Joseph raises after-hours and nighttime construction in her district
Joseph describes developers building in the middle of the night on Clarkson Avenue and asks who responds at 10 p.m.; Tigani says the Emergency Response Team covers nights and weekends and that after-hours permit violations are tracked and can lead to violations and partial or full stop work orders.
What about when developers decide?
to violate their permit and start building at night.
That was something we saw in my district on Clarkson Avenue.
I don't know, they think no one was watching.
They started building in the middle of the night and the constituents are calling my office consistently.
How do we help with that?
And when I call, who is gonna come out at 10 o'clock at night when the developers are not supposed to be building at 10 p.m.?
Typically, it would be ERT, the emergency response team that would be deployed.
They're also the ones who are there when, again, a major emergency, a fire happens.
So we do have coverage for this.
When it comes to those who are also violating after-hours permits, that's something that we're tracking, and then typically it may lead to follow-up inspections and other enforcement actions that we can take.
It may lead to either a violation, a partial stop work order, or a full stop work order on those sites.
But once they pay the fine, they feel they can carry on and do as they please in communities.
That's exactly what we're getting, that it's okay, I'll just pay the fine and carry on in disrupting the community and not being good neighbors and destroying.
So that's what my community is facing at a rapid rate in my district, and we would really love some support from DOB, HPD, and I know it's an interagency thing.
I hope you guys are sitting and talking to each other and having a plan because we're going to build block by block.
But as we're building, we also have to be considerate of folks, long-term residents who have been there, homeowners.
I have one.
constituent who they're building, they're squeezing in a building right in between two private homes and her property is damaged now.
What do you tell someone who's an older adult who has their home?
This is generational wealth for communities of color.
And when folks come in and destroy and think they can get away with this, this is unacceptable for our communities.
But there's no recourse because developers feel that, hey, this is just a slap on the wrist.
I can pay my fine and I can move on and continue this.
So for me, I'm saying this, I'm at the point where I'm like kind of frustrated at because I feel like I keep hitting a wall and there's no
recourse for this type of behavior?