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......

Some good news in the ongoing saga to save 1520 Sedgwick, better known as the Birthplace of Hip Hop. Today Senator Schumer, who has been lobbying on behalf of the tenants to preserve the building's affordability, announced that "the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development rejected the proposed sale to developer Mark Karasick because current rents could not be sustained if the sale had gone through." The move doesn't insure that the building’s owner......

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......

With the buzz about the 248 McKibbin Street MySpace page organizing comments about its bedbug infestation, we thought it would be a good time to visit the Bedbug City Map. The map relies on reported bedbug incidents, which are mapped by the intensity of the infestation as well - and 248 McKibbin is at the red "Help!" level. Bedbugs are hell, no question about it. Ridding an apartment of bedbugs requires multiple fumigations and......

Did you hear about the new arts and music venue opening in Fort Greene? Well, chances are that all of the blood, sweat, tears and money (over $1M) that went into it may have been for nothing. Amber Art and Music Space was being built out of an old liquor store at Fulton Street and Ashland Place by three friends who are now being told they can no longer develop the space. At the end......

Yesterday, East Harlem residents protested "greedy landlords" to raise concerns about gentrification. One resident, Otoniel Santiago, told amNew York that his $1,100 rent for his family's two-bedroom has zoomed up to $3,000 because of extra charges his landlord has added, "They said I had to pay or they would take legal action. I think they want us to get tired and move out, then they will bring in people who will pay $1,700 a......

It's been three months since the tragic fire in a Bronx family home that claimed the lives of one adult and nine children. Mamadou Soumare, who lost his wife and four children in the blaze, has filed a notice of claim, with the FDNY, Department of Buildings, Department of Housing Preservation and even his cousin, Moussa Magassa, who owned the building, as possible defendants. The fire was started by an overheated space heater cord on......

Two separate initiatives were highlighted yesterday: one to crack down on New York slumlords and another to cut property taxes paid by New York property owners. The City Council passed a bill called the Safe Housing Act that targets landlords with multiple building code violations. It requires the Dept. of Housing Preservation and Development to target 200 buildings annually with repeated code violations and in need of emergency repairs and force their owners to make......

A piece of Brooklyn property with a varied and interesting history is going to be turned into mixed-income housing by the city and developers. It is the former site of the Navy Brig in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Located between Flushing and Park Aves. and bounded by Clermont and Vanderbilt Aves., the one-time naval prison is across the street from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The Brig was built in the early 1940s and served as a......

This morning, the NY Times takes a look at the Mayor's $7.5 billion affordable housing plan four years since he announced it and one year since he expanded it to 165,000 units of low- to moderate-cost housing. About one third of the projected units, or 55,000, have been financed to date, and 41,366 have been completed. But the 10-year plan may not succeed in producing a net increase in affordable housing. The problem is......

The cold wave continues! In response to the cold, which is expected to last several more days, the city has opened nine temporary warming centers and the Department of Homeless Services has doubled their outreach to the homeless in each of the boroughs. In addition the DHS has expanded their Cold Weather Emergency Procedure to operate 24 hours a day while temperatures remain below freezing. If you do not have adequate heat or hot water......

Yay! It's Daylight Saving Time, which means at 2AM this morning, it magically went back to being 1AM. Well, it's "Yay!" for the extra hour of sleep you get, but then it's "Argh!" when you think of how dark it'll be at 5-5:30PM. The U.S. Naval Observatory explains why we fall back or spring forward, and reminds us that next year, we'll be falling back during the first Sunday of November. (The date has been......

We bet every person who read the NY Times' article, Everything You Need to Know About Bedbugs but Were Afraid to Ask, checked the nooks and crannies of their apartments, prayed they would never see a bedbug and then took a swig of a hard liquor to make the scary go away. But it was a very informative article - we learned:- Landlords are required to get rid of bedbugs within 30 days of an......

Andrew Friedman is co-director of Make the Road by Walking, a Brooklyn-based community-based organization founded in 1997 on the belief that the center of leadership must be within the community. Since then, the organization has grown dramatically and now includes over 600 members, a member-elected board composed of low-income community residents, and a staff of twelve. Over the past 5 years, MRBW has achieved many improvements to the lives of Bushwick residents. They pushed New......

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......

- Some Greenwich Village residents are worried that plans for 36-40 Gansevoort Street will mean sleepless nights. Fashion brand Theory (Angelina Jolie wears it!) is converting a five-story building into offices, complete with a rooftop garden, which conjured up Hotel Gansevoort nightmares for people living on Horatio Street. Theory has met with residents and Theory's president Andrew Rosen told the Times, "We're not a bar. We're a day business. Our only objective is to be......

As World Cup fever slowly infects its way across the five boroughs (we can't be the only ones who've found ourselves standing for hours in bodegas staring at soccer matches when we've already bought the beer we came for) the city has announced its own new competition, and we're pretty pumped for it, too! Using one of the few remaining large vacant properties in the city's portfolio, the Bloomberg administration and an architects' group......

Rent stabilized tenants are bracing themselves for tonight's Rent Guidelines Board meeting where the board will most likely vote for a hike. Expect things to get incredibly noisy tonight! Actually, we imagine the basement of Cooper Union might implode from the feelings of self-pity, anger, and entitlement from both sides. The rent increases owners are asking for is 8%, because of higher gas prices and real estate taxes. And not only that, owners may also......

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......

The City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development yesterday released their triennial report on New York City Housing and Vacancies. Most of the information that comes across in an initial looksie seems pretty common sense. The gist? While the household income of average New Yorkers has fallen, the price of living in the city has done anything but. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a statistician to know that affordability is......

Now that the monsoon rains have dissipated, our shoes dried and the skies cleared, the autumn chill seems to be more apparent. Just last night, Gothamist was awakened by a strange but familiar noise – the gentle clang of the year’s first radiator heat. This made us wonder: When does the heat have to be turned on? New York City Heating Season runs from October 1 through May 31, to tenants in multiple dwellings. Pursuant......

Julie Miles, Housing Here and Now...

The city is finally hit with almost freakishly cold weather, and because our winter had been so mild up to this point, it's been catching up off guard. With stories about people freezing to death, Gothamist would like to remind everyone what your building's temperatures should be: - When the temperature drops below 55 degrees between 6AM-10PM, inside temperature should be at least 68 degrees. - When the temperature drops below 40 degrees between 10PM-6AM,......

While the weather has only been chilly here and there, October is traditionally the month when it's cold enough to start thinking about turning on the heat. After speaking with some people about their respective landlords' attitudes about the heat , Gothamist would like to remind everyone that the requirements to turn on the heat are as follows: - When the temperature drops below 55 degrees between 6AM-10PM, inside temperature should be at least 68......

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......

I live in a prewar apartment building where things break down periodically. The building superintendant doesn't respond to our maintenance calls reliably and will let things go for days, even for emergencies. Is there anything we can do to get things fixed more promptly? Jane, Astora We hate it when things break down. We sometimes try to fix things ourselves, which just makes it worse. (One time, we tried to fix a drippy faucet and......