BY ZACH WILLIAMS | After-hours construction reached new heights in 2015, as real estate developers doubled down on city permits allowing work outside of regular weekday hours.
The city Department of Buildings (DOB) approved twice as many exemptions — known as After Hours Variances — to the city noise code this year, for developers who claim working off-hours would promote public safety or mitigate undue financial hardship. A bit of paperwork and filing fees secured more than 3,150 variances in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen in the first 11 months of 2015, compared to about 4,400 in the previous three years combined.
This increase also occurred throughout the borough and across the city. According to the DOB, developers in Manhattan received more than 32,513 variances, following about 44,000 from 2012 to 2014. Citywide, the numbers this year are only 10,000 shy of the approximately 64,000 variances issued during that same period, according to department records.
On the West Side of Manhattan, residents have complained that construction noise disrupts the flow of daily life. There are the booms of heavy equipment moving into place, and the crackling of debris being removed mixing with the racket from power tools. Residents said that complaints to elected officials or via 311 resulted in little change to a status quo that pits their desire for peace and quiet against the progress of projects costing tens of millions of dollars.
A core group of applicants dominate the process. Just two percent of developers accounted for a quarter of all variances issued in Manhattan from 2012 to 2015, according to department records obtained earlier this year through a Freedom of Information Law request filed by Chelsea Now.
The $50 million conversion of the Walker Tower (210 W. 18th St., btw. Seventh & Eighth Aves.), for example, received 122 variances from 2012 to 2013.
“It was absolutely terrible,” nearby resident Marcelo Sorino told Chelsea Now in April. “Saturdays, Sundays, mornings, afternoons. The worst was taking all of the metal out of the building. They had the big, huge, 40-foot dumpsters. They’d just throw the metal in there day and night.”
DOB Commissioner Rick Chandler defended the use of the variances in September, telling Chelsea Now that the department trusts the rationales offered by applicants. Complaints from the public are the primary means by which the department moves against potential abuse, he said in a Sept. 23 Chelsea Now report (“DOB Commish Commits to More Public Access”).
In the first 11 months of 2015, the department revoked 128 variances across the city. Nine of them were in the area of Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, and 101 more in other areas of the borough, according to the department.
Residents’ complaints helped spur a legislative effort to curb the issuance of the variances, and ensure more transparency in the application process. The bill garnered 12 sponsors in the City Council in 2014. It included provisions limiting the variances to 8 p.m. on weekdays, 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. on Saturdays and a ban on Sundays. Recipients and the DOB would have to publicly disclose the rationale behind the variance, and email alerts would notify neighbors as to the location and hours of nearby work, according to the legislation.
But the bill has never has gone further than mere introduction and referral to a committee.
A representative of Councilmember Dan Garodnick referred Chelsea Now to fellow co-sponsor Councilmember Rosie Mendez, who said in a telephone interview that the effort remains ongoing. The current language of the bill — which did not appear in a Dec. 8 online search of outstanding council legislation — was too broad and requires revisions, she said, echoing comments about the legislation she made in April and in autumn of 2014.
Other issues in her district (Lower East Side/East Village) took precedence this year, she added. But a meeting with a representative of the Real Estate Board of New York is tentatively scheduled for this month, she said. Outstanding concerns include how new limits on after-hours work would affect schools and hospitals, and effects on the construction industry at-large.
Eventually there will be a hearing before the council, but only after a new bill finds the balance necessary for passage, she said.
“It makes no sense to pass legislation that doesn’t make sense, that would get appealed…so it is incumbent on us to really sit down and work on the language and get it right,” she said. “It seems to me that [the variances are] just getting rubber-stamped, and that’s the problem I have, and that’s the problem that we are having in this city. You know, there’s so much construction going on and no one is being told beforehand.”
