🚌 Progress Comes Slowly at the Fulton and Franklin Bus Stop

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello and welcome to the 2 new advocates of the Better Block Project, bringing our group to 94 members committed to improving the neighborhood 🪴 

Thanks ❤️ to everyone who attended our community meetup at the First Quincy Community Garden last Sunday. It was a beautiful day and energizing to hear everyone’s passion on issues ranging from building more affordable housing to cleaning up our streets. For those who attended, I hope you made some new friends. For those who couldn’t make it, we will do more of these in the future!

📣 Launching Tiger 🐯 Teams

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”

I announced this at our community meet up: we’re officially forming Tiger 🐯 Teams at Better Block. Our goal is to bring small groups of 3-5 community members together to help solve the issues Better Block is working on. These groups will be a mix of new and long term residents and individuals with different skillsets such as community organizing, technology, social media and policy development. Forming these teams will result in us coming up with better ideas, our impact will be larger and we will make deeper connections with each other. I’ve already texted many of you about inclusion in teams I think you might be interested in, but if you want to join one, here is the list:

• Cleaning up trash on Fulton street

• Building a new park

• Improving vacant properties

• Fixing street tree maintenance

• Cleaning up the Franklin & Fulton bus stop

Reply to this email with where you are interested in helping. The time commitment will be a monthly 1 hour meeting and a small homework assignment from that.

🚌 Progress Comes Slowly at the Fulton and Franklin Bus Stop

It’s been nearly a month since our community walk with elected officials highlighted the quality of life issues at the Franklin and Fulton bus stop and nearby Bedford Place. I remember leaving that meeting hopeful and with a few clear next steps from the NYPD and elected officials on what they would do to improve the situation:

1. NYPD planned to deploy additional quality of life officers to the area

2. NYPD promised (within 48 hours) to deploy 3 lights at the intersections to deter criminal activity

3. Our elected officials committed to engaging with the MTA to assess removing the bus shelter altogether to deter illegal activity

So what has happened? Let’s start with the NYPD 👮 
NYPD communicated they deployed additional officers to monitor the bus stop. However, despite multiple follow ups, the 3 lights that were promised are still not there. I was finally able to contact the officer this week to learn what happened. Due to the UN General Assembly and a recent homicide on Lexington in Bed Stuy, there were no lights available to address the situation. Now that the UN General Assembly is coming to an end, the officer is putting in the light requests again, which should be up in a few weeks.

What about the MTA? 🚇️ Chi Osse’s office got back to us yesterday as they were able to meet with the MTA to discuss the situation. Here is what we heard:

“The MTA has acknowledged these concerns and has committed to reviewing the current conditions. They will be following up with us regarding the outcomes and any next steps they plan to take.”

🤷

➡️ What does this mean for the bus stop?

I’ve visited the bus stop a few times over the last month and each time it looked slightly cleaner, but the illicit activity is still occurring. In talking with residents who live on the block and deal with this daily, they say the issue still isn’t solved.

It speaks to the nature of the issues Better Block is working on. Many of the problems we are highlighting operate at the edge of organizational, budget and legal capabilities. NYPD doesn’t have enough lights to go around for every security issue in New York City. MTA is a completely different governing body who runs the bus stop, so even if the local residents, City Council and State Assembly all believe it’s a good idea to remove the seating at the bus stop to reduce the illicit activity, it’s not our decision.

Perhaps there is a better way we could organize to solve these issues? Isaac Oates, who writes about ways to make cities work better, talks about how Paris has district Mayors for all of their neighborhoods, who have more authority to solve quality of life issues. New York could consider adopting a model like this to give City Council more executive authority to direct resources as supposed to having to negotiate with NYPD (who has the authority to allocate lights) or MTA (who runs that bus stop).

I am interested to hear what you think could be done to improve the issue. In the meantime, we’re going to keep following up with the NYPD to ensure the lights actually go up and with the MTA to clean up or remove the seating at the bus stop.

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

• 🌳 Making Street Tree Maintenance Easier: Thanks to the office of CM Gutierrez, we have a meeting with Parks this coming Tuesday to engage them directly on how to improve street tree maintenance 🙌 . We hope to use this time to educate them on the problem, discuss solutions and align on next steps through both policy and budget requests to make tree maintenance easier

• 🏠️ Improving Vacant Buildings on Fulton, Jefferson and Macon: 26 Jefferson continued to do work through Stop Work orders this week, but as of Tuesday stopped construction. The property now has $125K worth of fines, including $22,500 in the last month. We’ve learned they may not actually have to pay all of these fines to continue to do work, but we’re hopeful the latest Stop Work orders finally force some compliance

• 🌳 Building a Park: We heard back from HPD regarding the lot on Greene Avenue and Nostrand (the old basketball court). Since the property is owned by NYCHA, we will have to engage with them to understand the future of the lot. We were able to get an email for Impacct Brooklyn who owns two of the lots we’re interested in, but they haven’t responded. If you know anyone at Impacct Brooklyn I could connect to, I would love that!

• 🗑️ Improving Trash on Fulton: We heard back from City Council regarding the request to have a meeting on budget for additional street cleaning, and unfortunately they can’t cover the additional $300,000 needed to clean the street. As expected, we’ll need to lobby with multiple elected officials and the Mayor in order to increase the sanitation budget for the corridor

That’s all for this week’s update. If you want to help in one small way this week, forward betterblockproject.com to a neighbor you know is interested in getting involved in community work in Brooklyn. The more people who join our community, the bigger impact we will be able to make!

See you next week,

David