Daniel Ackerman

And it's not crime.

If you look at the previous census data, when I moved in 2017, it's really about poverty.

So then I started photographing the pay phones at first, just trying to figure out why were people labeling this area?

And then I was taught a lesson that people were still using the phones in 2018.

So that's where once I heard Frontier was going to rip them out nationwide, I was like, I teach at an engineering school.

There has to be a way we can do this.

And I have team members.

The five of us are kind of a hodgepodge group, and we're just trying to do good for the community at this time.

That or even whether it can be county or city government, because if I'm still doing this in five years, I believe we failed because the average phone is being used 400 times a month.

And so with that in mind, we're hoping somebody will take it over.

Right now, we're completely grant based or donations at this point.

And we've had, since our last ribbon cutting, we've gotten a lot of inquiries from the Buffalo, New York public libraries.

People from all over the country say, how do we get this in our community?

And it's like, we're trying to lay out, like, here's the a la carte.

This is what it costs to buy a phone.

These are the people you need, and so forth.

Thanks for having me.

The poles and the wires in the system are old, and we haven't had to build new power in this country for a long time.

This time last year, we had the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, basically taking a chainsaw to the federal workforce.

Historically, the place black households have been able to find good jobs, well-paying jobs with pension benefits.