The Department Of Transportation Alternatives steals public space from people and gives it to Lyft and Citibike for free car storage

 

NY1

What was once a free parking lot under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is now being used for CitiBike support. Some neighbors say they feel cheated, especially after their hard work to keep the area clean.

“When you see it, you’re like, ‘Are you serious?’ So, no one said anything to any of us. There was no notice," said Shaquana Boykin, who lives in a public housing complex next to the BQE. "It just doesn’t make sense to keep removing free space.”

On August 5, residents noticed a sign announcing the end of public parking near the intersection of Park and Clinton Avenues in Clinton Hill. The Department of Transportation owns this lot and says it’s now being used by Lyft to support CitiBike operations with no set end date. That doesn’t sit well with neighbors.

“This space under Park Avenue has been a public space for decades, it’s been people’s parking," said Michael Higgins, who, along with Boykin, are part of the volunteer group Park Avenue BQE Cleanup. Members have been cleaning the parking lot and others under the expressway since the start of the pandemic. They say it’s unfair for the city to close a free lot with little to no warning, especially one that residents have been maintaining for more than two years.

“We are just trying to care for this space," said Higgins. "We’ve unfortunately seen community spaces in this neighborhood become privatized and we’ve tried to avoid that. People care, people are trying to do the best they can given the limited resources we have, but we need help.”

Boykin feels the decision to close this lot is an insult to residents who park there as well as volunteers who keep it safe and clean. She disagrees with the decision to section off an entire parking lot for storage.

"Parking under the BQE is where you feel safe," said Boykin. "You don't have to worry about tickets. No matter where you live, when you enter that community, you know where that free space is to park and you've gotta maintain that!"

In a statement, a DOT spokesperson says, “Accommodating Citi Bike in this lot is an important and necessary measure to support Citi Bike’s operations in keeping bikes well maintained and stations evenly balanced.”

Judge rules in favor of Brooklyn homeowners against city's government program TPT plunder scheme.

Kings County Politics

In a sweeping decision, Kings County Supreme Court Judge Mark Partnow yesterday ruled that the City of New York violated the U. S. Consitution in the seizure of six central Brooklyn properties, and ordered the city to give them back to their owners, restoring millions of dollars of intergenerational wealth in the black and Latino community.

The city attempted to take all the properties under the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s (HPD) Third Party Transfer (TPT) program, and in which KCP has been doing an ongoing investigative series. 

Under the TPT program, the city seizes properties they deem “distressed,” and give them to the public/private non-profit Neighborhood Restore, who in turn give the property for a nominal fee to a qualified non-profit or for-profit developer. The program was created in the late 1970s, when the city had a large number of abandoned and neglected buildings.

However, with gentrification, these properties, and others in the same program, are now worth millions of dollars in market value. Almost all were completely paid for with no mortgage and located in traditionally black and brown neighborhoods, which are becoming increasingly gentrified.

When the city takes property under TPT, they give no equity to the property owners, who in many of the cases paid thousands of dollars in back taxes and water bills to the Department of Finance, which was never registered as being paid.

Much of the properties taken by the Third Party Transfer (TPT) program are located in rapidly gentrifyingng neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

Partnow rulings were on six separate property cases that came before his court. Two of the properties – 25 McDonough Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant and 19 Kingsland Avenue in Williamsburg/Bushwick were the subject of several of the KCP stories. The other properties Partnow ruled on were 1055 Bergen Street in Crown Heights, 972 Rutland Road on the Brownsville/Crown Heights border, 315 Harman Street in Bushwick and 463 Classon Avenue in Clinton Hill.

“The City has particularly targeted properties that are owned by minorities. The court recognizes that home ownership is an important means for families to build intergenerational wealth. While the Third Party Transfer Program was intended to be a beneficial program, an overly broad and improper application of it that results in the unfair divestiture of equity in one’s property cannot be permitted,” wrote Partnow in his ruling.

Partnow found several problems with the taking of all these properties including a lack of process in serving property owners that their property was being taken, and that the properties in questions never met the definition of being distressed.
But time and again, in each of the cases Partnow noted the city took properties worth millions of dollars without giving any equity/compensation to the owners.

“The transfer of the Kingsland property to Neighborhood Restore is also unconscionable and shocking in the conscience of the court based on the amount of the City’s lien versus the substantial value of the Kingsland property. In addition, since the Kingsland property is not a distressed property, the taking of it through the Third Party Transfer program would constitute an unlawful taking of private property without just compensation in violation of Kingsland’s HDFC’s constitutional rights under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Consitution and article 1, section 7, of the New York State Constitution,” he wrote.

Anyone seen the former HPD director Alicia Glen lately? Because her dirty vampire calimari hands are all over this. 


Admin note: if anyone is not familiar with her background, she previously worked at Goldman Sachs in their Urban Investment Group dept., which this neighborhood would certainly meet it's qualification for "urban" and it's gentrification as "investment". As for my description, she sardonically replied in a Vanity Fair article about Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi's description of GS as a Great Vampire Squid by saying that her former employer are actually nice little calimari.

Long story short, this woman should be indicted and arraigned on punitive charges for what she did to these homeowners while running HPD.