Illustration: Emma Erickson
Welcome to “Apartment Department,” Curbed’s advice column by Clio Chang. Join us every other Wednesday for questions about making peace with noisy-sex neighbors, the nuances of roommate fridge etiquette, and whatever else you might need to know about renting, buying, or crying in the New York City housing market.
Got a problem? Email clio.chang@nymag.com.
Dear Apartment Department,
When curbside composting was first announced, my super put a compost bin out and it was great. I started composting for the first time ever! But because he had to put the bin in our street-facing courtyard, it got overrun with passersby throwing trash and dog poop in it. Now the bin is gone and we have no way to compost. Aren’t buildings required to compost by law? I don’t want to add more work for my super, but how can I push my building management to figure out a composting solution? I very much don’t want him to think I’m annoying.
Yours,
I’m Chill, Seriously
“The law” is often up for creative interpretation when it comes to housing enforcement in New York. The main check keeping building owners and management companies honest is, generally, you, the tenant. (Personally, I live in the kind of place where nothing gets done until you call 311.) So while, yes, it’s now mandatory for all residential buildings in the city to compost, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily happening.
But before you jump straight to reporting your building, it’s probably best to approach your super first. After all, he clearly made an early effort to compost, so it’s not like he wants to ignore the law entirely. If your super knows that you and other residents really want to compost, he might be open to figuring it out with you.
Being a super sounds extremely hard and annoying, so I reached out to Ron Pioquinto, a super in Long Island City, about some possible approaches here. “It’s often supers and other residential workers who are on the front lines of executing important city policies like this,” he says of the newish composting rollout. “That can come with challenges.” (Bin theft and street trash getting mixed in with compost are big ones, he adds.) His advice: “If there’s room inside the building, keep compost bins inside until it’s time to put them out for removal. Alternatively, if the front courtyard has too much street traffic, maybe there’s a back courtyard to store bins?”
Technically, it’s your building management that will get in trouble if the building isn’t composting, but it’s also on residents to help make the program work by properly separating their food waste. So it’s a learning curve, which you can help with. “I really try to lean into the education piece around composting,” Pioquinto says. And it may be more fruitful for you to think of composting as a group effort, anyway. That could mean anything from holding a meeting on compost, knocking on your neighbors’ doors, or putting up signage next to the bins showing what can and can’t be composted. (Ellen Honigstock, the director of education at Urban Green Council and a co-op board member who worked on her building’s compost committee, agrees with approaching this as a building-wide responsibility: “It’s kind of all of our jobs; some of us just have a different role than others.)
But if you’ve tried all of this and your building management is stonewalling, then it might be time to call 311. Vincent Gragnani, a spokesperson for the Department of Sanitation, says the department responds to every request and works with building managers to make sure they comply with the composting law. (You can also ask for DSNY to conduct an in-person presentation or training in your building.) The department started issuing warnings for noncompliant buildings last April but was only sending summonses to those that had more than 30 apartments and exceeded four warnings. This year, summonses will be sent to all types of buildings. (In the first week of the new policy, the department issued 161 of them.)
If your building management still refuses, summonses be damned, it would be helpful to get more of your neighbors to join in and also report management. The more the fines build up, the more likely the calculus will shift for your building to take the compost mandate seriously. While your landlord is technically the person who should be handling all of this, that’s rarely the case — sometimes it’s up to you to force the change. And remember, all you have to do is get it set up; once the compost bins are in place and people are educated on what to do, it should become as easy as taking out the trash.
Have a question for the Apartment Department? You can send it to clio.chang@nymag.com.
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