Building shut down/kicked out by DOB
Pros
New construction building in the heart of Williamsburg. Lots of trendy restaurants and bars at your finger tips.
Cons
The building was shut down and issued an emergency vacate order the night before Thanksgiving. All tenants must evacuate immediately within 24 hrs - no explanation, leaving all tenants homeless without all their belongings. This carried on for almost 2.5 months and we were indeed homeless and couch surfing. All of our belongings were held hostage in the apartments and police were surrounding the building, restricting tenants from any access other than “2 hour designated time slots” during work hours on business days where we were allowed to retrieve a few of our belongings like underwear and necessities. We later found out the building was shut down because of sub-standard construction practices (discovered by a potential tenant who wanted to rent out the ground floor space for a bodega), deeming it an unsafe building to occupy. The official documents submitted to the DOB were for a completely different building blocks away, and it was discovered that the beams in the ceiling didn’t connect to any columns, and were just floating there as if they were just for show/decoration. As if we weren’t living in our nightmare already, we then find out the original owner of the building was murdered the year before, most likely by angry tenants the owner had screwed over. It was an article in the New York Post where I believe he was lit on fire at a train station. Now we knew this building was just the one of many where he had screwed his tenants over. As if that weren’t enough, the building was clearly very cheaply constructed, I could hear everything the neighbors talked about, there were gaping holes between bedrooms, and we had issues all around.
Advice to the owners
Tear down the building, start over. The building wasn’t built safely in the first place, it was said to have not been surprising to have fallen apart years ago and yet it’s still standing. Tear it down, do better and don’t screw tenants over.
/-73.963308,40.711844,14/640x640@2x?access_token=pk.eyJ1Ijoib3BlbmlnbG9vIiwiYSI6ImNsYjNmMjVwdzBjeHgzd21wYmJmZDB0eGYifQ.XZvZCOh51yXuDBE-I3Bg0A)