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Clement Bailey didn’t know what to expect when he moved from Flatbush just as the city shut down in March 2020
He’d bought a two-family house in The Hole, a low-lying neighborhood wedged between South Conduit Avenue and Linden Boulevard that straddles the border lines of East New York, Brooklyn, and Lindenwood, Queens.
Some call it the “Jewel Streets” neighborhood, for thoroughfares with sparkling names like Sapphire, Emerald, Amber and Ruby. But the area sits below the city’s municipal sewer network. With swampy flooding, septic seepage and illegal dumping, the atmosphere is lackluster.
“I can’t stand these conditions, honestly. I’m not used to living like this,” said Bailey, 29. “Everything inside the house is pretty peaceful, but when you step outside the door, you have to deal with all the water issues, the garbage issues. It’s not really appealing.”
A construction worker, he bought the house for his mother and sister to live in. But his mother died last year, and so he’s been living there with his sister.
In The Hole, many homes aren’t serviced by the city’s sewers and instead use septic tanks, which tend to overflow when there’s rain. There are no stormwater drains, so Bailey and his neighbors often navigate lakes of standing water in the streets. Abandoned vehicles sit in empty lots. Paved roads are inconsistent. Strewn trash abounds.
And it’s been this way for decades.
Plans to address the issues have long been stuck in the muck: Twenty years ago, the Giuliani administration proposed elevating the streets and installing sewers in the area. The plan’s been included in the city’s capital budget for at least two decades. Yet nothing was ever done. The most recent “request for proposals” on the project went out in 2019, but remains on hold, according to the Department of Environmental Protection.
7 comments:
Based on that description, one expects to see Chief Bill Gillespie pull up in his car in Sparta, Mississippi in the 1950s or 60s, not someone in the middle of New York City. No sewer system in this day and age?
More signs of anarcho-tyranny. We can't have decent sewers, but God forbid your 3 year old doesn't wear a (useless) mask! We give 10000x more attention to masking the toddler than fixing the sewers.
Did Mr. Bailey know about the neighborhood before he bought the house?
Raze the entire area, zone it for highrises, and sell it to the highest bidder who would be required to build it all above the floodplain. City needs cash.
This is all Joe Biden's fault.
Prove me wrong ...
If its been that way for decades then there is no way I can feel sorry for a person who just bought the house somewhat recently. When you buy into an area, you should be doing your research on it and talking to someone about the area before you buy there. Its the same way that Its hard for me to feel bad for a transplant or a tourist who just came here and they wander into neighborhoods that have been bad for many years and then they end up getting hurt in those areas. People just say "hey i want to live in nyc" or "I want to visit nyc" but they have no idea what its really like here and they do no research about it or nothing before they come.
When I worked for a utility in the area we used to refer to it as "Goat Town" And it's been that "Way' since the '70's at least....
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