The Gowanus Canal Conservancy held a public meeting in Carroll Gardens this week to unveil renderings for a park and esplanade that would run along the Gowanus canal. The project’s dubbed Sponge Park because planners hope it will help absorb some of the raw sewage that currently contaminates the canal during heavy rainfall. (Brownstoner believes oily runoff from the nearby Gowanus Expressway is another big problem.) The idea is that when the canal is finally......

Photograph of 102 East 124th Street via WABC The Department of Buildings commissioner admitted her agency knew a Harlem building was in danger of collapse but somehow it got lost in the shuffle and collapsed on its own. On Tuesday, bricks fell off 102 East 124th Street, a vacant building, and a few hours later, the roof and top floor collapsed. Its neighboring building was compromised and authorities moved to demolish it, asking the......

Rendering of proposed Public Place development by The Hudson Companies. Earlier in the week, the department of Housing Preservation and Development [HPD] revealed renderings for a proposed housing development and park on 5.8 acres of heavily polluted land by the toxic Gowanus canal. Located on the site of a former manufactured gas plant, the city has owned the land, which stretches from Smith Street to the canal, for two decades. National Grid, who took over......

The Department of Housing Preservation and Development has compiled a list of the city's 200 most poorly maintained buildings and has told the owners they must be repaired in 4 months. Or else, the NY Times reports, the city will be able to overhaul them and force the owners to pay. On November 11, a Local Law No. 29, the Alternative Enforcement Program, went into affect to help the HPD to "enforce the correction of......

Sometimes people just don't like dogs, and one of those people is Jeanne Farley. Farley is suing her apartment's management company to, as she tells the Daily News, "get rid of the dogs and play by the rules." Sixty-four year old Farley has a fear of dogs (cynophobia) points out that the rules at Penn South does have a ban on dogs and her lease says "no animals of any kind" (!!) are not allowed.......

In 1979 a collective of artists occupied a vacant city- owned building on Delancey Street and mounted an exhibition. The police padlocked the show but after community and media support of the artists the city offered use of a building at 156 Rivington Street as a compromise. Over the ensuing years, the collective that runs the center – which is home to weekly punk and jazz/improv concerts as well as a computer center and silk......

This past February Mayor Bloomberg announced an expansion of the city's five-year housing plan to a ten-year plan that will create and preserve 165,000 units of affordable housing by the end of 2013. The two lead agencies in the housing initiative are the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). Recently, Gothamist had the opportunity to take a walking tour of the neighborhood around Marcus Garvey Park led by......

Julie Miles, Housing Here and Now...

I want to sell a condo purchased from an affordable housing program in New York City. Are there income restrictions for buyers, and are there restrictions on my asking price? Ask Gothamist can't help but notice - it seems that the most popular questions involve real estate and romance (the most sought-after things in NYC?) According to the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development FAQ,there are several affordable housing programs in NYC......

In the chicken vein, there are roosters keeping Harlem residents awake with their crowing from 4AM well into the morning. NY1 called the Health Department and was told "the responsibility lies with the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development since the lot where the roosters roam is city-owned. The HPD told [NY1] it had first been trying to find out who owns the roosters. But now because of this story, HPD had Animal Control remove......