Seven years after the fact, developer Mendel Brach is out of business. The developer has entered into an agreement with the State Attorney General’s office wherein he will barred from selling apartments in New York State and will pay buyers in the Spencer Street condos $10.9 million to repair “structural defects”. The agreement arose out of Brach’s exploitation of the dormitory exemption to overbuild a 9-story condo project in Bed-Stuy. (Locally, Brach was the original developer of the Finger Building.)

It is up to Mr. Bailey, the residents’ lawyer, to collect the $10.9 million judgment, and the apartment owners still must seek certificates of occupancy from the Department of Buildings… If Mr. Brach satisfies all conditions of the settlement, he can ask to have his real estate security privileges reinstated in five years.

No wonder the residents don’t sound ecstatic over the deal. Sounds like a slap on the wrist, with no guarantee of damages ever being recovered.

Comments gone wild.

The 1980s were supposed to be the Al Franken decade, but the junior Senator from Minnesota is have a pretty good decade right now. Here he is giving a woman from the Hudson Institute a schooling on why we need health care reform.

[via Animal]

I wuz robbed.

By a vote of 12 to 1.

Now it’s on to the City Council, where the real changes will be made (and where, despite what Gotham Gazette says, Diana Reyna is not the city council member).

NBC New York weighs in on the Custom Wine Bar story:

The Custom American Wine Bar, a fancy schmancy Driggs Street tapas bar, has faced seemingly inexplicable resistance from locals, who have levied every charge at the place short of saying it will harbor prostitutes servicing Al Queda sleeper cells hell-bent on destroying the American way of life.

In case you missed it, the Community Board approved the application.

I’m ready to admit that the nightlife situation is getting out of hand in Williamsburg – being ground zero for a moveable frat party is not my idea of quality of life. But drawing a line in the sand over a wine bar is not the right answer. The community really needs to encourage restaurants and lower-impact establishments (ahem, wine bars), and work to shut down and curtail the nuisance establishments (or, ideally, stop them from opening in the first place).

The Nobel Committee gives Obama an A for effort. They should have waited for some actual accomplishment of peace, but I do love the smell of heads exploding in the morning.