00:36:10 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway
[00:36:10] S1: People littered everywhere. [00:36:13] S5: So that said, I don't want to preclude for your future study. It is true that piles of trash attract additional trash. And when you're in a neighborhood that is not containerized and you see a pile of black bags, it is natural to think, I can put my garbage on top of this. So my hope is that after full containerization, we can reevaluate some of that further and say, OK, now that the city broadly doesn't have trash. [00:36:37] S1: Everywhere, what can we do to limit littering and public space cleanliness issues? [00:36:57] S2: This is a slightly random question, but what happened to the anti-littering campaigns of like the 80s and 90s, I guess as far back as the 70s? Because I feel like you just don't see them as much anymore. And it's not like, I don't. [00:37:10] S3: Think you can look at New York and say, mission accomplished. There's no more littering. [00:37:13] S1: I totally agree. [00:37:14] S5: I will say that I do think that there's some confirmation bias and selective memory about these because we... Ran a multi-million dollar one last year, the We Heart NYC anti-littering campaign. We ran one that was well into the six figures recently that had a picture of a finger pointing up into an NYC litter basket and said, if you see someone littering, tell them where to stick it. [00:37:36] S1: We ran a few of these. [00:37:38] S5: And the issue is, I think, probably the same one that you find across the media landscape, right? The monoculture is long over. And we try to do a tremendous amount.
00:37:38 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway
[00:37:38] S5: And the issue is, I think, probably the same one that you find across the media landscape, right? The monoculture is long over. And we try to do a tremendous amount. [00:37:48] S1: Of littering outreach. [00:37:49] S5: But, you know, this came up a lot in January, February. [00:37:51] S1: This year when there was a sort of persistent dog waste issue. [00:37:55] S5: Oh, yeah. And I would often remind people that as frustrating as it is and as much as we do want to and are planning to do more, there is no one in the city who doesn't clean up after their dog because. [00:38:04] S1: They don't know the rules, right? [00:38:06] S5: Of course, you know, outreach and education is great, but it's not like they go, oh, yeah, you know, I didn't know you had to clean up after your dog and now I saw the ad. [00:38:13] S2: Right. [00:38:15] S1: We do them.
00:38:15 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Tracy Alloway
[00:38:15] S1: We do them. [00:38:16] S5: Every sanitation truck comes with a poster space on the side. We put anti-littering messages on those posters frequently. We've had longstanding relationships with the arts community. You've probably seen the early 90s David Lynch anti-littering ad that he did with the DSNY. It's something that we're interested in, but also I do think that we're at the point where we see the built environment as the bigger issue here. And I'll bring it back to some of the philosophy behind this. One of the thinkers who informed a lot of the work of the trash revolution that really gets at what you're talking about is a 70s urban planner named Oscar Newman, who wrote a book called Defensible Space that was basically what he did in the book was he said that controlling even for income, for age, for all demographics, He found that public housing still had, at that time, a higher rate of crime than market rate housing. [00:39:10] S1: And so what was the cause? [00:39:12] S5: And he proposed that there were elements of the design of the space that caused this issue, specifically that there were significant parts of many urban public housing developments that didn't feel like they belonged to anyone. [00:39:26] S1: They were everyone's. [00:39:27] S3: Oh, yeah. [00:39:28] S1: And so he proposed.... [00:39:30] S5: A design model that would be did. So the most famous example of his design is the Yonkers row houses that were the subject of Lisa Belkin's book, Show Me a Hero, that won her the Pulitzer, I guess. [00:39:44] S1: In the late 90s.
00:39:44 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal
[00:39:44] S1: In the late 90s. [00:39:45] S5: A big part of what we were thinking with this was how do we apply that same finding about crime to cleanliness? What do we do that makes it so that every part of the city. [00:39:56] S1: Belongs to someone? [00:39:58] S5: So that cleanliness is not just about trash removal, but about real care for public spaces. That's one of the reasons why the Empire bins are assigned to a specific building rather than shared. It's one of the reasons that we have done a lot of sort of continued expansion of the property owners are required to clean 18 inches into the street, that we've done a lot of work on that, that we have been so focused on expanding the ways in which we enforce alternate side parking, street sweeping regulations, because there should be no part of the city where someone can litter or someone can observe someone else litter and think that is not my fault. And the design that Newman put into place has been broadly seen as effective. And we're hopeful that over the next five or so years, we'll see those same design elements work on the cleanliness space. [00:40:43] S4: Tracy, is it well known that don't mess with Texas, that phrase you hear a lot, was an anti-littering thing? [00:40:49] S3: I know about it because my dad's Texan. I lived in Dallas. [00:40:52] S0: Now everyone, don't mess with Texas, and people think it's some. [00:40:54] S3: Sort of political thing. [00:40:56] S0: But it literally is just, and it still is. [00:40:58] S3: No, I mean, some of the anti-littering campaigns. Exactly. But to your point, I.
00:40:58 · Tracy Alloway, Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal, Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal, Joshua Goodman
[00:40:58] S3: No, I mean, some of the anti-littering campaigns. Exactly. But to your point, I. [00:41:04] S2: Mean, this is also the problem with public shaming, by the way. If you see someone littering, they probably know what they're doing is bad, and so pointing out to someone who's doing a bad thing that what they're doing is bad is a little bit risky in New York sometimes. [00:41:18] S0: It could be, yeah. I'm still, I'm pro, I think I'm pro-shaming. [00:41:22] S2: I'm pro-public shaming, but that's different from saying that, like, I'm comfortable doing it constantly. [00:41:27] S5: We don't think of anything we do as shaming. We just want people to know, if you are someone who cares about your neighborhood, you are not alone. You are actually, in the majority, not the person littering. [00:41:36] S4: Can you talk a little bit about, you mentioned, okay, This containerization, it's in West Harlem. It's about to be in Brooklyn. So that's two of 59. [00:41:44] S5: Yes. [00:41:45] S1: And it will start going much faster. [00:41:46] S0: What is the roadmap? [00:41:48] S4: And you said the mayor is committed to funding it through. Does that mean it's not guaranteed currently that it will be rolled out to the entire city? [00:41:57] S1: No, it's guaranteed. [00:41:58] S5: I mean, we do annual budget cycles here. So the money's not literally there. But the commitment is as good as it gets to roll this out. And we've got strong support from the city council on this, too. [00:42:08] S1: You know, it's funny. When we first started this, we heard a lot.
00:42:08 · Joshua Goodman, Joshua Goodman, Joe Weisenthal, Joe Weisenthal
[00:42:08] S1: You know, it's funny. When we first started this, we heard a lot. [00:42:11] S5: Of concerns about pushback, and those concerns were mostly conceptual. I bet people will be mad about parking. [00:42:18] S1: We heard that a lot. [00:42:19] S5: Very few people are actually mad about parking, but we heard a lot. I bet people are going to push back. So as far as the rollout, It took, you know, 50 years to do the first district, another year to do the second, but we're going to do the remaining 57 in about five years as trucks start. [00:42:32] S1: Rolling off the line. [00:42:33] S4: Can you talk a little bit more about, you know, as you concede it to one fact, which is that you can't just copy and paste any other city's model onto New York City. So it's not, you know, even if containerization, et cetera, works, it's a little different. We might not have alleys. That's a difference. We might, whatever, every city is a little bit different. But then, as you mentioned, people can take a little bit too far and convince themselves that New York is just different. Yes, it looks like you can have, and then people really get dug in, and they come up with stories. Where does this impulse come from? That all around, you look at trash, and you have, like, there was an article in The New Yorker about, like, a trash anthropologist, and there was some quote that's like, oh, you don't understand New York. [00:43:15] S0: Is it really a city?