Discover NYC.

Is there anyone who isn't on Kickstarter these days? The latest bandwagon-jumpers: The New York City Council, which has partnered with the artsy crowdfunding platform to create a landing page that highlights New York City-based projects.

The move is positioned as a way to help business owners in low-income neighborhoods get access to hard-to-find capital, a persistent problem.

Remember when microlending was going to solve everything? Now it's crowdfunding. Wonder what it'll be in five years? 

From the announcement:

The Council’s page will serve as a place for residents to pledge their support for local projects that have the potential to yield a variety of benefits to underserved communities. With projects ranging from neighborhood urban farms to public art installations and performances to co-ops and cafes – the potential for positive community change, civic engagement and urban renewal is limitless.

Held up as a success story is Seasoned Vegan, a restaurant that'll open in Harlem in September, thanks to a $22,185 Kickstarter campaign.

Projects currently in the spotlight include a "Beatboxing Program for Blind Kids in the Bronx," pop-up and performance project "The Last Night of Service at Chez Gourmet," and "Brownsville Student Farm Project." A mixed bag, but it sounds like the Council has big ambitions for this little landing page:

“From East New York to the South Bronx, we’re going to kickstart New York’s low-income communities through our partnership with Kickstarter, said Speaker Christine C. Quinn. “New Yorkers are still struggling, and we need to do everything we can to give people a leg up.”

To our ears, that's a new positioning for Kickstarter, which--despite its blossoming reputation as a place for hardware startups to raise money--has hewn pretty hard toward the artsy, rather than the pragmatic. In fact, the whole plan also sounds an awful lot like what two nascent New York City-based startups, SmallKnot and Lucky Ant, are already doing--offering platforms explicitly tailored to the needs of small businesses looking to raise money.