Three years ago, the city installed large trash containers in parking spaces across West 149th Street in Upper Manhattan for residents to dump their trash.
It was an early step in a sanitation department pilot program that would lay the groundwork for New York City’s ongoing “trash revolution,” which aims to ban mountains of garbage bags from sidewalks across the five boroughs.
But some residents in the neighborhood have since been boxed out. As the sanitation department began its process to expand the program citywide last year, officials said they’d only install the streetside trash containers in front of large buildings. Smaller buildings with fewer than 10 units like the one Alexandra Hoyt lives in on West 149th Street have to store their garbage in wheeled bins and pull them out to the curb for collection.
“It was transforming to have the community-wide bins,” Hoyt said of the containerization pilot.
“It was wonderful,” she said before lamenting that “it just all went back to the way it was.”
The outcry from residents like Hoyt led local Councilmember Shaun Abreu to propose a law that would allow property owners of small buildings to band together to request the street containers, called Empire Bins, from the sanitation department, offering the potential to greatly expand the bin rollout that Mayor Zohran Mamdani has taken up from his predecessor Mayor Eric Adams.
The legislation would allow block associations as well as nonprofit groups to band together to ask for their own on-street bins, even if their building is too small to qualify for one under the city’s current regulations. The bin rollout is expected to replace roughly 30,000 parking spots citywide, according to planning documents. Abreu’s proposal could lead to even more street space being taken away from cars and turned over to trash containers.
“When the city came back with its second phase of the pilot in West Harlem, it ripped away these Empire Bins that the brownstones were really reliant on,” he said.
Abreu is formally introducing the legislation on Thursday.
“It was very upsetting for our homeowners who were able to benefit from something that was just taken away from them,” he said.
Mamdani’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Hoyt said the street bins freed up space in front of her building — and said that she’s seen more rats in her entryway since she’s been forced to use wheeled containers to store her trash.
“It was suddenly a patio, and I fantasized about putting out planters, and it was just ideal,” she said. "Every day, me and my family, we have to walk outside our door and walk in between garbage bins. ... They're like plastic and they have floppy lids, and of course rats can get into them and roaches are attracted to them."
When the Empire Bins hit the streets last year, the prototype on-street bins the sanitation department deployed in Hoyt’s neighborhood were hauled off to a storage area under the West Side Highway, where they languished as recently as last month.
Sanitation department spokesperson Vincent Gragnani said the city’s latest expansion of Empire Bins in parts of Brooklyn allows residents in smaller buildings to request streetside bins they can share.
Abreu said his legislation would ensure that measure is offered in every area as the city plans to require the containerization of residential trash in every neighborhood by 2032.
