📺️ Better Block on Pix11 and 🎢Momentum Building Around Solving Trash on Fulton

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello and welcome to the 7 new subscribers this week of the Better Block Project, bringing our total group of advocates to 51! This is the highest weekly growth in subscribers we’ve seen since the start of this update.

Our efforts are getting noticed by the local NYC media, as the Better Block Project was featured on Pix11 News this week 🥂 ! Check out (and share) this video from Greg Mocker below to hear about the problems we’re working on, how we operate and what we’re trying to accomplish.

In addition to this, we had a very successful Community BBQ at the Greene Garden with over 30 attendees. We had burgers, heard from Jim Walden and ended with some dancing on the dance floor 💃 🕺 . Huge thanks to Jeanette and the Greene Garden for hosting, Jim Walden for speaking and everyone who was able to come out on Sunday!

Alright, let’s get down to business!

🎢 Building momentum around solving trash on Fulton

This week, Better Block’s primary focus was solving the trash problem on Fulton. We officially scheduled our community meeting for Wednesday, July 9th, at the basement of St. Peter Claver Church from 7-8:30pm (shoutout to Meredith for helping us book the space!). We’ve invited City, State, DSNY and Bed Stuy BID officials to this meeting to hear concerns from the community and discuss solutions. The goal of this meeting is to raise awareness 📣 of the issue, and show how important a cleaner Fulton street is to the community. RSVP here to attend. Please share this link with your fellow neighbors and block leaders. We’re also planning on passing out fliers on Fulton street to inform the community, starting this Tuesday. If you want to join, reply and let me know.

💡 Getting smarter on the problem

In order to truly solve trash on Fulton, it’s important we understand how trash pick up works and why the problem is the way it is. I’m reminded of a quote Daniel Golliher, an expert on New York City and founder of Maximum New York, shared with me recently, “is before ought”. We all have lots of ideas about what can improve the city, but in order for them to be effective, we need to know how things work first. Here is what we learned this week after speaking with the head of the BedStuy BID and the Sanitation manager for Fulton Street:

• We originally thought sanitation pick up was only 3 days per week, but after speaking with DSNY, it turns out garbage pick up is actually already 6 days per week

• Sanitation confirmed what we heard from the Bed Stuy BID: the trash problem is severe. The manager shared that you likely need trucks multiple times per day to solve the problem

• We also got smarter on how Sanitation works on the street: DSNY owns collections of litter baskets, businesses are supposed to have their trash pick up done privately and the Bed Stuy BID helps provide supplemental cleaning. In addition to this, ACE, another non-profit, helps with collection on the streets intersecting Fulton. As you get deeper into how New York works, you start to discover that private organizations run a lot of services you might have expected the city to run (I recently learned the The High Line park is fully privately funded!)

With this much trash and four separate ways to pick it up, is more pick up really the answer? Let’s talk about enforcement and containerization…

🖐️ Increasing enforcement

On Wednesday, I was stopped at a red light on Lexington and Throop with a car in front of me. Without warning, the car ran the red light. No accident was caused, but the individual didn’t receive a ticket, either. Unfortunately, this low-level rule breaking is a recurring theme I’ve encountered as I’ve learned more about how New York City works…and doesn’t work. Our vacant property on 1105 Fulton has several unaddressed violations, same with 26 Jefferson. Often, the challenge in New York isn’t needing more laws, it’s just enforcing the laws we already have.

Back to our trash issue, the reason this exists is because of illegal dumping, which is against the law. In order to fix this challenge, we need our city to better enforce this law. So, why isn’t it happening? We’ve heard from the DSNY and Bed Stuy BID that while illegal dumping is caught on camera, it’s often difficult to catch the individual or car and give them a ticket.

In our research, this is a problem many cities face (see here for a full analysis on Philadelphia). While there isn’t a clear formula for solving the problem, cities that have employed a combination of tactics have seen the most success:

1. More cameras to monitor activity

2. Active patrols to ticket illegal dumping as it occurs

3. Holding property owners more accountable for illegal dumping

4. Visible signage to discourage illegal dumping and positive community nudges to promote clean streets

🗑️ More containerization

When you drive down Fulton street and review the issue directly, most of the trash is driven by dumping near litter baskets where it doesn’t belong.

More containerization, via the larger City Bins, means this trash can get off the street, limit attracting rats and discourage more dumping from occurring in the future. As we wrote about in our last update, the Bed Stuy BID cites 12-14 additional city bins would make a huge difference to improve this.

💵 Funding the solution

Increased enforcement and additional city bins require more investment. We discovered a few different options for funding this effort:

• The full FY26 City budget which allocates ~$2B in funding to Sanitation, these funds are already accounted for

• Discretionary budgets from City Council, State Assembly and the State Senator. These funds are easier to influence, and often go to local non-profits

The good news is there is a precedent for a City Council’s office to allocate significant funds for trash clean up, as Lincoln Restler has already done in his district in Brooklyn. The bad news is most of this discretionary funding has been earmarked already 🤦 (it’s a process that takes place November to January). In speaking with City Council Chi Osse’s office, there is some allocation for containerization but the amount will not be known until July and it’s not clear if this is actually going to solve the problem.

🚶 Next steps with Trash

As we push forward with our advocacy, our goal is to work primarily with the Bed Stuy BID to understand exactly what amount of funding is needed to truly clean up Fulton and advocate with discretionary budgets across all of our elected officials to get those funds.

In addition to this, we’ve heard from City Council and DSNY that 311 is an effective way to document the problem, so we’re aggressively submitting requests. I took a drive along Fulton on Thursday and saw overflowing trash at almost every corner, and submitted 12 requests documenting each 🕵️ . The city might regret telling me to do this…

⏳ Where we are on the other problems we’re working on

We continue to push forward on the other problems we’re solving, see below for updates on each:

• 🐝 Removing the Wasp’s Nest in Williamsburg: We were optimistic our Pix 11 news coverage would cause the nest to be removed, but as of now, and after a follow up with City Council, it still stands. We’re going to wait another 1-2 weeks to see if City Council and the Parks Department come thru, and if not, we’re going to take matters into our own hands

• 🏠️ Protecting Residents from Property Tax Reform: We followed up (again!) with the key stakeholders in the upcoming tax reform: Senator Gounardes, Assemblymember Braunstein, and Property Tax Committee Chair Jaime Williams. We still have heard nothing from their offices, and the legislation session has closed, suggesting that nothing is happening on this issue again this year

• 🗑️ Repairing vacant buildings on 1105 Fulton and 26 Jefferson: DOB still has not called us back, despite multiple follow ups, so it’s unclear where we are with enforcement on both properties. However, next week, I will be attending a breakfast with the commissioner of HPD, and my hope is to bring this situation to his attention, along with continuing to follow up with the DOB

🤝 How you can help

1. Share the July 9th Fulton Community Trash Event with anyone you know impacted by the issue, and make plans to attend! The more people who are there, the more likely we are to see action from our local leaders

2. If you think you can help out on any of the problems above, just reply to this update. This community is a large part of the power we have to make a difference

That’s all for this week’s update. If you like what we’re doing here, share betterblockproject.com with other community members you know who are looking to drive change in Brooklyn. The bigger our community, the bigger our impact.

See you next week,

David