CLAREMONT — Mayor Bill de Blasio promised that Bronxites would soon see a new select bus service line and touted the city’s low crime rate at his first town hall meeting in the borough on Tuesday night.
Despite federal and local investigations into the mayor's fundraising efforts, de Blasio received a warm welcome at Claremont Neighborhood Center at 7 p.m., with many members of the audience beginning their questions with praise for him and his policies.
The focus of the meeting was public safety, and while this topic came up frequently, de Blasio also discussed issues ranging from select bus service on the Bx6 route, which should be arriving by next year, and the rezoning of Jerome Avenue, which he described as "a chance to get a lot of things done" in the area.
Despite the overall decline in crime throughout the city in recent years, The Bronx had still seen 24 homicides in 2016 as of May 1, according to NYPD statistics.
Community leader Bernard Smith stressed that even one life lost is still too many and asked if there was anything the city could do to try regulating bullets.
"There are too many guns out here on the street, and you’re not going to get everybody to turn in their guns," he said, "but if we could stop their ammunition or put regulations on them…I think that would slow the crime down.”
De Blasio responded that he would "love nothing more" than to be able to do that but stressed that the country was at a political impasse on the issue at a national level and that officials were obligated to do what was possible through policing and reaching out to young people for now.
The issue of homelessness came up at the meeting as well, with one woman giving voice to the concern that homeless people are being "dumped" into The Bronx and that buildings are being converted into shelters illegally.
De Blasio has faced strong criticism on his administration's handling of the city's homeless problem but defended his record on the issue, saying the number of people staying in homeless shelters had stabilized after years of growth.
"We now have 32,000 people who were in a shelter in the last two years who now are in a home — 32,000 people," he said. "So we finally stabilized the number of people in shelters. Our goal is to go a lot farther."
Several children asked questions at the event as well, focusing on topics ranging from slaughterhouses to health food to safety and security at housing for seniors.
The event was hosted by Councilwoman Vanessa Gibson, and although it ran for more than two hours, many Bronxites still had questions when it was time to shut things down.
"I can only take one more," Gibson said at the end of the meeting, "and look at all these hands."
