From the Daily News:The collapse of the housing market has cast a shadow across the city in hundreds of unfinished and decaying apartments, condos and houses.
Derelict and unsafe, these eyesores have blighted neighborhoods, drawing rats, squatters and junkies. They drag down property values and enrage residents who feel helpless.
As of last month, the Buildings Department recorded 682 stalled sites across the city: vacant lots, empty foundations, concrete skeletons of half-built luxury condos, boarded-up single-family houses.
New York Building Congress president Richard Anderson doesn't expect much will change: "If the trend continues, there will be hundreds and hundreds of sites in limbo for years to come."
Concentrations are high in neighborhoods where the rush to gentrify collided with the collapsing market - hipster Brooklyn, the trendy lower East Side, Riverdale and Kingsbridge in the Bronx, Staten Island's North Shore and foreclosure-plagued Southeast Queens.
Queens Borough President Helen Marshall's spokesman calls Southeast Queens "the epicenter of foreclosure in the state."
The fallout has been scores of abandoned homes and complaints about "lack of security fencing, drugs, prostitution and squatters."
Typical is the boarded-up house at 120-06 194th St.
"It attracts crime," said neighbor Ron Miles. "You've got people taking the copper piping out."
For a time one derelict made the house his hangout. "It was scary," said Yolanda Stowe. "He used to be outside naked in the morning."
5 comments:
As of last month, the Buildings Department recorded 682 stalled sites across the city: vacant lots, empty foundations, concrete skeletons of half-built luxury condos, boarded-up single-family houses.
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Wallet's Point is next!!!
Obama sez the economy is improving. The recession is over.
My 1925 single-family wood frame had a $100,000 increase in assessed valuation in January. I'll wait 2 more years for it to hit 1 Million and I'm outta here.
All this can be addressed through auctions if the property owner owes back taxes. If this requirement is net then off to the auction it goes and better yet if the property goes through this process, the new owner by new laws will need to commit to bring the property to speed as a taxpayer property or risk losing it.
Investor based properties that are development holes in the ground must be completed with x years (2?) or risk losing tax abatement completely for those properties with that designation and experience unfulfilled development penalty of 2x local tax assessment until property is brought to a certain level of development.
Let fix this through some legislation - I am not for govt but here is a tool to get these eyesores rolling!
"So why are we building more?"
Because I can!!!
Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice
The system runs on its own and since you doormats do nothing as they rob taxes from your family to feed developers and the real estate industry (now be honest, has people moving into a big building ever done anything to make the lives of you and your family better?) to pay the system, it will continue indefinitely.
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