. Stimulating a sense of community both by the pro­cess of discussing serious issues with colleagues or neighbors and by seeing the reality of a regional com­munity.