A new audit by Comptroller Scott Stringer found that half of all privately owned public spaces (POPS) restrict access to the public, fail to provide promised amenities, or have commercialized the areas by turning them into restaurants.
Of the 333 POPS surveyed, 275 had not been inspected by the Department of Buildings in at least four years — and 41 of 58 locations that had been inspected within the last four years were not in compliance. Only 18 violations to 10 of those locations were issued, despite widespread non-compliance, according to the audit.
The findings prove what gadflies have long suspected: Developers allowed to build higher and given generous zoning exemptions flagrantly broke the promises they made to provide communities with plazas, atriums, seating and resting areas, bike racks, and water fountains.
8 comments:
This is why we need to piss in the streets
Yet that is the unwritten way that the powers' that be intended.
The public officials received donations, the tax revenues increased, economic development increased, all part of the plan.
More importantly these otherwise useless areas would be a disgusting,filthy mess, filled with vermin, human and other.
The costs to properly maintain these via a useless bloated government agency would be astronomical.
The true unwritten purpose of many of these public spaces is for "traffic calming" making vehicular traffic as horrible as possible as a never ending retribution for not instituting "congestion pricing"
Be ever cautious with this, it will cost us all...
I wondered why this is an issue, then I clicked on the link to the original article. It is a Democrat hit piece on Donald Trump.
Why is it no one ever cared about this until now?
BTW, Trump projects, most notably Trump Tower, count among those caught "in flagrante delicto"
another BS story from the democrate party
Reporting about this isn't political, and it's certainly not a Trump "hit piece". An article in the NYT on this topic noted that there are over 180 of these privately owned public properties in the City that are out of compliance with the rules. Trump seems to be affiliated with two.
Why should we care?
“Right now, some large developers are gaining benefits worth tens of millions of dollars, but it’s coming at the expense of the rest of us,” Mr. Stringer said in a statement.
Unless you're saying it's ok for us to be fleeced as long as Trump is doing the fleecing, I'm not sure why anyone would object to this info. All the greedy developers including Trump, should be called out and made to fix this.
Here is the NYT piece for additional info:
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/nyregion/public-space-trump-tower.html
>Why is it no one ever cared about this until now?
First day here? People always care about this, politicians and bureaucrats ignore us. We don't have the money or pull that real estate does.
Trump and his lawyers, certainly Roy Cohn, and all the spineless avaricious elected officials of the past opened the floodgates for all the predator developers that followed and up to today.
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