In the Brooklyn Paper, Aaron Short has this quote from one of the few legal tenants in the building:
“It’s horrible!” said Ralph De La Rosa of Go Yoga, which occupies a first-floor business space. “The city should be doing something else instead of vacating them in this way.”
Let’s review, shall we. This is a six-story building with 12 “apartments”. There are no sprinklers (as is required for hotels and other transient uses), there are no secondary means of egress (as is required for hotels and other transient uses). Most of the four-story addition is constructed of combustible wood framing. All of the DOB permits for this building describe a three-story commercial building, so the top three stories seem to be some form of immaculate construction (DOB issued a violation for the construction of the third story in 2002, but somehow missed the fourth, fifth and sixth). There is no certificate of occupancy (so technically, even Go Yoga is in there illegally).
What else, exactly, would you have the city do? Other than the fact that a lot of people are out of their (very expensive) home, what is horrible about this whole episode is the fact that the city didn’t do something about it eight years ago.
4 responses to “112 North 6th Street Followup”
If you were a tenant kicked out on Friday from one of these apartments, please contact: Ryan Kuonen at Neighbors Allied for Good Growth
718.384.2248.
You’re not alone in this!
Wow. So, I say one lousy thing in defense of innocent people getting put on the street at a moments’ notice… and I’m the jerk? Interesting.
I didn’t say you were a jerk. In fact I agreed with you that it was horrible that people were getting thrown out of their home.
What I also said was that the issue is a lot more complicated than just saying the City is being a jerk by evicting people on a moments notice. Unfortunately, that is what the City does when it comes across blatantly illegal construction, occupation, use, etc.
The real jerks here are the building owners, who allowed this to go on for 12 years, who did work that probably was not permitted (I’m still trying to figure out where two additional stories come from – they sure don’t show up on the online DOB filings), and who did really shoddy work to boot (I watched this addition go up, it was not a pretty sight).
The blame for the city lies in the fact that they didn’t do something about this eight years ago when there were complaints about the illegal construction (or 12 years ago, when there more complaints and many visits by FDNY).
I agree with Ralph. If the DOB truly cared about safety, they could have given the tenants at least 24 to 48 hours of advance notice that the building was being vacated.
For them to expect to put rent-paying tenants out on the street within the course of a few hours is ridiculous.