👋 Hello HPD, 🧱 Helping More Vacant Properties and ⚡️ 311 Blitz

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello and welcome to the 3 new subscribers this week of the Better Block Project, bringing our total group of advocates to 54! 

Before we dive in to this week’s update, I want to remind everyone about our upcoming event to clean up 🗑️ Trash on Fulton Street on July 9th. I was out on Fulton Street this week passing out fliers in the community and it only reinforced my belief that everyone in Bed Stuy wants this street to be cleaner. We officially have confirmed attendance from the leader of the Bed Stuy BID, Department of Sanitation and Chi Osse’s office, so I expect this to be a productive meeting to advocate for more enforcement and clean up. RSVP here, hope you can make it!

📷️ Expanding the Aperture with Vacant Properties

This week, Better Block’s primary focus was improving the vacant properties on 1105 Fulton and 26 Jefferson. We also have some new properties on our radar that we plan to assist with: 73 and 75 Macon Street, between Nostrand and Marcy.

The story with these vacant properties 🎶 rhymes a lot with what we have experienced with 1105 Fulton and 26 Jefferson:

• They’ve been empty for multiple years with no visible activity

• They are a frequent magnet for trash

• The owners have caused small property damage to the neighbors

• Occasionally homeless people will sleep on the property under the awning

It’s a reminder that for every one of the 33K+ vacant properties in New York city, many are not only a missed opportunity for housing, but are also causing challenges for their surrounding neighbors. The unique opportunity with these properties is they are both quite beautiful, and represent a great chance for restoration to preserve some of the historical magic of the Bed Stuy neighborhood. For next steps, it’s our goal to engage with the owners first to understand what the current state of the properties are. There is always a story, so we’re going to do research with Serhant (their prior broker), the renovation hub, and public property records to make contact. If you think you can help, just reply to this email. Let the sleuthing begin 🕵️ 

👋 Hello Housing Preservation and Development (HPD)

If you’ve been following our pursuit to improve these vacant properties, you’ll know I’ve been waiting for about a month now for a call from the Department of Buildings to understand the status of both 1105 Fulton and 26 Jefferson. Well, they still haven’t called 🤦 I sent another follow up to Chi Osse’s office asking for an update, but I didn’t want to sit on my hands and wait for something to happen. So, this week, thanks to my good friend Aaron Kinnari, I was lucky enough to attend the breakfast his organization, the Future Forum, hosted about the Future of Housing and Unlocking Underutilized Spaces. It was an incredible event highlighting the activity in office to residential conversions (if you don’t know about City of Yes, you should!) and all of the development that was happening to address the housing crisis. I was excited about the topic, but I was also excited for another reason: the HPD Commissioner was attending and I thought they could be helpful in addressing our vacant properties.

Sure enough, I was able to meet with the Assistant Commissioner and share more about our efforts to improve these vacant properties. The Assistant Commissioner is going to help us in a couple of ways:

1. The HPD Emergency Repair Program: This is a program I was already aware of, but essentially if a property is in severe disrepair, HPD will step in and make the needed fixes, and then bill the owner. 26 Jefferson is a great candidate for this, so the Assistant Commissioner is investigating

2. The HPD’s Preservation Program: This is a program I wasn’t aware of, but for properties that are historical and we want to avoid demolishing, HPD can also step in here to make and help fund the repairs. 1105 Fulton and our new properties on 73 and 75 Macon are both great candidates for this, so we’re going to work with HPD on this

I’m still hopeful the DOB will call us back to understand the current state of 1105 Fulton and 26 Jefferson, but I am excited that we have an additional tool we can use to improve these vacant properties and push towards a positive resolution for the neighborhood. Stay tuned as we make more progress here.

⚡️ 311 Blitz

While this week was mostly focused on vacant building improvement, I wanted to shout out some unexpected value from using 311. When I spoke to City Council and DSNY about improving the trash situation, the answer I received from both was “call 311.” Initially, this was a bit demoralizing as 311 feels like a black hole, and how could submitting a single 311 complaint fix the pervasive trash issue on all of Fulton street?

Well, as I mentioned last week, over the past 7 days I’ve been doing daily auditing of Fulton street, and every time I see trash, I take a picture and submit a 311 complaint. My goal was to be a 📣 megaphone for pain on Fulton. This has resulted in 35 311 complaints about individual trash sites in the last week, and I am not even addressing all the trash that is there. So, what’s the impact? DSNY is noticing 🎉 !

I’ve received multiple calls from the Sanitation Manager who serves Fulton between Classon and Marcy, and he’s shared that the 311 complaints are starting to get through 💪. Every 311 complaint has to be addressed by DSNY, so the more we submit, the more they have to pay attention. As a result, he’s informed me this is causing upper management to consider increasing collection routes and enforcement for Fulton Street.

My plan is to continue to double down on this up until July 9th to submit as many as possible in order to drive awareness, and motivate a solution from DSNY. If you want to help, when you see trash just take a picture and submit it here. For clarity, I am only submitting a 311 complaint when I see an actual issue (which is evidenced by a photo). I think it’s important we stick true to this value, as anytime DSNY is spending time on our problem, it means they are spending less time on someone else’s issue.

I believe ⚡️ blitzing 311 can be a helpful advocacy tool for Better Block as we tackle more problems that are owned by the city, so I am excited to use this moving forward to increase our effectiveness.

⏳ 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: The Wasp nests still stands in Williamsburg, and City Council has gone dark in terms of identifying steps to remove it. If we don’t hear anything in the next week, our plan is to contract with exterminators to remove the nest, then communicate to the city what we did

• 🗑️ Cleaning up the Trash on Fulton Street: We spent time this week passing out fliers to drive attendance for our July 9th meeting and continuing to submit evidence to 311 to drive awareness of the problem with DSNY. It’s our plan to continue to do this and learn more about the problem over the next 2 weeks to drive us much attendance for the July 9th event

• 🏠️ Protecting Residents from Property Tax Reform: After getting nowhere with follow up emails, I decided to call the offices of Senator Gounardes, Assemblymember Braunstein, and Assemblymember Williams to grab time to discuss the property tax reform issue. The good news, all of them picked up the phone (I have learned the city is way more responsive to phone than email), the bad news, no one has confirmed a schedule. I plan to follow up again the week after next if we hear nothing

💼 Legal update

We made some progress this week on getting legal support for the problems we’re trying to solve at Better Block. We now have three solid leads with large law firm Pro Bono practices to work with us, and we’re trying to start those evaluations to ultimately secure support for our cause. After discussing with more attorneys, we believe a Pro Bono partnership will be the best option for us early on, as it will give us big law firm support on cases that could take a very long time, with no cost to the Better Block Project.

🤝 How you can help

1. As a reminder, 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.

Next week, I will be in Istanbul, Turkey for my wife’s sister’s wedding 💒 . I still plan to send a Better Block update, but expect it to be more reflective on what we have done and our path forward.

See you next week,

David