Restaurant annexes the curb

 

 Today is the day City Council has a remote hearing on a deranged and autocratic proposal by the Department of Transportation to give restaurants, BIDs and Transportation Alternatives and Open Plans connected groups the right to annex roads and steal parking spaces for privatization to continue the pandemic era "open streets" program that barricades streets and impedes traffic. 

A good example of this colonizing of the streets of New York for dining and drinking is this space hogging restaurant that built two shanties and stole multiple parking spaces where the aforementioned urbanist lobbyists have ties. 

Here's where you can testify via writing or zoom to finish this program once and for all.

 

Queens is burning again: Makeshift boarding house goes up in flames and kills 3 people in Jamaica Estates

Update. 17 people were living in this house. Queens Borough Redundancy/President Donnie Richards called the fire "preventable", which is pretty far-fetched considering these boarders could only afford to live virtually on top of each other because the city built a bunch of towers in the city's housing connect system that were 80% market rate. The landlord decided to put the fire out himself and waited to call 911. The City Of Yes will fix this.

 Firehouse

Three men died in a Queens fire early Sunday that tore through a house full of illegally converted apartments — with panicked survivors leaping out of windows to escape the flames, FDNY officials said.

The two-alarm blaze broke out on Chevy Chase St. near Henley Road in Jamaica Estates about 1:30 a.m., officials said, with the inferno soon bursting through the windows and roof.

FDNY officials described the house as a firetrap, with no apparent smoke detectors, makeshift walls and occupants packed into apartments on the first and second floor as well as the cellar and attic.

One of the survivors described making a desperate escape as his father died leaping out of a second-story window.

“There was a lot of smoke inside. We cannot get out. I broke the window so we can just get out of the window. This is the only way,” said Abdullah Zaher, 25. “There was no flames upstairs. Smoke! My father jumped, my brother jumped, and I jumped in the end.”

Zaher’s hand bled heavily from breaking the window as he spoke to the Daily News hours later. His father didn’t survive.

“He was everything to me, literally everything to me. He was a friend, he was a father, he was a giver. Literally everything. There was food, he would give me the food,” Zaher said. “He’s still working, trying to survive. He was a chauffeur.. Uber driver.”

Firefighters found three men dead at the scene, ages 45, 52 and 67, according to police.

“There’s no evidence to us at this time that there’s a working smoke detector in this house,” FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker told reporters at the scene. “And there’s a lot of evidence of extension cords and other carelessness.”

At least eight residents were hurt but survived, including three injured jumping out of second-floor and attic windows, according to police sources. One of the survivors is in critical condition, according to FDNY officials.

FDNY Chief of Department John Esposito described the scene in the house.

“When our units arrived, they had fire out the windows of the first floor. The fire had extended to the second floor and attic and these were all living spaces,” he said. “There were makeshift walls. The means of egress were substandard, exits blocked, stairways blocked.”

“There was a wall through the middle of the kitchen, which was very abnormal,” he added. “There’s makeshift access to the second floor, which allows the fire to spread much quicker upstairs.”

Four firefighters suffered minor injuries in the blaze, which the FDNY brought under control by about 3 a.m.

The house is listed in city records as a single-family home, but dozens of Buildings Department complaints dating as far back as 2008 show neighbors and residents complaining that it was illegally converted into a roominghouse.

The most recent complaint, from February 2023, reads, “The home owner [has] a mental disabled individual living in the basement. The homeowner built a half wall in the kitchen so someone can live there … there is approximately 12 to 14 people in the house.”

“It’s so frustrating because we’ve been watching this unfold for years. I called 311. My husband called 311. Many of the neighbors called 311,” said Steve Fischer, 67, who lives across the street on the upper-class tree-lined block. “We knew based on what we saw that it was being used as an illegal roominghouse.”

“It wasn’t for lack of many people trying to alert the city that there was something illegal going on,” he added.

Buildings Department officials said the owners of the house were hit with a violation in 2010 for illegally converting the basement into an apartment and in 2016 for work without a permit when they constructed two wood-frame structures in the back and side yards.

Since then, the Buildings Department has received several 311 calls complaining about illegal conversion conditions — but inspectors were unable to get into the building for one visit in 2020 and three visits in 2023, agency officials said.

“Calls would prompt people from the city to show up. Supposedly they would knock. The guy was not an idiot. He wouldn’t answer the door,” Fischer said of the landlord. “It’s so frustrating because it was so avoidable. … I hope he is charged criminally.”

The cause of the blaze is under investigation.

Tony Rock, 40, who paid about $1,000 a month to live in a first-floor room, dived out of a window to escape the fire.

“I heard screaming, the guy upstairs above me … begging to get out of the room. He’s in there dying,” Rock said.  “I saw him jump out the window.”

Nearly 20 years of complaints on four pages on the NYC Buildings website

 

AG Letitia James's whale of corruption and hypocrisy

 

White Collar Fraud

This comprehensive investigative report presents original research conducted by the author, consolidating key findings to date—including documented evidence that New York Attorney General Letitia James has engaged in a consistent pattern of financial and property disclosures that raise serious legal questions. By bringing these discrepancies together in one document, the report offers a clear roadmap for further investigation by journalists, regulatory authorities, and ethics officials. The evidence points not to isolated errors, but to a systematic pattern of misrepresentation that raises serious questions about James’s legal compliance, transparency, and ethical obligations as New York’s top law enforcement official.

• Principal Residence Misrepresentation: In August 2023, James signed a Specific Power of Attorney declaring her intent to make 604 Sterling Street in Norfolk, Virginia her “principal residence”—a legally binding statement that may have automatically vacated her position as NY Attorney General under Public Officers Law § 30. This declaration came just 45 days before she launched her landmark civil fraud case against Donald Trump. It also potentially constituted mortgage fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1014, which criminalizes false statements made to obtain a loan.
• Hidden and Phantom Mortgages: On her first Virginia property at 3121 Peronne Avenue, James used a $109,600 mortgage from OVM Financial in 2020 but never disclosed it on any of her NY financial disclosure forms, despite legal requirements to do so. Later, in her 2023 disclosure, she reported two different mortgages—one from Freedom Mortgage ($150,000-$250,000) and one from National Mortgage ($100,000-$150,000)—but a 2025 title search found no record of either loan, suggesting they may be fictional.
• Severe Overleveraging: If all three mortgages are considered, James claims $509,600 in mortgage debt on a Virginia property assessed at just $187,300—a loan-to-value ratio of 272%, far beyond any rational underwriting standard and likely impossible to obtain through legitimate lending channels.
• Brooklyn Property Unit Count Misrepresentation: Since 2001, Letitia James has repeatedly represented her property at 296 Lafayette Avenue as a four-family dwelling on mortgage applications and permit filings—even though its official Certificate of Occupancy designates it as a five-family building. Under federal lending guidelines, buildings with five or more units are treated as commercial properties, subject to stricter underwriting standards, including higher down payments, lower loan-to-value limits, and more complex documentation requirements. By misclassifying the property, James may have obtained more favorable residential loan terms—such as lower interest rates and easier approval criteria—that she would not have qualified for if the property had been accurately reported. This misrepresentation also enabled her to secure a federal HAMP mortgage modification in 2011, despite the program explicitly excluding buildings with more than four units. The pattern raises serious questions about the accuracy of her mortgage filings and her compliance with lending and disclosure regulations.
• Undisclosed HAMP Mortgage and Handwritten Alterations: In 2011, James received a federally subsidized HAMP mortgage modification that required the property to have no more than four residential units. The official Certificate of Occupancy showed five. My investigation revealed critical last-minute handwritten notations in the mortgage document, including “4 fam” in one corner and a contradictory note stating “not more than 6 residential units“—suggesting deliberate manipulation to maintain technical eligibility while creating plausible deniability about the property’s true status.
• Missing and Misclassified Mortgages: James’s financial disclosures reveal a pattern of delayed reporting, missing mortgages, and unexplained classification changes. A 2019 Citibank HELOC went undisclosed for three years, then mysteriously disappeared from her 2023 disclosure with no record of satisfaction. Similarly, a 2021 Citizens Bank mortgage went undisclosed that year, appeared as a mortgage in 2022, then was reclassified as a HELOC in 2023—all without corresponding documentation in public records.
• Undisclosed Rental Income: In 2013, Crain’s New York reported that James had failed to disclose rental income from her Brooklyn property for at least five years. Even after being exposed, she understated her actual rental income of $44,400 when filing corrections. Similarly, she reported rental income from her Norfolk property in 2020, then reported zero income in subsequent years while still claiming ownership—leaving unexplained why the active mortgage on the property was never disclosed as required.
• Taxpayer-Funded Private Jet Travel: Between 2020-2021, the Attorney General’s Office spent $41,807.80 in taxpayer funds on private jet travel through Venture Jets Inc., a vendor used by no other state agency. Several flights coincided with James’s campaign activities, including a Martha’s Vineyard trip and the politically significant SOMOS conference in Puerto Rico where she was described as being “fully in campaign mode.”
• Luxury Campaign Spending with Creative Accounting: Campaign filings show a pattern of luxury travel with inconsistent expense categorization. The same hotel charges on the same day were often split between different expense categories (“Office,” “Lodging,” “Transportation”), making it nearly impossible to track true expenditure purposes. In May 2022, after her office stopped paying Venture Jets, her campaign picked up the tab—paying over $12,000 to the same charter company.
• Selective Enforcement of Building Codes: When a complaint was filed about the discrepancy between James’s property’s five-unit Certificate of Occupancy and her four-unit permit applications, building authorities dismissed it as a “MINOR ERROR”—a striking contrast to how such violations are treated for ordinary New Yorkers, who face stop-work orders, substantial penalties, and even forced vacancy for similar infractions.
• The 1983 Queens Property “Husband and Wife” Designation: Records show that in 1983, Letitia James and her father, Robert James, co-signed a mortgage document identifying themselves as “husband and wife”—a legal classification that typically confers specific benefits not available to a father-daughter relationship. 
  

These aren’t isolated incidents but reveal a systematic approach to financial and property reporting that spans multiple jurisdictions, decades, and legal filings. The fact that these patterns have persisted throughout James’s rise to become New York’s chief law enforcement officer—the very official responsible for prosecuting similar misrepresentations—makes these findings particularly significant and demands thorough investigation.

 

NY Post 

 New York Attorney General Letitia James was hit with a federal criminal referral for instances of alleged mortgage fraud on Tuesday, according to a letter obtained by The Post.

Federal Housing FHFA Director William Pulte sent the missive to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy AG Todd Blanche, alleging that James had “falsified records” to get home loans for a property in Virginia that she claimed was her “principal residence” in 2023 — while still serving as a New York state prosecutor.

In February 2001, James also purchased a five-family dwelling in Brooklyn — but has “consistently misrepresented the same property as only having four units in both building permit applications and numerous mortgage documents and applications,” the letter noted.

Dysfunction Junxion

 

For over two months (maybe longer) this massive and hideous bus that was being used as a sanctuary for artists for events and was once parked by a restaurant shanty, was illegally parked on Starr St. until it finally got removed by the NYPD which led to a hilariously fitting end.

But now another bus is now illegally parked on Starr. While less massive but equally hideous, it also has a connection to the art scene as the last one. Meet Ridgewood's newest neighbors "the Junxion"

They think illegal parking and dumping is art and we should like it.

The platform on top of their bluebird bus illegally taking mundane and unused parking spaces is used for performances that can happen anytime according to their "mission" 

  

 

 

Which is why getting nearly 4 grand in parking violations is just a meager cost of doing business. 

 

Ti

 This is what the bluebird bus looks like when it's being immersive.

This collective has 3 other "reimagined" buses in their fleet, so be on the lookout for the bluebyrd and the other trashy art buess when they try to "immerse" on your block. 207

Caption our newest neighbor

Juniper Park reimagined for gentrifiers

 

Looks like the end of softball, concerts and events on the blacktop at Juniper Valley Park and the introduction of adult fitness equipment and bike paths for kids, along with new basketball and pickleball courts. All for the low price of $6M+!

 

 

The Parks department is also making their own version of crunch fitness.