Empire Bins coming to LIC

Over 100,000 residents are going to have cleaner waste handling thanks to the Empire Bin

More than 100,000 Hunters Point, Long Island City, Sunnyside, and Woodside residents are about to get their trash off the sidewalk and into locked containers. That’s a real public health win: fewer ripped bags, fewer rats, fewer streets that look and smell like a dump on collection day.

It’s a policy choice which the community has been dealing with: limited curb space. Reilly Owens the Transportation Committee Chair of Queens Community Board 2 noted:

Streets and sidewalks comprise the majority of public space in NYC. And the majority of that space is the roadway, in almost all cases in our district intended only for vehicular travel and dangerous for pedestrians.

The most egregious sidewalk offense was the trash. Piles and piles on every sidewalk all the time. A mountain of trash, an insurmountable civil problem. Until a tradeoff was suggested: for a few parking spaces per block, all the trash could come cleanly off the sidewalk forever. The eyesore, the space-hogger, the sensory offender.

The Transportation Committee of Queens CB2, in response to community requests for safer streets and more rights and amenities for pedestrians, has been in favor of these tradeoffs, calling for plazas and open streets, protected bike lanes, loading zones, wider sidewalks, shorter crosswalks, and a citywide investment to reduce car dependency by making walking, biking, and public transit easier, safer, and more accessible.

And the environmental review governing how the city plans for that tradeoff was built almost entirely around a neighborhood that doesn’t look anything like ours.

DSNY Commissioner Gregory Anderson, in a press release: “Residents and building managers in West Harlem have found Empire Bins to be clean and convenient, allowing building supers to take trash out at any hour, any day, while freeing up space once occupied by trash inside the building and on the sidewalk.”

The numbers

Based on an HPL analysis of NYC PLUTO tax lot data, 627 buildings across Queens Community District 2 have 10 or more residential units — the threshold at which DSNY’s Citywide Containerization Program requires or offers Empire Bins, the department’s on-street waste containers. Those buildings hold 52,950 dwelling units. Using the average household size for CD2’s PUMA (2.1 persons, per 2024 American Community Survey data), that works out to an estimated 111,195 residents living in a building this program will directly affect.

Ninety-one percent of those residents — about 100,858 people — are in buildings where an Empire Bin isn’t optional. At 31 or more units, DSNY’s rules require it.

Unit tier	Buildings	Dwelling units
10-30 (opt-in)	278	4,922
31+ (mandatory)	349	48,028
Total	627	52,950

Where it’s concentrated

CD2 isn’t one neighborhood; it’s five different districts within a neighborhood built across three distinct eras. There’s the core Hunters Point district which is primarily 2-5 story walkups, the Court Square area with it’s booming towers, and the Waterfront which is reclaimed industrial brownfields.

This program lands very differently in each of the main districts based on the building type.

The Hunters Point South waterfront has only 24 buildings that meet the threshold — but they average 434 units apiece. Court Square isn’t far behind, averaging 221 units per affected building. Compare that to Core Hunters Point, where the same size threshold catches a much more modest set of mid-rise buildings averaging 41 units, or Sunnyside and Woodside, where affected buildings are smaller and more numerous, spread across many more blocks.

That spread matters because it shows how across our neighborhood the Empire Bin conforms to the building type. A handful of waterfront towers will absorb a huge share of the district’s bins in a small footprint. Sunnyside and Woodside will feel it as a slower, wider rollout across hundreds of separate blocks. Any city process that treats CD2 as one uniform district — including the one DSNY used — is going to get the picture wrong somewhere.

What CD2 can expect: an estimated 939 Empire Bins

DSNY hasn’t published a bin count for CD2. So the Hunters Point Ledger modeled one: an estimated 939 Empire Bins, built from DSNY’s own results in other districts (Full methodology below). That many bins means roughly 430 parking spaces’ worth of curb space gone, using DSNY’s own container dimensions and the CEQR Technical Manual’s 20-foot standard space length. In a district where curb space is already fought over by residential parking, loading, bike lanes, and outdoor dining, that’s not a footnote. It’s the actual price of cleaner streets.

This is a model, not a DSNY figure. Both inputs — the 56 percent opt-in rate and the 1.86 bins-per-building ratio — come from other districts’ actual results, applied here as the most defensible available stand-ins for numbers DSNY hasn’t released for CD2 specifically.

^* Dutch Kills incorporates blocks outside HPS series tracts.

The Prototype has Issues

Here’s what should give CD2 residents pause, independent of how they feel about the bins themselves. DSNY’s entire Queens parking impact analysis — the study meant to catch problems like block-by-block curb strain before they happen — rests on one neighborhood, and it doesn’t really match ours.

The department’s environmental review names a single “prototypical” study area for all of Queens: a quarter-mile circle in Forest Hills, roughly nine miles from Hunters Point, averaging 20.6 residential units per tax lot. No part of CD2 looks like that. The waterfront runs nearly eight times denser. Court Square runs about twice as dense. Core Hunters Point, Sunnyside, and Woodside are three to five times less dense, dominated by rowhouses instead of towers.

That’s not a rounding error. It means the tool DSNY built to catch curb space problems before they happen was never pointed at the neighborhoods where those problems are most likely to actually show up: the waterfront’s tower canyons, or the tight blocks of Sunnyside and Woodside where every parking spot is already spoken for.

Nobody knows for sure if the converted 430 spaces is a minor adjustment or a real strain, because nobody measured it here.

Parking rules everything around me

Instead of thinking about lost parking spaces, which a huge amount of our press peers are fixating on, we should ask how to apportion scarce public curb space.

Eric McClure, executive director of the transit advocacy group StreetsPAC, put the underlying problem bluntly in testimony last year: “We as a larger society in New York City are to blame for allowing people to think that it’s somehow their God-given right to park their car on the street close to their home or their business. We’ve just allowed people to develop this mentality that that’s their space, that’s not public space.” Empire Bins don’t invent this tradeoff, we’ve had this same conversation about CitiBikes, bike lanes, daylighting, and anything else which moves away from car-only infrastructure.

Containers are an infrastructure commonwealth where the benefits are shared widely, where a parking space is extremely valuable for a single person.

^* Dutch Kills incorporates blocks outside HPS series tracts.

111,195 CD2 residents live in buildings this policy affects – and the benefits are huge.

Process Issue: The Queens Prototype has issues

The benefits of this program exist on the merits: reducing trash on the streets has a material benefit for all.

However, we need to build better internal capability and capacity since 85% of all lots inside DSNY’s Queens prototype circle are low-density (fewer than 10 units). Meaning the “prototype” DSNY used to model Queens parking impact is overwhelmingly single/two-family houses, with a small cluster of large apartment towers pulling the averages up. That’s a very different built environment than CD2, where dense multifamily housing is the norm across every zone, not a small outlier cluster inside a sea of houses.

DSNY’s Queens parking analysis rests on a single data point: a quarter-mile circle centered on 65th Road between 99th and 102nd Streets in Forest Hills, averaging 20.6 residential units per lot. No part of CD2 looks like that. The Waterfront zone runs nearly eight times denser, at 163 units per lot, while Court Square comes in at roughly double the prototype’s density. At the other end, Core Hunters Point, Sunnyside, and Woodside are all three to five times less dense than the Forest Hills circle, dominated by small multifamily buildings and rowhouses rather than towers.

As someone who used to work at all levels of government, I know how difficult it is to choose the right place to pilot and prototype. You have to start somewhere.

I wish however we could find a more suitable prototype which could tell a more comprehensive story for the wide range of districts we have in our neighborhood.