Wednesday, May 8, 2013
24/7 construction noise
From NBC 4:
The city that never sleeps seems to have a new culprit for all those sleepless nights: construction.
Tens of thousands of construction projects receive after-hours permits throughout the year, NBC 4 New York has learned. The Department of Buildings alone hands out about 30,000 overnight work permits throughout the year.
But the city's buildings department says the late-night work is nothing new and that it's been handing out the same number of permits for years. The mayor's office added that noise complaints to the 311 hotline are down 20 percent since 2008.
Developers and city officials say safety is a key reason for working late. Stopping work at 5 p.m. can leave a job site in dangerous conditions, according to officials. At other projects, like the Second Avenue Subway, stopping for the night could add months or years to a completion date.
A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg said, "The safest construction project is one that is completed, and after-hours work is critical to finishing these projects as soon as possible.”
4 comments:
Bloomberg doesn't live near 2nd Avenue.
Why should he care?
a lot of 'late night' permits are like the one in the building I'm in. We were doing some interior work (minor stuff - pulling electrical, adding a doorway) Big midtown commercial building. They got an after hours permit. They would do the work after 5:00, and be cleaned up before we get in at 9:00. Not like they are bothering anyone in a 40+ story commercial building doing basically quiet work at night
The public school on my block has been doing after hours construction for almost a year now. It's awful because they drill and hammer and all kinds of nonsense till 11pm. It's a quiet residential street in a working class neighborhood, lots of people have to get up at 5 in the morning.
I called 311 and got the run around; turns out since they're a public school they get special considerations. I get that they can't work while the kids are in school but this has been going on for so long, and so late, I really wish there was an alternative.
They claim that "noise complaints to the 311 hotline are down 20 percent since 2008". If the number of complaints are down, it's because people have given up calling the 311 because the city did nothing to address their prior complaints.
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