Monday, December 5, 2011

Making lemonade out of lemons?


From Huffington Post:

A remnant of the Great Recession is hiding behind a paint-splattered wall in Chinatown, in an empty lot where a building was supposed to rise into the sky.

The plywood barely conceals the mess behind it: a pile of cement blocks and tangled metal and empty bottles of beer. It is, in short, exactly the sort of place that draws the ire of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

"There's a lot of bad things that happen in stalled construction sites," says Stringer, whose office issued a report earlier this year cataloguing the more than 600 stalled sites that are scattered throughout New York City. "Especially if everybody sort of ignores the site and lets it grow in a very unpleasing way."

Instead of allowing these lots to become eyesores, some developers are coming up with creative ways to use them temporarily until construction can begin. Grow vegetables in milk crates? Sure. Sell doughnuts out of a shipping container? In New York City, where open space is a precious commodity, just about anything goes.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I previously had address incentives as a solution for these started/stop hole in the ground properties.

Now I realize the best way to address these eyesores is to heavily tax them in order for the owner to develop the property or partner or unload them to someone who will develop the property.

Anonymous said...

Lemonade? No, the sewers don't smell lemoney my dear. THey ain't be calling it sewer city fonuttin.