How to make waste removal much more affordable for New Yorkers
Last year, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani captured the public’s imagination with a series of snappy affordability pledges: a rent freeze on stabilized units, fast and free buses, City-owned grocery stores and free childcare for all. But as the father of his vanquished opponent once said, “you campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.”
Now, as mayor, he has to figure out how — or whether — to deliver on the promises made during his campaign. Childcare looks like a winner; even moderate Democrats were eager to work with him on it. On the flip side, even many New Yorkers who support free buses don’t think the government should actually do it, and the campaign and now administration have been quietly shifting the emphasis from “free” to “fast.” As for City-owned grocery stores, Vital City readers know how I feel.
That leaves the rent freeze. People can debate (including in Vital City) the wisdom of zeroing out increases on the roughly one-third of housing units in New York City that are subject to rent regulation. But the campaign promise was simple, clear and — if the Rent Guidelines Board goes along — squarely within the mayor’s control. The administration has reaffirmed its promise of a four-year rent freeze.
The task now at hand is how to pay for it. Mamdani the candidate argued that landlords are already on average so far ahead that they can handle a few years without rent hikes. Mamdani the mayor understands that averages obscure outliers. A growing share of rent-stabilized buildings are in dire financial straits — which soon might get even worse with a looming property tax hike. When costs exceed rents, buildings risk a return to the dark days when landlords simply walked away from their properties.
With a rent freeze seemingly a foregone conclusion, the administration has been casting about for how to rein in landlords’ operating costs. The conversation has focused on things like insurance and property taxes, but there is one more tangible item that often gets overlooked: trash.
The rotting, leaking bags of trash piled onto the city’s sidewalks have long been an embarrassment for the city, and the Department of Sanitation under Eric Adams finally made a move to do something about it, requiring some buildings to put refuse in bins. But hidden beyond the cleanliness struggles are big costs for New York City residential building owners.
The journey of a few hundred miles from curb to landfills, incinerators and recycling centers costs taxpayers around $35 per dwelling unit per month, facilitated by Department of Sanitation workers and private waste management companies. The cost to building owners to move trash, recycling and now compost just a few feet from the city’s cellars and courtyards to the curb is, surprisingly, much higher. The cost has never been tallied up, so my organization, the Center for Building in North America, worked with the Center for Zero Waste Design to interview dozens of owners and pore over financial statements to figure out how much it costs, and published a report with our findings. To get this right, we found owners of everything from brownstones to large campuses, and worked with them to determine what share of their labor and other budgets were going towards waste handling and related work. The number that we arrived at is about $75 per month, on average, for each apartment in the city. While building owners pay the cost directly, one way or another, operating costs are passed along to residents. And at least for small and mid-sized buildings, this is a cost that is completely avoidable if New York City would adopt the same waste collection policies that you find across Europe and beyond.
Seventy-five dollars a month might not be a lot of extra cost for a new luxury apartment, but it’s a sizable sum for most New Yorkers. Citywide, the median household income is around $81,000. That $75 a month means $900 a year — more than 1% of all income that the typical New York City household earns before taxes goes towards paying to move their rotting banana peels, Amazon boxes and used yogurt containers from the trash room to the curb.
For rent-stabilized housing, $75 a month means the difference between a cost-neutral rent freeze and one that will cost owners dearly. The median rent in a rent-stabilized building is $1,384 a month, so if the City can deliver landlords an operating savings of $75 per month by relieving them of the duty to handle waste, that would pay for about two years of a rent freeze, assuming the alternative is rent hikes of around 2.5% per year.
Seventy-five dollars a month also means that new affordable housing that the City subsidizes will not be able to serve the tenants most in need. When the City finances new fully affordable housing, it tries to ensure financial sustainability by setting rents at levels that at least cover operating costs. It’s the same when the City sets affordable rents in private developments receiving tax breaks, or built under the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program. An extra $75 per month in costs for affordable housing translates to an extra $75 per month in rent, which means an extra $3,000 that applicants must demonstrate in yearly income to rent a given apartment (the City uses the same 40-times-your-rent formula that private landlords do).
It might seem surprising that it costs more than twice as much to move waste a few feet, from building to sidewalk, than it does for the almost 10,000-strong Department of Sanitation and its private contractors to take it hundreds of miles from curbs to landfills and incinerators as far away as South Carolina. But when you consider the inefficiency of the work, it starts to make sense — as does the logical solution.
My own five-story condo building in Williamsburg shows how high the costs of waste handling can be. We have a storefront on our ground floor, so residents trudge downstairs to leave bags of trash and recycling in the cellar. Three times a week, the management company sends a porter to haul the bags up the narrow staircase and onto the street. Back when buildings were still allowed to leave refuse on the sidewalk, that was the end of it. But in an attempt to clean up the streets, the City now requires that waste be placed in bins. So, after bringing the bags up, the worker has to bring the bins up as well, where they sit on the curb until collection. The next day — another three times a week — they come back to the building to haul them back downstairs. Along the way, there is constant cleaning — cleaning the waste room, fishing pedestrians’ stray trash out of bins that sat at the curb, spraying the bins down. And much of this work now has to happen after hours, with the City pushing the old 4 p.m. setout time to 6 p.m. or even 8 p.m. in an attempt to shrink dining hours for rats, in the process lengthening hours for supers and porters and driving up costs for those who employ them.
The actual work is unpleasant and physically taxing, but the real hassle is in traveling to and from the building six times a week. It’s a small building with just seven apartments and minimal other cleaning needs, so most trips are just to move waste and bins between the cellar and the sidewalk. Co-op and condo fees have skyrocketed in the 2020s, and the growing difficulty of finding labor to move all of this waste around is one reason why. When accounting for how much of the building workers’ time is spent hauling around bags and bins of waste, the total comes out to $750 per month for my building, or $107 for each of our seven units.
As it turns out, this is not an uncommon amount for a small building. One owner of a Brooklyn brownstone reported paying a service a whopping $214 per unit just to move bins from her front yard to the curb and back. Most owners, especially of bigger buildings with economies of scale, pay less, but the average for waste handling works out to $75 a month for each apartment.
Trash needs to be taken out, but there is a better way. Visitors to Spain might notice that there are large bins on the street, taking up a few parking spaces near the corner, and residents bring their trash and recycling down to them directly. There is no super, porter or “trash concierge” (as new luxury buildings are now branding it) to handle your waste. Your landlord or condo board has no involvement in your waste at all — it’s between you and the City.
For large or luxury buildings with waste chutes or luxury expectations — and the rents and maintenance fees to go along with them — paying staff to ferry waste from the building to the curb might still make sense. Indeed, our research found that larger buildings have lower per-unit handling costs. But for the typical row house or small apartment building, the sort of building that most New Yorkers live in, the waste-handling intermediary adds little value and imposes huge costs.
New York is a city that most people experience on foot, so one person in almost every household walks down their street every day. Carrying a bag to a bin somewhere on the block would not be that onerous (and for many buildings, like my own, it would even spare schlepping down a flight of stairs to the cellar or to a courtyard). Many buildings were not built with waste storage areas that are convenient or adequate to today’s trash, so removing buildings from the business of storing their own waste would relieve residents of the smells of stinky bags of garbage in and around their buildings. It also means that far less of our public space has to be given over to trash, since mechanical collection from common containers means that the City can pick up waste more frequently.
There would be a related benefit: making the City’s pickup job much easier. Beyond the costs and hassle to owners, the City pays tremendously for door-to-door collection. With the typical New York City lot being just 25 feet wide, sanitation workers must crawl down every block in the city two or three times a week and manually lift bags from the curb (and increasingly from inside bins) and then toss them into the back of a truck. The wall of parked cars between the sidewalk and the street means that it’s not realistic to mechanically collect the suburban-sized bins the City is asking owners to put their waste out in. The work is back-breaking and the constant need to jump on and off of trucks in moving traffic is dangerous. When heavy snow creates an impassable wall between the street and the curb, collection grinds to a halt and bags pile up.
New York City has been dipping its toes into more efficient practices, but old paradigms have limited the appetite for innovation. The City calls its “Empire Bins” — large containers as part of a pilot program that hold far more waste than typical suburban-style bins, and which can be mechanically collected — “European-style,” but the way they use them is not as efficient as in Europe. In New York, only building staff can access the containers, so building owners still have to pay to store waste on-site and have supers and porters carry it out to bins, meaning minimal cost savings. The bins are also specific to one building, so they are limited to large properties lest entire streets be taken over by them, one in front of each house or small tenement — not something that New Yorkers would tolerate given competing demands for parking, the return of outdoor dining and curb extensions for pedestrian safety. And while Empire Bins are lifted mechanically, making collection far more efficient than the old manual methods, the Department of Sanitation has not updated its pick-up frequency to capitalize on these efficiencies — they still only collect two or three times a week (and just once for recycling and compost), compared to up to twice per day in Europe, allowing for far fewer bins and less smelly trash sitting out.
Moving to a system of City-owned containers might some day open up possibilities for waste management beyond what door-to-door collection can manage. In New York, most waste that could be recycled is not. In parts of Europe, properly sorting waste into separate streams is encouraged by charging for disposal of trash destined for landfills, while offering recycling for free. Collection from larger, City-owned containers also allows greater investment in infrastructure, moving waste containers underground, as in the Netherlands, keeping smells and bulky containers off the street, and enabling even greater quantities of waste to be collected in one go. Some places in Scandinavia have even taken this to the extreme with underground vacuum tube systems, eliminating the need to collect waste with trucks at all — a system that New Yorkers might be familiar with on Roosevelt Island, installed back when the city still had grand visions for improvement.
New York isn’t the only city in North America that struggles with waste and could benefit from a new approach. The United States and Canada are historically low-density and suburban nations, leaving cities to struggle with suburban-style solutions. In Toronto, many new buildings must sacrifice huge amounts of ground-floor retail space to make way for enormous loading docks that can host enormous garbage trucks making three-point turns. Other American cities on the Northeast Corridor struggle with similar inefficiencies as New York — bins or even bags put out by individual buildings, but with mechanical collection blocked by a row of parked cars. In Philadelphia, a strike by sanitation and other municipal workers even forced the city to temporarily embrace a more efficient model — centralized collection points rather than door-to-door pick-ups — albeit in a slapdash, smelly way compared to the modern sealed containers on every block that residents have access to in, say, Madrid or Prague.
It may feel to New Yorkers today like supers and porters hauling bags and bins back and forth from the curb are in the city’s DNA, but waste practices have changed before. In 1971, the miracle of plastics let the city move away from Oscar the Grouch-style metal cans to thick contractors’ bags. In 1982, reeling from the City’s brush with bankruptcy, the sanitation workers’ union agreed to cut three-man crews down to two workers per truck. Under the rat-hating administration of Eric Adams, the City is finally signing up for waste containerization — forcing bags into suburban-style bins and even larger containers. Now, with Mayor Mamdani’s pledge to deliver on a rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants and housing affordability for all, it may be time for New Yorkers to learn to take out their own trash.