Bushwick’s own council member wants the city to send extra street cleaners into the neighborhoods where people party hardest. What she hasn’t said yet is who foots the bill.
On July 16, Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez, whose District 34 covers Bushwick along with parts of Williamsburg, Ridgewood and Bushwick’s Brooklyn-Queens border, introduced legislation to create official “nightlife districts” across New York City, according to a press release from her office. The districts would give neighborhoods that host bars, clubs and music venues a formal way to demand more sanitation service to deal with the trash those crowds leave behind.
Gutiérrez is the prime sponsor, joined by Council Members Virginia Maloney, Lincoln Restler, Christopher Marte and Harvey Epstein. Justin E. Sanchez, who chairs the Council’s Sanitation and Solid Waste Management Committee, also backed the bill.
Per the release, the Department of Sanitation, working with the Office of Nightlife and the Department of Transportation, would identify nightlife districts using three measures: pedestrian activity, how many nightlife establishments are packed into an area, and recurring 311 sanitation complaints. Once an area gets tagged as a nightlife district, its Community Board could request enhanced street cleaning for it.
Gutiérrez said nightlife shouldn’t come at the cost of the people who live next to it. “For New Yorkers who live in lively districts like mine, the cost of someone’s fun night out can unjustly impact the cleanliness of the entire neighborhood,” she said in the release. She called the bill “a community-oriented approach” to problems she said have gone unaddressed for years, pointing to overflowing litter baskets and street debris that pile up around high-traffic nightlife corridors.
Marte made the same case for his Lower Manhattan district. “Residents deserve clean sidewalks when they wake up in the morning, and businesses deserve public spaces that reflect the vitality they bring to our communities,” he said in the release. Restler said he “fully supports” identifying the areas with the most bars, clubs and restaurants, foot traffic and 311 complaints for extra cleaning.
“Our nightlife districts should be just as clean on Sunday morning as they were alive on Saturday night,” Sanchez, whose committee would handle the bill, said in the release.
What the release does not spell out is the money. It gives no estimate for what enhanced sanitation service would cost or where the funding would come from. It also does not name a single neighborhood that would qualify as a nightlife district, and it gives no timeline for when the Council might vote on the bill.
Gutiérrez has spent recent weeks in the local news on other fronts. Her colleague Restler, another sponsor here, reversed his opposition to the Monitor Point towers in July after the developer agreed to make half the units affordable, and Gutiérrez earlier rolled out a plan to address the child care worker shortage.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily image
