🧹 The Impact of the No Dumping Spots

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello to our 88 advocates in the Better Block Project community. I hope you all enjoyed what felt like the most beautiful week of August in New York City in years. I’m ready for fall in Brooklyn 🍁 

📆 Save the Date: Sunday, September 21st we are planning a community meet up to gather with members of the Better Block community to meet, hang and talk through the areas we’re working on to improve the neighborhood. Details to follow in next week’s update. I hope many of you can make it!

🧹 The Impact of the No Dumping Spots

Sunday, after our No Dumping Spot installation on Fulton Street, I walked the full length of Fulton with another one of our community members to survey how we did. TLDR: we made an impact!

In multiple spots where we wrote “No Dumping Spot” we saw that no trash was placed there the next day, exhibiting the impact the 🧑‍🎨 simple chalk art could have. But, it wasn’t all a success. In other frequent dumping spots trash was still there, some that looked new and some that looked left over from the day prior.

It’s a fresh reminder that the trash on Fulton Street is a deeply entrenched problem, and will take continued advocacy and a combination of efforts to truly change behavior and ensure the street stays clean. We reached out to the community liaison at DSNY to share our efforts, here is what we heard back:

“Let me be the first to tell you how I appreciate the out-of-the-box thinking that went into this! I’m not going to lie, it never occurred to me to write on the ground “No Dumping”. If it works, then do it!”

In this email, we also heard back a decision on the dedicated route for Fulton Street. Unfortunately, right now DSNY can’t commit to a dedicated route to clean up the street 😭 . However, he did communicate they have added additional enforcement 🥳 to the area, to continue to ticket illegal dumping as it occurs. This is a positive step forward for our advocacy to clean up the street, so hopefully we start to see the impact of this over the coming months.

This week, I analyzed 311 data to try to get a sense of how the problem was trending year over year. NYC has a great open data resource where you can analyze 311 requests on any topic, going all the way back to 2010. I looked at 311 requests with the descriptor Trash on Fulton Street and only included the intersections of our core focus area (from Classon Avenue to Marcy). The picture is somewhat bleak, as 311 complaints about trash are up significantly in both July and August.

However, my hypothesis is actually a large number of these 311 requests are from the Better Block blitz ⚡️ , so it’s hard to say if the problem is truly significantly worse or we are just notifying the city about it more. To get a true sample, we’re going to pause the blitz for the month of September to see if we see a downward trend year over year. My sense is if you ask the average resident, they will still tell you the street is dirty, acknowledging we still have work to do.

In addition to following up with DSNY, we also synced with the Bed Stuy BID, and I’ll be having a call with Ms. Charles on Tuesday, September 3rd to better understand the incremental budget they need to ensure the street is cleaned. As a refresher, in our meeting in July we discussed requesting funds so the BID could double their staff sweeping the street and get access to additional city bins to store trash. The budget request season is going to be crucial for us with both the BID and DSNY to ensure they have enough resources to truly keep the street clean.

📆 We’ve Got a Big Week Next Week

Next week, we have multiple meetings across key problems we’re solving that will be big moments to push solutions forward:

• Tuesday, September 3rd: Meeting with Dale Charles, lead of the Bed Stuy BID, to align on budget needs in order to keep Fulton Street Clean

• Wednesday, September 4th: Meeting with Chi Osse’s office, DSNY, NYPD and DHS to align on solutions for the persistent drug use issue at the Fulton and Franklin Avenue bus stop

• Friday, September 5th: Meeting with Council Member Gutierrez’s office regarding next steps with our proposed Tree Maintenance legislation

If you’re interested in participating in any of these meetings, feel free to just reply to this email and I can add you!

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

• 🌳 Simplifying Tree Maintenance in NYC: We’ve wrote out a draft policy proposal to simplify tree maintenance, which includes (1) removing the permit for simple maintenance, (2) streamlining the permitting for more complex maintenance and (3) creating a listing of qualified businesses so it’s easier to find someone who can do tree maintenance fast. We’re also building a freedom of information request to learn more about the budget to prune trees, as we ultimately believe the city needs to have the minimum resources to conduct tree maintenance, given they own the property. When you call 311, someone should show up!

• 🏠️ Improving Vacant Buildings on Fulton, Jefferson and Macon: We attempted to call the public administrator office of Brooklyn for more details on 75 Macon’s sale, but they didn’t answer after 4 calls this week. We’ll follow up again next week. We also heard 1105 Fulton’s owners are current looking into demolition estimates, suggesting this will move forward soon.

• 🚌 Improving the Bus Stop on Franklin and Fulton: As outlined above, the next big step in this effort is our meeting on September 3rd with elected officials and city agencies. Our goal with this meeting is to align on a permanent solution to clean up the bus stop, and hold the city accountable to implementing it as soon as possible.

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.

See you next week,

David