🚌 Incident at Franklin & Fulton Bus Stop & MTA Requests Community Letter

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello and happy NYC Marathon 🏃 Sunday!  Halloween and the marathon make this one of the best weekends of the year in the city, hope you all are enjoying it. And, welcome to the 3 new subscribers of the Better Block Project, bringing our total group to 105 members 🥳

📣 Reminder: Mapping for Equity Event on Saturday, November 15th @ Herbert Von King Park

We’re just 2 weeks away from the Mapping For Equity Event, and I hope to see you there. This is a great opportunity to identify missing public infrastructure in the neighborhood and use it as a tool for advocacy, so I hope you can make it out. The full details to register are here.

🚌 Incident at Franklin & Fulton Bus Stop

After last Sunday’s update, I heard from a member of Better Block about an incident at the Franklin & Fulton Bus Stop. A young woman who was purchasing a carton of milk from the Lincoln Place Grocery Store on the corner, a place I’ve visited probably 50 times, was chased down by a man wielding a studded belt. She was then cornered in front of the bus stop, pushed up against the wall and then he proceeded to hit her with the belt. Luckily, someone intervened and ran off the person who was doing the attack. I encourage you watch the video from News 12 to hear directly from the victim of the attack.

This is the exact location where we held our walk more than 2 months ago with police and elected officials to raise awareness about the situation. Residents on the walk shared very similar stories about drug dealing, individuals fighting and someone being chased with a knife. You can read more about it here. After that walk, we were promised lighting but the NYPD never delivered on that request. We were also promised that increased police presence would address the situation, but the problem remains unsolved. It’s deeply frustrating that our city leaders and elected officials were made aware of the problem, promised next steps, did not follow through on those promises, and now someone else has been victimized as a result of it.

We reached out to City Council to follow up on this situation, and they informed us they are encouraging NYPD to amp up police presence in the area. I walked by the bus stop yesterday to see if anything had changed. There are still no lights up and there was no police presence on the corner. I passed two people doing drugs, and a similar level of trash that was there last week.

✉️ MTA Requests Community Letter

We followed up with the MTA, who runs the bus stop on Franklin & Fulton and is storing the construction in front that has created the hideout for illicit activity. As a reminder, we have been advocating with them to remove the seating or the full bus shelter to deter the illicit activity from occurring.

We heard back from them on Friday with some positive news. The MTA is requesting that we put together a letter from the community with our request, which will also be signed by elected officials and the Community Board. With this letter, we’re hopeful the request will be approved and action will finally be taken to improve the bus shelter so it is safer for residents.

As next steps, we’re going to partner with the Franklin-Brevoort Block Association and nearby block associations to align on our exact request and then share the letter with elected officials and the community board for signature. It’s worth noting, this is not the first letter to be written about this situation. Both the Franklin-Brevoort Block Association and Lefferts Place Block Associations have written letters before, to see little improvement. I met some new individuals from the Lefferts Place Block Association yesterday at their community garden, who shared they have been advocating to improve the situation for years and seen little success with local officials and the Community Board. It’s a story that deeply resonates with me, as I wrote about in our update last week.

Despite this, I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll be able to convince the MTA to do something to improve the situation this time. As the old saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed, try try again. There’s another saying that says the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Let’s hope that is not true here.

If you’d like to be a part of the letter or have any feedback on what you think the solution should be, just reply to this email. The more people we get to sign the letter, the more likely we are to see action from the MTA.

⏳ Progress on the other problems we’re working on

• 🏠️ Improving Vacant Buildings on Fulton, Jefferson and Macon: We’re continuing to do our research on how building fines work today, in order to inform the policy we’d like to propose to hold negligent landlords and developers more accountable for poor behavior on their properties. We’re meeting on November 17th to review the research and align on what we think is the best policy path to propose to our elected officials

• 🧹 Cleaning up Trash on Fulton Street: We still haven’t heard back from the Bed Stuy BID on forming the budget request for containerization, so I’ll plan to follow up this week to get this formalized. Our hope is to secure budget for the increased containers on the hot spot trash corners (Nostrand and Fulton, Spencer and Fulton) as we think this will truly solve the problem

That’s all for this week’s update. As always, if you like what we’re doing here at the Better Block Project, forward this to someone else you know who wants to do more work in the community!

See you next week,

David