Motorcycle mayhem terrorizes residents at the 34th ave open streets in Jackson Heights

Not much has been written about what a disaster these open streets have turned into and it's easy to see why. Council member Shekar Krishnan held a sham town hall about this and it mostly was about preserving the open streets than stopping the "traffic violence" that goes on there every day and night.

The Department of Transportation Alternatives is holding a survey for these dangerous open streets tonight in the hopes they will get 88 million dollars to turn those 25 blocks into an official fake park.

Hey Queens! Take our survey to help inform the future capital project vision of the 34th Ave Open Street: https://t.co/syQg96QBGu (closes Friday 6/21) and join us for a design workshop:

When: Tomorrow June 18, 5-7PM
Where: 34th Ave between 79th St and 80th St pic.twitter.com/QOqlZIV1lH

— NYC DOT (@NYC_DOT) June 17, 2024

Expressway Haunted Mansion

 

Riding along the Van Wyck Expressway while it's still under construction, I did a double take and saw this huge house on the corner of 105th ave.

 

Parking is forbidden by the entrance but it hasn't discourage this ricer car owner. Although it looks like this house had a steady occupation by squatters for some time.

A full dumpster indicates gut renovations.

 

Like every other abandoned house or vacant lot, the plywood fence is covered with numerous posters of festivals coming to town.

 

It kinda looks like the Bates Motel.

Mother?

 

Looked up the address on the Buildings Dept. website and there isn't much information about who is renovating this house. But it did have a record of multiple families living in this quasi-mansion from 30 years ago, which surely still continued considering the number of satellite dishes. But with the City Of Yes coming, the owner of this house can get away with building a little more housing for another 10 families and a dozen single men delivering food on motorcycles.

Frank Lloyd Crap special in Southside Queens

 

 

This house got some facelift. It looks they made a few extra rooms.

 

This reminds me of the second little piggy house.

 

Maybe the extra space is store these grills?

 

One side has shingles, the other side has brick paneling.

 

Maybe this is the little mo' housing from the City Of Yes doctrine.

 

 

Saturation pricing now

 

Gothamist

 

New York City officials signed off on an 8.5% water bill hike for property owners on Thursday — the largest increase since 2011.

The city Water Board begrudgingly approved the new rates during a meeting where the group also passed a resolution saying they were forced to approve such a steep hike due to a budget maneuver by Mayor Eric Adams.

The members said Adams imposed new fees on the Water Board, an independent agency that oversees the city’s water supply. The resolution said the increase will make it more difficult to justify water bill hikes in the future, which could limit board's ability to fund infrastructure to handle increasing rainfall and rising sea levels caused by climate change.

“It undermines the board's ability to consider rates in the future for critical water infrastructure, like storm water resilience and coastal resilience,” board member Dan Zarrilli said in an interview after the vote.

The increase will add $93 to the average city property owner's water bill, from $1,088 to $1,181. The new rates go into effect July 1.

 

 

More little housing

QNS 

The average size of apartments in Queens was the smallest among all New York City boroughs in 2023, as well as the third-smallest among cities in the United States, according to a report by the real estate firm RentCafe.

At 692 square feet, Queens boasts slightly smaller apartments on average than Brooklyn’s 712 square feet. Among major U.S. cities, only Seattle and Portland have smaller averages, at 661 and 685 square feet respectively.

Compared to the historical average square footage of rentals in Queens, the borough had a decrease of 32 square feet over the last ten years, marking a 4.4% decline. Over the same period of time, Brooklyn had a 21 square feet decrease for a 2.9% decline.

In addition to Queens and Brooklyn, which placed third and fourth among the smallest average apartment sizes in the country, a third New York City borough, Manhattan, was found within the top ten, placing sixth at 737 square feet. However, unlike Queens and Brooklyn, Manhattan actually increased in square footage over the last decade. Apartments there grew 2.2% in the last ten years, adding 16 square feet to the average size of apartments there.

 

 

NYC Planning to hold a town hall on zoom for the Jamaica Neighboorhood Action Plan (but don't call it the City Of Yes)

📢 Attention Southeast Queens residents!

This is your chance to chime in on what should be included in the long-term vision to improve the downtown Jamaica area.

Join us at the Jamaica Neighborhood Plan Town Hall on Thursday, June 13th at 7PM!

RSVP: https://t.co/48u7DF7HhD pic.twitter.com/YtODxTbWI8

— Adrienne Adams (@NYCSpeakerAdams) June 10, 2024

 

Jamaica Plan  

Why wouldn't Natasha Williams and Dan Garodnick and all those urbanist plants from the NYC Planning office hold an in person town hall now that the weather is a lot warmer out. Maybe it's because everyone in Jamaica knows this is part of the notorious City Of Yes plan to rezone and upzone residential blocks and make driving and parking difficult for them. Here's another thing, the toxic lobbyist Cerebrus who supported the failed congestion pricing scheme-transportation alternatives, open plans and Open New York have heavily influenced the Jamaica Plan from the very beginning. This zoom town hall is going to be rigged with those lobbyist creeps and their cult supporters unless the people from Southeast Queens stops them.

Bill de Blasio DEP office staffer currently working under Mayor Adams indicted for bank fraud

 
QNS

A Forest Hills man was arrested by FBI agents on Thursday morning for participating in a multi-million dollar bank fraud scheme while he was a high-ranking official in the administration of former Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Tommy Lin, 41, was charged in a superseding indictment along with two co-defendants for defrauding financial institutions which resulted in the theft of over $10 million while serving as the Director of Constituent Services in the Community Affairs Unit.

Beginning in 2018, Lin participated in a scheme with his co-defendants Zhong Shi Gao and Fei Jiang, and others to steal millions of dollars by causing transfers of funds between accounts they controlled, then falsely and fraudulently reporting that the transfers were unauthorized, which induced the financial institutions to credit them the amount of the transfers, according to the indictment. The scheme was responsible for over $10 million in actual losses to nearly a dozen banks.

“Tommy Lin allegedly participated in a complex bank fraud scheme while also serving as a Director in the New York City Mayor’s Office and Senior Advisor to the NYPD’s Asian Advisory Council,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said. “Leveraging his connections to law enforcement, he allegedly leaked personal identifying information to members of the scheme, ran background checks for them and even arranged for federal immigration authorities to arrest an individual in exchange for $20,000 in cash.”

Lin allegedly accepted that $20,000 bribe in cash in exchange for arranging for a Deportation Officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to arrest a disgruntled accountholder who had previously participated in the scheme, according to the indictment.

“To facilitate this conspiracy, Lin allegedly assisted members of the scheme in running background checks and accepted a significant cash bribe to arrange the arrest of a slighted account holder by immigration authorities,” FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge James Smith said. “Those in municipal offices are expected to conduct themselves with rectitude and obedience to the law, not engage in the purposeful manipulation of our economic infrastructure.”

Lin is charged with one count of bank fraud conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison; one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud affecting a financial institution, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison; and one count of aggravated identity theft which carries a mandatory sentence of two years in prison to be served consecutively to any other sentence imposed.

Caption Transportation Alternatives

Congestion pricing is dead

 The Village Sun

 Bowing to political pressure and in the face of numerous lawsuits, Governor Hochul on Wednesday declared that the Manhattan congestion pricing plan is on an “indefinite pause.”

“After careful consideration I have come to the difficult decision that implementing the planned congestion pricing system risks too many unintended consequences,” Hochul said. “I have directed the M.T.A. to indefinitely pause the program.”

The Metropolitan Transportation’s traffic-tolling plan was set to start later this month on June 30. It would have walloped car drivers with a $15 once-a-day fee for driving into Manhattan south of 60th Street ($3.75 during off-peak hours) — and trucks with repeated fees of $24 to $36 for each time they entered the zone.

However, the scheme faced eight lawsuits, with plaintiffs ranging from New Jersey, to the teachers union to Chinatown merchants and Lower East Side residents, all of whom said the plan’s financial impact would be unfair and onerous. Among the top arguments was that a comprehensive environmental impact statement, or E.I.S., for the sweeping, first-in-the-nation plan was shockingly never done.

Retired judge and former Councilmember Kathryn Freed, who lives on the Lower East Side and is a plaintiff on a class-action lawsuit against congestion pricing, has become a sort of poster person for the opposition. Yet, she described her reaction to the plan’s shelving as “mixed.”

“I’m not one of the people who’s crazy pro-car or whatever,” she said. “The whole thing is a mess. I don’t know what Hochul was waiting for — it was massively unpopular.”

Indeed, according to a recent Siena College survey, 63 percent of New Yorkers statewide and 64 percent of Big Apple residents oppose the Manhattan congestion pricing plan, with opposition in the suburbs even higher at 72 percent. Fourteen percent said they would not come to Manhattan as often due to the toll.

At the urging of then-Governor Cuomo, the state Legislature passed congestion pricing into law five years ago, with the target of raising a total of $15 billion — at a clip of $1 billion per year — for the constantly cash-poor transit agency.

 

Communities protest against the City Of Yes

Assemblywoman advocate for safe streets is a traffic violence recidivist

Emily is the smirking fauxgressive on the left. Photo by JQ LLC

 

NY Post

 

Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher (D-Brooklyn) — who has demonized drivers for years as she calls for “safer streets” — has racked up at least 46 traffic tickets totaling over $4,000 over the past two-and-a-half years, a review of public records by The Post found.

The socialist pol’s 2014 White Buick Encore was caught on camera blowing through a red light in the Bronx in November 2022, and ticketed for parking in front of fire hydrants at least six times, according to city records.

Her utter disregard for the rules of the road extends beyond the Big Apple: In March 2022, Albany traffic cops slapped the far-left lawmaker with an expired-meter ticket that she has yet to pay, records show.

 

Gallagher has been upfront about her war on cars, and called driving a “very kind of aggressive activity” in a 2022 interview.

The scofflaw lawmaker backed a bill known as “Sammy’s Law,” which allows the city to lower speed limits to as low as 10 mph on some streets.