Jerk shovels snow into neighbor's driveway

I've enjoyed your blog for a while now. I have a video to contribute if you find it worthy.

My next door neighbor thought it was OK to shovel his snow into my driveway!

The pile was almost 4 feet high when they were done.

Just amazing!

Paul B.
Richmond Hill

Not only that, he's blocking the street with a garbage can. - QC

Tree fight in Bellerose

From the Times Ledger:

A stately, 100-year-old Black Locust tree has sparked a war between two neighbors in Bellerose, with one man claiming the tree’s roots damaged his property and one woman worried that clearing the roots would cause the massive tree to topple over.

The neighbors both agree the spat began with a conversation across their shared backyard fence this summer. During the conversation, Mahendra Shah, who lives on 250th Street, asked Carolina Florica, who lives on 249th Street, where the tree is located, if she would remove some of the large, shallow tree roots growing onto his property.

After that point, however, they seem to agree on almost nothing.

Shah said he wants the tree roots gone because he believes they caused a large crack in the wall of his stand-alone, single-car garage and in the stones of his back patio.

He also said he is considering building a shed in the backyard, but cannot move forward with the plan unless the roots are scaled back.

But Florica disputes Shah’s allegation that the tree is the cause of the garage’s crack and says she should not be responsible for cutting the tree roots, saying the tree was there long before she or her neighbor were.

Florica called a New York-certified home inspector with Garber Home Inspections and an urban ecologist with Worldwide Ecology, Dr. Steven D. Garber, to inspect the tree and Shah’s garage this summer. According to an affidavit Garber gave to Florica’s attorney, the garage’s damage was not due to the tree but rather to freezing and thawing water from the roof, which Garber said does not have a gutter and is poorly maintained.

In addition, the affidavit warns cutting away portions of the tree’s root system could be dangerous, making it more susceptible to health issues “that could weaken the tree, cause death of parts of the tree and make it more likely to lose branches [or] fall in a storm.”

Trapped in their own home

From CBS 2:  

An elderly couple in Bushwick, Brooklyn claims they are trapped in their own home thanks to a construction project on the stairway out of their multi-family home. 

Robert Foster, 91, is a World War II veteran and said he and his 87-year-old wife both use walkers but have a hard time navigating the 22-inch wide staircase from their Putnam Avenue home to the sidewalk. 

Their neighbor’s improvement project included putting up a fence, which split the original stairwell in two. The neighbor extended her own staircase but the couple’s staircase was left less than two feet wide, which violates code. 

By law, staircases must be at least 36 inches wide. The couple’s daughter said she is concerned the current staircase is a safety hazard.

Stop work order as revenge?

From Brownstoner's Astoria Renovation blog:

We had been warned by the seller, the former tenants and the other neighbors that the owner of the one house we share a party wall with was… difficult.

We tried to start things on the right foot with with all the neighbors, giving them an apologetic letter outlining the scope and schedule of the work and giving our and the contractor’s phone numbers for any problems. A few weeks into the work, we approached the afore-mentioned neighbor because we needed to dig a foot into her property to waterproof the walls of the extension, at a point where there was only an old cement patio.

She refused us access (even though legally we could have forced the issue). Well, we explained, we would need to come onto her property to apply the brick facing to the extension later in the project. She still refused.

Our neighbor would rather stare at an unfinished cement block wall than allow us onto her property to give a nice brick facing.

Then she suggested that if our contractor gave her a good price on some work she wanted done, she would let him have access. Well, the price — current Queens above-board building prices — was not what she — old Astorian mindset — was prepared to pay.

Then suddenly we got a visit from a DOB inspector because of a complaint. Our work was causing “cracks in a party wall.” Complaints are anonymous, but there is only one party wall — on the side with this neighbor. Most people, if they had cracking, would contact the owners or the builders, show them the problem, and demand to know how they were going to make it right. We have never heard anything from the neighbor directly, and no one has seen the claimed cracks.

Bad neighbor blog

I've had to endure the crappiest neighbors for more years than I care to remember. Despite calls to the city for help for either their noise, trash, illegal burning..., we've gotten precious little effective response.

Because of this, I have decided to start a blog chronicling and documenting their exploits. It is 93-45.blogspot.com. I have named it after their house number, but deliberately left off the street number. I hope that this might be of interest to you and your readers and perhaps lead me to some solutions for their BS.

yours,

Rich Parkwood

(my "name" stand for RICHmond Hill, Ozone PARK and WOODhaven communities of which I live on the cusp of.)