Paul Bass Photo
Berkowitz Wednesday at WNHH.
A tagger who defaced a State Street building inadvertently helped revolutionize the way American cities run.
The tagger struck in late 2007. He sprayed graffiti on the side of the Studio Zee building on State Street between Humphrey and Bishop.
Ben Berkowitz — a homegrown freelance website builder doing side deejaying gigs — lived nearby at the time. He and neighbors were working together to improve the Upper State neighborhood. They didn’t want to see grafitti holding back that progress.
So Berkowitz called City Hall. No results.
“I realized,” he recalled, “that internally at City Hall there seemed to be some confusion about how graffiti on private property would be resolved. It’s actually common in a lot of cities.”
Berkowitz also realized that his neighbors probably encountered similar frustrations.
It was an “aha” moment.
“I had this moment of realization: I called in. They called in. We’re talking to each other. This shouting against the black box is not helping any of us. Why don’t we try to create a way to publicly document these requests that re coming into City Hall?”
From that spark was born the most influential and innovative company to launch in New Haven since the days of the cotton gin, the frisbee, the apizza, the hamburger, the clock, and the oyster.
Berkowitz and their colleagues called their company SeeClickFix. It enabled citizens to report problems from potholes to grafitti to illegal dumping … have other citizens add their reports adn views … map the location … notify public officials … then track how public officials or other citizens address the problem. And, hopefully, fix it.
Soon New Haven City Hall took notice — and adopted SeeClickFix as an official platform to receive and address everyday citizen concerns. Other cities followed suit. To date some 300 cities around the world have adopted SeeClickFix. They use SeeClickFix to field citizen concerns, then report on their progress in addressing them, in full public view.
And Berkowitz’s company, hatched in coffee shops, has grown, receiving millions of dollars in investment and, so far, hiring 37 employees. It has remained true to its New Haven roots, headquartered on Chapel Street near State.
Berkowitz told that story, ruminated on how his hyper-local problem-solving tool promotes digital democracy while bringing neighbors together —and offered up-to-the-minute SeeClickFix reports from New Haven, Oakland, and Richmond (Canada) — Wednesday on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program. He spoke about why he came home to New Haven after chasing a music-business career in L.A., and how he discovered work that meant more to him than building suburban Starbucks outlets or cleaning dust bunnies at Urban Outfitters.
Click on or download the above sound file to listen to the full interview.