Hotspots, Vacant Lots, and the Geography of Litter in the Bronx

Written By Angus Jackson

By Angus Jackson

Trash isn't casually scattered across much of the Bronx, but clusters around specific kinds of locations. Vacant lots, parks, bus stops, and underpasses offer what people locally refer to as "hotspots" where trash builds up regularly. To understand the terrain of trash, one must know where city policy, community action, and infrastructure must be directed.

Empty, privately owned lots and vacant or empty buildings usually turn into dumpsites. There were fenced or limbo lots, the City Limits investigation reported specifically in the location between East 154th and East 155th streets bordering Melrose Playground, beneath or below elevated subway structures, or along highways. These places are not being cleaned up because no one in particular owns or maintains them. The report also indicated that most of these kinds of sites in the Bronx are "magnets for bags, bottles, and butts."

Schools and playgrounds overrun by heavy foot traffic also have wide litter buildup in common. In the same report for City Limits, Melrose Playground is specifically identified as a location, as are school boundaries and walkways to play spaces. Observation in such locations revealed stretches of sidewalk between school fences that are prone to collecting snack packaging, bottle tops, and debris that eventually gets swept into the edges of lots or fenced blocks.

Transit-sitting areas also add to it considerably. Spaces around overpasses or alongside overhead rail tracks are especially likely to accumulate huge quantities of trash because wind blows light waste in that direction, and nighttime pedestrian travel decreases because of invisibility and deterrence. City Limits depicts such spaces as "triangles of territory bracketed by highways" appearing to belong to no one, yet incontestably piled high with trash.

Some of the issue lies in skewed infrastructure. The research "Overflowing Disparities: An Examination of the Availability of Litter Bins in New York City" revealed that areas with greater median household income have more litter bins per tract compared to lower-income tracts. A $10,000 increase in median income was associated with an increase of about 13% in number of litter bins per census tract in bivariate analyses. The argument was weaker when spatial considerations were introduced, but the difference in perception and physical infrastructure remains evident.

Attempts to deal with such hotspots will be unsuccessful unless sustained maintenance is provided. Sweeps in the Bronx can clear garbage briefly from lots or along parks, but the containers in these areas — if they exist — are packed, service is irregular, and the locations become trashy again when institutional follow-up does not happen.

MyCoast NY "Litter Watch" program verifies the fact that most litter observed in Bronx Waterways and riverbanks is identical to what one finds in street litter containers and roadways. Foam, plastic bags, and single wrappers are most common in the reports submitted along the Bronx River or riverbanks in front of empty lot drainage. That verifies litter at hotspots does not remain local but transmigrates into waterways.

With these trends, city policy needs to allocate resources not in proportion but geographically. Support from steady funding from NYC's mayoral office for litter collection and targeted cleanup in high-problem areas can assist. Prioritizing frequency, setting out bins on or near empty lots and school boundaries, holding lot owners accountable, and staying visible are each conceivable levers.

The Bronx geography of trash discloses systemic neglect of the neighborhoods. They are not anomalies; they are necessary to city sanitation and public health. If resources pour into hotspot communities, infrastructure is directed according to demand, and absentee owners are made accountable, then the burden of trash in the Bronx can start moving from determinism to preventability.

Sources Used:

Angus Jackson
Previous

Downtown vs. Uptown: How Foot Traffic Patterns Influence Litter in Manhattan
Next

Packaging, Policy, and Pollution: How Regulation Shapes Litter in NYC