Thursday, January 12, 2017
Infrastructure upgrades obviously needed
From CBS:
Crews are on the scene of a massive water main break Thursday in Queens.
The main burst at 60th Avenue and 99th Street in Corona overnight, sending water and mud gushing into the street and cracking the asphalt.
Crews are now trying to get to the water main.
The cause of the break is still unclear.
AirTrain is unnecessary spending
At last week’s board meeting, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey unveiled its latest $32 billion, 10-year spending blueprint — a document carefully calibrated not to consider the region’s need for new infrastructure, but to appease governors on both sides of the Hudson.
The governors, of course, appoint the Port’s commissioners and, bridge scandals notwithstanding, continue to pull the strings at the authority. Unfortunately, using the Port Authority to dole out money to gubernatorial pet projects does nothing to help commuters stuck with a dysfunctional regional transportation system.
Two big examples show how the latest Christie-Cuomo spending plan got it all wrong.
First up: dubious airport rail projects favored by both governors are getting funded in a suspicious quid pro quo. Nearly $1.5 billion would go to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s LaGuardia-Willets Point AirTrain, which transit experts say will actually take longer than existing bus service.
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Woodside to get $250K dog run
Work is scheduled to begin this month on the long-awaited revamp to the dog run in Doughboy Park, according to the Parks Department.
Construction on the dog run in Doughboy Plaza, located on Woodside Avenue between 54th and 56th streets, is expected to be completed sometime this spring.
It will include improving access to the site and installing new steps, drainage, fencing and plantings, according to Meghan Lalor, a spokeswoman for the Parks Department.
Though Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer allocated $250,000 in funding to fix up the dilapidated dog run in 2013, the project was delayed for several years while the park was used as a staging area for construction on the neighboring school, P.S. 11.
$250,000 for a dog run? Really?
DSNY app inaccurate
182nd Street in Fresh Meadows not looking too plowed @NYCSanitation @NYCMayorsOffice pic.twitter.com/aBOODkY7oK
— (((Rory Lancman))) (@RoryLancman) January 8, 2017
From NY1:
A Queens councilman says the city's PlowNYC program did not measure up during this weekend's snowstorm.
City Councilman Rory Lancman uploaded videos on Twitter showing snow-covered streets in his district.
He said many of them had not been plowed in hours, or at all.
This, despite the streets being marked as recently cleared on PlowNYC - the city's public database that tracks which streets have been plowed.
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Dumb de Blasio statement of the day
Mayor de Blasio won’t be using the Second Ave. subway for his daily commute because it’s not as convenient as getting to his Brooklyn gym in his taxpayer funded NYPD SUV, he told reporters Monday.
“Think about the route to Brooklyn [from Gracie Mansion], then to City Hall,” de Blasio said when asked about his subway habits.
He added, “I'm going to be doing exactly what I’m doing — going to my home neighborhood [Park Slope] in the morning, and then going to City Hall from there.”
___________________
Yes, indeed. Think about that route when you could be attending a gym on the upper east side or even install one inside Gracie Mansion.
And this is all you need to know about the logic of the Dope from Park Slope.
NYC lacking in trees
In an effort to promote urban tree cover, researchers at MIT’s Senseable City Lab have developed Treepedia, a platform for mapping the canopies of ten different major cities. Using Google Street View panoramas to serve as a Green View Index (GVI) to compare and evaluate green canopy coverage, Treepedia provides a visual map of trees and vegetation in Boston, Geneva, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Sacramento, Seattle, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Turin, Vancouver and of course, New York.
Researchers chose GVI over satellite imagery so as to “represent human perception of the environment from the street level,” according to the Treepedia site. GVI is measured on a scale of 0 to 100. A city with a GVI of 100 would be completely covered by tree canopy.
New York ranked the third lowest of the ten cities, with only Paris and London having less tree coverage. With a GVI of 25.9 percent, Vancouver was found to have the most tree coverage.
Flushing man takes stand against bioswale
Flushing resident Carmine Famiglietti held his ground.
And he remains bioswale-free.
After three workers, who the Flushing resident says are “most likely” contractors (which could not be confirmed by the agency before deadline) showed up in front of his home on behalf of the Department of Environmental Protection on Dec. 20, Famiglietti went outside and after hours of staring them down, they left.
“I said, ‘Fellas, I’m gonna tell you, I’m gonna stand here, I’m not gonna let you do the work,’” he said. “I don’t have any real clear cut evidence that we need one in front of my house.”
The Flushing resident says that the employees were “very courteous,” but he was determined to stop them from testing a site in front of his house where a bioswale could go. The analysis would require drilling.
“It never got confrontational but I wasn’t gonna move,” he said. “It went on for about two, two and a half hours before they finally gave up and left.”
Monday, January 9, 2017
Air pollution inspector arrested for accepting bribe
A city air pollution inspector was busted for soliciting a bribe from a Brooklyn construction site after threatening to impose a stop work order, officials said Wednesday.
Sean Richardson-Daniel, 53, was inspecting 222 Pulaski St. on Dec. 4, 2015 when he told an informant he believed was a property representative that he would issue the stop work order unless he received $15,000 in cash, even though there were no active Department of Environmental Protection complaints against the property, according to the Department of Investigation.
Grease in pipes in an ongoing problem
Some section of the city's 7,500 miles of sewer lines gets blocked virtually every day, and discarded cooking oil is the reason 60% of the time. But in parts of Queens, that grease is the culprit in nearly 80% of all sewer backups, a problem that is especially acute near Kennedy Airport.
Experts say one reason Queens' sewers get blocked so often is that a lot of food is prepared in the city's most diverse borough, where residents, who hail from 120 different countries, might not be familiar with the best grease-handling practices.
In an effort to educate the public on the ills of grease dumping, last year the city enlisted interns from the Summer Youth Employment Program to knock on neighborhood doors as part of its Cease the Grease campaign. The teenagers visited more than 50,000 Queens households and 1,000 restaurants to remind people that used cooking oil and fat should be sealed in nonrecyclable containers and thrown out with the rest of the trash, not poured down the sink.
But grease has been blocking big city sewers practically since the pipes were laid. In 1859, a Brooklyn sewer commissioner observed that "melted grease is very objectionable." Two years ago in London, an 11-ton mound of congealed fat was extracted from a sewer, requiring more than $600,000 in repairs.
Grease causes sewer backups all over the city, but they most commonly occur in certain Queens neighborhoods including South Jamaica and St. Albans, where more than 4,800 complaints were made in the past five years, an average of nearly three per day. The city received almost 15,000 reports of greasy sewer clogs during that time, according to 311 call logs—numbers that suggest one-third of the most mucked-up city sewers are located in neighborhoods that house less than 5% of New York's 8.5 million residents.
Although some of those sewer problems can be linked to the vast amounts of cooking oil used in preparing dishes such as deviled fish, a deep-fried delicacy on the menu at many Sri Lankan restaurants in southeastern Queens, experts say the chronic backups mostly reflect the area's history and geography.
Sewer pipes in southeastern Queens tend to be 10 inches in diameter, Adamski said—less than half the typical size in other boroughs—because they were installed decades ago, when the area was relatively undeveloped. Southeastern Queens is also a flood basin, so its streets and basements are vulnerable to sewer backups after even modest rainfalls. The problem's origins go back to the 1940s, when a natural drainage area was paved over to build runways for JFK. Moreover, the area's groundwater table has steadily risen during the past decade or so. Climate change is a factor, and so is the fact that the city no longer pumps the ground wells that once provided the area's drinking water.
Commercial vehicles are prohibited on residential property
A Flushing man wants two commercial trucks parked at his neighbor’s house to hit the road.
Manzar Karim is sick of commercial vehicles being parked in the driveway of a house at 33-55 159 St.
“There are two trucks,” Karim, who lives nearby, told the Chronicle. “There’s no warehouse, no shops, nothing, in about 30, 40 blocks. It’s a resident area, completely.”
The area is zoned R1-2A, a residential designation.
He spoke to the offices of Councilman Paul Vallone (D-Bayside) and state Sen. Tony Avella (D-Bayside) about the issue and filed a 311 complaint.
The building is being rented to a family by Feng Liu, who bought the house in October. He has been issued a ticket by the Department of Buildings for the vehicles, which he says are not parked at the house overnight.
“I recently acquired this property like two months ago and I leased it out to one family,” he said. “They own a moving company where they usually have a lot of stuff to move around but usually at night they rent a spot somewhere else for a monthly fee.”
The senator wrote the DOB last month urging it to look into the truck situation. According to Avella spokesman Conner Quinn, the agency has not sent a response yet.
Vallone’s office also reached out to the DOB before the ticket was issued and plans on following up if the problem is not solved.
This is a problem all over Queens and is why the borough looks like one big truck yard.
Sunday, January 8, 2017
Large collection of historical records to be better preserved
From NBC:
Long buried inside the granite of Surrogate Court, what was ancient history to New York is alive again. Geog Huth and Joe Van Nostrand aren't merely history buffs -- they're history's keepers. Their task now is to dust off New York's old court records and deliver them to a larger, safe space. John Chandler reports.
Elderly and infirm residents are trapped in their building
From PIX11:
Imagine you have no elevator service for a month and you're a senior citizen or have serious health issues.
That's what dozens of residents in a Kew Gardens apartment building are coping with.
"We do the best we can," Sidney Tesher, an 87-year-old tenant of the Austin Street building, told PIX11. "Excuse me for being out of breath."
PIX11 News reached out to the building's management company, PSRS Realty Group, for comment, but has not received a response.
Nobody was working on the elevator when PIX11 was there. The realty group told residents in a sign in the building that elevator service will be restored on Jan. 18.
Reporter captures food pantry debacle
A Queens Crap blog post from last month featured a complaint from an anonymous person about the crowds that come when the synagogue gives out food and block the entrance to a nearby community driveway.
Nisanov said that people who come to the food pantry are encouraged to avoid blocking the community driveway.
“Whenever there’s cars coming by, we always ask the people to move,” he said. “Even when there is no car coming by, we always tell people, ‘Please, it’s a driveway; we don’t want anyone to get hurt.’”
But when the Chronicle went to the location on Wednesday morning during the time of the food pantry’s operation, an entrance to the community driveway was blocked by a number of people waiting in line.
The rabbi added that the synagogue being in the area has benefited it in other ways.
“A house of worship and especially a synagogue in the neighborhood has raised the values of homes tremendously,” he said.
The Board of Standards and Appeals issued a variance for the building to be a synagogue with an accessory apartment for the rabbi in 2007 on the condition that it get a new certificate of occupancy reflecting the usage, according to the agency’s executive director, Ryan Singer. The certificate was necessary for the variance to legalize the building’s usage as a synagogue. The building did not have one by 2011, the deadline to do so under the conditional variance.
Saturday, January 7, 2017
Judge rules that homeowner must fix up landmarked house
A Staten Island judge on Thursday ordered the owners of one of the city's oldest houses to fix it immediately or run the risk of having to pay fines of more than $8.5 million — 20 times the property's fair market value.
In a colorfully written, 22-page decision, Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Philip Straniere said the owners knew in 2009 when they bought the historic Manee-Seguine Homestead that the house and surrounding acres were landmarked and they would be responsible for maintaining the building.
Instead, he said, they adopted a policy of “demolition by neglect” and ignored prior court orders to make repairs and post bonds that could be used to fund fixes.
Straniere added that the owners never filed a hardship application with the city to get out of the landmark designation for the house, which was built starting in 1690 and designated a landmark in 1984.
Under the designation, the owners were allowed to build residential units on the two-acre, ocean-view parcel as compensation for maintaining the historic home — one of the six oldest houses in the city. But they did not do that, either.
"(The owners) do not have to take any steps to develop the property; that is their choice. But they are required by the statute to maintain it. They have not done so," the judge wrote.
He said the city's request for an injunction to block the owners permanently from “continuing their policy of ‘demolition by neglect’... is granted.”
Be careful who you hire as an architect
From PIX11:
An architect from Queens was nowhere to be found after he promised to help a woman draft up new papers for her two-family home, so PIX11 stepped in.
Denise James said she was getting clobbered by taxes because the city considered her house a three family when it was really a two-family home. She needed an architect to draft new papers so she could get a new certificate of occupancy.
James found Alfred Mierzejewski, of Flushing, after reading good reviews of his services on the internet.
Mierzejewski said he wanted $10,000 to do the job. James gave him a $5,000 deposit in April 2015.
“Never hear from him till after three months. I keep trying to call him, text him, no response," James said.
When Mierzejewski finally did call her, he said he’d forgotten all about her. But somehow he still didn’t get around to completing the job. He gave James a handwritten note promising to refund her $5,000, but it never happened.
2-family house illegally converted into 8-family
From Brooklyn Reporter:
A Dyker Heights home has been issued a full vacate order after Department of Buildings (DOB) officials found that it had been illegally converted from a two-family home to an eight-family home, housing just over two dozen people.
An initial complaint, logged onto the DOB database on Tuesday, January 3, stated that the home – located at 1178 65th Street – was a “two family house, turned into a six family house with 30 people living there.” However, upon inspection by the Building Marshals Office two days later, the residence was found to have “illegal gas and electrical work at the location, and [it was] determined that the two-family home was illegally converted into an eight-family residence,” according to a DOB spokesperson.
President of the Brooklyn Housing Preservation Alliance Bob Cassara says that the vigilant actions of neighbors and concerned residents who continue to file complaints with the DOB, local officials and a recently started Agency Task Force, aid the city in combating illegal conversions.
“The fact that credible information is being supplied from the community is the reason we’re able to get a lot of this done,” said Cassara who, in 2015, helped form the Agency Task Force – which focuses on combating the proliferation of illegal home conversions in Dyker Heights and Bay Ridge. “[Residents] are making these complaints to DOB, and sending us complaints or going to a councilmember or community board and if the information that’s being supplied is credible, [DOB] acts on it.”
Friday, January 6, 2017
$2.5M Sunnyside Railyard study is "incomplete"
Nearly two years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a grand vision for an affordable housing development.
"It's an opportunity to keep our city affordable for thousands of New Yorkers, particularly in the borough of Queens. I am referring to Sunnyside Yards," de Blasio said in February 2015.
Planners wanted New Yorkers to picture thousands of units of affordable housing above a 200-acre railyard in Sunnyside, Queens.
But since the proposal was first unveiled, we've haven't heard much. So has it gone off track?
"There is a lot of back and forth happening right now, both within the administration and with some of the engineers we are consulting with about different development scenarios, exactly what is feasible," said Wiley Norvell, communications adviser to de Blasio.
According to the project's timeline, the city was supposed to unveil a feasibility study in the summer of 2016. The administration says that study, which cost about $2.5 million, is not complete. It's coming, they promise, within a few months.
The local councilman, Jimmy Van Bramer, questions whether the whole project has just derailed.
"When you make a big important speech and you are the mayor, people listen and they hear it," Van Bramer said. "We've gone through this study phase, and now, I think people are getting a little agitated about where is it, what's happening here, why aren't we hearing back."
City Council Member proposes app for trash truck tracking
From CBS:
They’re a welcome sight when garbage piles up on the sidewalk, but getting stuck behind a sanitation truck is no fun for city drivers.
“Cause I always get stuck behind a garbage truck and it always makes me late in the mornings,” Tamara Mose told CBS2’s Jessica Borg.
Especially — she said — while driving in her neighborhood, on narrow one-way streets, like in some Brooklyn neighborhoods.
“It’s the most frustrating thing as a New Yorker,” City Councilman David Greenfield said.
Greenfield said he has a bill that would bring that frustration to an end.
On Wednesday, he proposed making it a requirement for the Sanitation Department to publicly release its GPS data on trucks so that drivers can see exactly where trucks are in real-time.
“It’s really a win, win, win. A win for the drivers, it’s also a win for the sanitation workers, it’s very frustrating when you’re trying to do your job. People are honking, they’re yelling,” Greenfield said.
Greenfield said the GPS data could then be used to create navigation apps to warn people about what streets to avoid.
Wealthy renters are choosing Queens
High-income renters are flooding into Queens, according to a recent study.
Wealthy residents of New York City have shown a preference for renting rather than owning homes over the last decade, a new report from RentCafe shows, with the number of affluent renters more than tripling in Queens over the last decade.
After Brooklyn, Queens has seen the second largest influx of wealthy renters over the last 10 years by percentage.
Queens saw a jump in high-income renters from 8,486 households to 29,473 households, or 247 percent, over the last decade, compared to the city as a whole, which saw an increase by 137 percent.
The report defined high-income renters as households earning more than $150,000 per year, and found that about a fifth of New York City renters qualified as high-income, or 211,482 households, which is more than all the affluent renters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Jose, and San Diego combined.
The report points out that an influx in wealthy renters is a sign of gentrification, with about seven percent of Queens renters now making more than $150,000 per year.
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