Assembly Member Maritza Davila (far left) teed up a report from Deputy Inspector David Poggioli (right, standing) on crime statistics for the Myrtle Ave and Broadway intersection. Photo: Jack Delaney
By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com
What you need to know:
- Residents near the intersection of Myrtle and Broadway in Bushwick/Bed-Stuy, especially small biz owners, have complained for years about public drug use and unhoused people loitering on the street.
- Local politicians hosted a town hall to update the community on what law enforcement, nonprofits, and their own offices are doing to address the problem, and to brainstorm new solutions.
- Attendees agreed that a priority was better lighting in the corridor, while officials cited the way district maps are drawn as one reason why funding has been delayed.
- One resident suggested that an overdose prevention center was needed, which divided the room — some shopkeepers were curious, but politicians remained wary.
Read on:
At a town hall on the Friday before Christmas, Bed-Stuy and Bushwick residents pressed local officials for a concrete plan of action to address substance abuse and homelessness around the long-fraught intersection of Myrtle Avenue and Broadway.
The complaints are familiar: in an article this October, the New York Times quoted a Bushwick resident who called the area “probably the worst intersection in the entire city.” Accurate or not, the connotation has been difficult to shake. In 2016 and 2018, respectively, spikes in the sale of laced K2 led to over 100 overdoses in the corridor alone. Along with drug use, housing insecurity has been persistent, even as the surrounding neighborhoods gentrify rapidly. In 2023, as glittering condos went up only blocks away, Bushwick Daily reported that hundreds of asylum seekers were being housed in “crowded rooms without access to showers or proper food,” in an empty building by the Myrtle Av/Broadway subway station. And on December 16, a large fire further damaged the intersection’s already iffy infrastructure.
No-Shows and Map Woes
The forum, which aimed to cover “sanitation issues, unhoused individuals, mental health, and substance abuse,” had an inauspicious start: four of the five elected officials who were slated to appear did not show, sending aides instead, and one—Council Member Chi Ossé—did not send any representative from his office whatsoever. Likewise, the MTA and Department of Sanitation (DSNY) were absent, merely passing along a written statement.
The evening was emceed by the one prominent politician who did attend, Assembly Member Maritza Davila, whose district encompasses Bushwick and Williamsburg. Before opening the floor for input from residents, she summarized the problem at hand.
“We are here today,” Davila said, “because everyone obviously knows that we are having a lot of issues on the corridors of Broadway and Myrtle. We are aware that there are people who are homeless. We are aware that there are a lot of issues with drugs. Straphangers that take these trains are usually very afraid to go through these corridors, because they don’t feel safe.”
Yet Davila also hammered home a rationale for why progress had been slow in coming, a bugbear — or scapegoat, depending on one’s perspective — which would be reiterated again and again throughout the evening: district maps.
“About four or five years ago, we tried to tackle it,” she explained, invoking the K2 epidemic. “We went out, we had press conferences, we got programs to come out. We did everything we could. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out because of the way [the corridors] are split up politically. We all try to get on the same page, but it doesn’t always work like that.”
Here is the issue: to the northeast, on the Bushwick side, there is City Council District 34, Assembly District 53, Senate District 18, and Congressional District 7. To the southwest, the Bed-Stuy contingent comprises City Council District 36, Assembly District 56, Senate District 25, and Congressional District 8. If the numbers start to swim, the upshot is that the intersection falls under the jurisdiction of eight different offices, which makes it difficult to wrangle which of them should take responsibility.
The headache worsens when you account for city agencies, which have their own logistical challenges. “Just to piggyback,” said Assistant Police Chief Scott Henderson, “you see it’s one area, right? But it’s actually three different precincts, so they have to think collaboratively and cooperate.”
Nevertheless, Davila struck a positive note as she shifted to fielding residents’ questions. “It takes a village,” she said. “We have the right people here today so that we can come up with a plan to move forward.”
A Matter of Lighting?
First up was Mr. Rivera, the owner of a 24-hour florist’s shop two blocks down from the intersection. After he introduced himself, he was briefly drowned out by a round of applause — since opening his store a year ago, other residents said, public drug use in its vicinity had decreased significantly.
Via a translator, Rivera said that he had migrated to the U.S. in 2023, and noticed ‘a lot’ of panhandlers in the area who would physically harass passersby, as well as unhoused people who had pulled their pants down near families in the community.
His main request was for more street-level lighting, which Davila immediately amplified. “Myrtle and Broadway has always been a dark area to walk,” she said, turning to Deputy Inspector Khandakar Abdullah of the NYPD’s 81st Precinct. “What can we do differently?” Abdullah replied that his office had received 11 calls in 2024 relating to homelessness, and that he would raise the issue of lighting with other agencies.
Myrtle and Broadway from above. At the town hall, almost everyone present agreed that insufficient lighting was contributing to safety issues. Photo: Google Earth
Rivera also wanted to see better dialogue between police and residents, since he said there was a lot of distrust. Specifically, he asked for more community events, to which the NYPD officers present responded that each patrol unit hosts quarterly ‘Build the Block’ meetings to solicit feedback.
The next question came from Jalisha Hunte, a Bed-Stuy resident who attends Community Board 3 meetings. Were political lines really enough to explain the dysfunction she had witnessed for years at the intersection?
Yes, said Alexis Rodriguez, deputy chief of staff for Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who seconded Davila’s earlier comments. Even if one elected official wanted to earmark funds for addiction services or better lighting, he or she could not guarantee that other crucial stakeholders would also prioritize the issue.
Hunte was dissatisfied with those explanations, however, and with the forum’s narrow framing as a whole.
“I’ve lived in the neighborhood all my life,” she said. “I used to walk home [from school], and I had to walk through these streets, and it was terrible. It’s gotten a lot better, but the entire strip of Broadway is in trouble, right? I get that we’re having a meeting about Broadway and Myrtle, but there are other corners like Broadway and Flushing that are way worse — where people are laid out in the street coming from the psych ward, and don’t have help. This is a collective thing on Broadway, so what plans do you guys have to work together to fix that? Because if this is something I’ve been noticing all my life, that means it’s at least a 35-year-old issue.”
Davila pushed back, calling Hunte — jokingly, it seemed — a “whippersnapper” and flexing her local bona fides. She had been in Bushwick during the power outage of 1977, which many historians view as the neighborhood’s darkest hour, in this case literally. On July 13th of that year, a pair of lightning bolts downed a substation, two lines, and a critical plant, cutting electricity for the entire city. Soon looting broke out, and upwards of 60 stores were burned down over the course of a few days. Today’s problems were nothing in comparison to those of the past, Davila argued.
“Back in the 80s and 90s — horrible,” she asserted. “I would like to say that now the community has been uplifted. New businesses are coming in. The community is a melting pot. It wasn’t like that before.”
Evelyn Cruz, district director for Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, backed her colleague while taking a more conciliatory approach.
“We’ve come a long way from when Bushwick was in ashes,” she said, “but we also agree that we have a condition that’s chronic along these corridors.”
Cruz placed blame at the foot of the MTA, saying she was “personally distressed” by the agency’s failure to build more lighting even as it blocked street lamps with construction. Yet she also drew attention to good news: in the fall, Hochul had unveiled the Opioid Settlement Fund, a $55 million dollar payout from negotiations with drug manufacturers and distributors deemed responsible for the national painkiller epidemic, which will support efforts to mitigate and reduce substance abuse.
“There are resources,” Cruz assured Hunte, “we just have to continue to keep our eye on the prize to get them allocated. And [that does] happen, it’s just that everything takes time.”
At this point, Robert Camacho, chairperson of Bushwick’s Community Board 4, rose. He agreed that the most urgent priority was to improve the lighting around Myrtle and Broadway. From his vantage, though, it was equally important to call out the lack of collaboration from the community board and representatives of Bed-Stuy.
“We need to put a lot of pressure on the other side, to make sure that they come here,” Camacho stressed. “[Davila] can’t say it, but I can. This half of Broadway won’t get fixed if the other half isn’t, too.”
‘One Real Difference Between Williamsburg and Bed-Stuy’
In their own ways, Hunte and Camacho had expressed dissatisfaction with local officials, but it was Bed-Stuy resident Anderson Footman, also known as Hollywood Anderson, who gave the strongest indictment yet of their response to public safety issues along the corridor.
“The MTA, I see them spray everything in the city all the time,” he said. “They’re out there with trucks, they have the pressure washer going. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them out here, and I’ve been living in New York for 15 years. They clean the train stations in the Bronx more than they do down here — that’s crazy, you know what I’m saying?”
Gridlock was presented as the norm, Anderson noted. But the elephant in the room, he suggested, was gentrification: “I think what a lot of people really came here for today is not to hear y’all saying, ‘We’ve got stuff in motion.’ Like, give us some timelines. What’s actionable? You’re telling me that we can’t get the same action they’re getting over in Williamsburg? There’s only one real difference between a room over there and one over here. So how do we get the same treatment? I’m not really hearing real answers. I’m just hearing semantics and bureaucracy.”
Davila countered that there was real change afoot. “In the north part of Brooklyn, we all work together,” she said. “And we get a lot done.” She pointed to lead abatement on Myrtle Ave as proof that her office was working in concert with the other four that represent the area to improve conditions.
Cruz touched on Anderson’s deeper critique. “I cover Williamsburg,” she said. “Believe me, I’m born and raised in Williamsburg. We’ve been gentrified. It’s been a struggle for decades.” But she rejected the notion that a federal investigation was needed, as he had intimated, and pointed instead to the role of community boards in dictating how funds are spent.
Zachary Henderson, a member of Community Board 4, argues for the creation of an overdose prevention center. Photo: Jack Delaney
Anderson had highlighted Bedford Ave and North 7th in Williamsburg as a foil to Myrtle and Broadway, an intersection in a now-wealthy neighborhood where improvements were actually implemented. Cruz’s riposte was that the accessibility elevators on North 7th were “federally funded because [they were] a high need, according to the community,” and painted them as evidence that local boards writ large can be effective.
Switching gears, Davila asked the police captains in attendance to brief the room on their statistics for Myrtle and Broadway. While acknowledging that problems still existed, the NYPD leaders — Abdullah, Poggioli, and Wernersbach — emphasized that crime was down across the board. In the 81st Precinct, it had dropped 18% from 2023 to 2024, matched by a 13% decrease in the 83rd, and a 9% dip in the 90th.
David Bueno, who owns the Concrete Jungle coffee shop on Jefferson St., expressed his appreciation for the support of the NYPD and other agencies. He had been running his café for two and a half years, and his family has done business in Bushwick since 1998. Yet he implored officials to act soon.
“I have a front row seat to all the activity. Ever since this young gentleman opened this flower shop under the stairs,” Bueno said, referencing the event’s earlier speaker, “the conditions have improved — he pushed all of the people sleeping under there, out.” The construction of a new condo had also shunted unhoused Brooklynites further down the corridor, but he noted that in both cases the fixes amounted to reshuffling people without addressing the core issue.
“I don’t really blame any of the service people who work here,” he said. “But this is a chronic condition that has to be pulled out from the root.”
There it was, the question that everyone present had been carefully circling — what was the root of the problem, after all? And what would it mean to pull it out?
Assembly Member Davila’s vision seemed to involve empowering local nonprofits with more funds to address addiction. At the town hall, she championed one in particular, StartCare, a medical services provider that has been located at 1149-55 Myrtle Avenue, just off Broadway, for almost 47 years. Davila praised its CEO, Jonnel Doris, who she said had been more proactive than past directors in engaging with the community.
“This is a medical issue,” said Doris, “and we’re addressing it as such.” He called attention to the fentanyl crisis — in 2023, NYC’s overdoses decreased for the first time in four years, but only by 1%, meaning they still claimed 3,046 lives. And he outlined his clinic’s holistic approach, which pairs medication with counseling and workforce training. StartCare also offers Narcan and anti-stigma education.
A Bold (But Contentious) Fix
Zachary Hendrickson, the final resident to speak, floated a solution that was complementary to that of Davila and Doris, if more controversial.
“We’re talking a lot about the resources and services that are already here, which is good for folks to know,” said Hendrickson, a member of Community Board 4. “But I want to lift up something, Assembly Member [Davila], that you’ve already been a leader on — can you comment on the Safer Consumption Services Act?”
That act, which has stalled in the State Senate, would legalize overdose prevention centers. Up until recently, there were only two centers authorized to operate in the U.S., both in Manhattan, which provide a secure location for drug use with the goal, true to their name, of avoiding overdoses due to tainted supplies and infected equipment. Another site opened late this year in Providence, Rhode Island.
“The minute someone is being robbed, the minute someone discards a needle into the street, the harm is already happening. The whole point is to avoid that, to go further upstream,” Hendrickson argued. “What we really need here is an overdose prevention center, a place different from a lot of other services, because people can actually go inside and use their drugs safely under monitor, so overdose is highly unlikely to happen.”
To bolster his case, Hendrickson cited a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that 911 calls for medical emergencies near the overdose prevention centers in Manhattan decreased by nearly 50% after they were implemented, compared to 9% in similar areas without the centers.
Yet Davila, who made it clear that she was not a co-sponsor of the bill, was cautious. “We grew up in this neighborhood. We understand what it is to have family members that have been affected. I know mothers that have lost their children to all of these drugs. It’s getting worse, but there’s a critical part to this, and that’s the community — the community has to be the one to say, we want this.”
Footman, who had broached the topic of gentrification, came to Hendrickson’s defense, disputing the suggestion that residents would be automatically opposed to overdose prevention centers. “People may protest against it,” Footman said. “But if you lay out the facts and you tell this brother over here, who’s got the coffee shop, ‘Hey, bro, we put this thing down, and they won’t be outside your spot no more,’ I’m pretty sure he’ll be open to hearing about it.”
But the subject fizzled, and after a brief back-and-forth about social media outreach, Davila closed the forum. “I really want to thank everybody for the afternoon,” she said, and the officers filed out.
