B’KLYN ‘PARK’ ROW
Nabe’s pet pave: Illegal driveways
Brazen Brooklyn residents are selfishly paving illegal driveways on their front lawns and creating unauthorized curb cuts — eliminating scarce parking spots.
“Most of them I’ve seen go from a lawn to a driveway overnight,” fumed Michael Buhse, 55, who lives on 79th Street between 19th and 20th avenues in Bensonhurst, where the problem is especially bad.
Buhse says he sometimes gets home from work at 1 a.m. and has to drive around for 30 minutes or more to find an open parking space.
“It’s infuriating. It’s obscene. There’s so little parking as it is without it being reduced further. There’s no greenery here. It’s like being at Rikers,” he said.
“The problem is so widespread,” said Marnee Elias- Pavia, district manager of Community Board 11 in Bensonhurst.
“So many have paved over their lawns and made illegal curb cuts. And the current laws have no bite to reverse them once they’re there.”
Along the stretch of 79th Street where Buhse lives, there are at least 18 bogus driveways whose owners never got permission for legal curb cuts, the city’s Department of Buildings said.
Some homeowners cut the curb themselves, but most just drive over the short curbs onto freshly paved-over lawns — and then pitch a fit when anyone parks at the curb and blocks them in.
Worse still, the NYPD has no record of which driveways are legitimate.
So if a motorist parks at a curb and blocks an illegal driveway and the homeowner calls the cops, officers will ticket the car and force the driver to fight it in court, NYPD sources told The Post.
On Buhse’s block Thursday, a neighbor yelled at a Post reporter to move his car to let her drive into her illegal spot.
When the reporter told her he was from The Post, she parked on the street, blocking a neighboring illegal spot.
A homeowner who gave his name only as Ming and who was parked in an illegal spot in his front yard insisted he had a right to park there and that the city had granted him permits.
But he then denied that the gold Toyota Sienna in the spot was his and claimed it was owned by friends who would move it later — and then he rode off on a kid’s bicycle.
Not only do the many paved-over lawns take away from on-street parking, they make neighborhoods look unsightly and take away grass that can accommodate storm runoff, which in turn increases the likelihood of street flooding, said Elias-Pavia.
“It’s putting pressure on the sewers and make them more likely to overflow,” she said. “And it’s just ugly.”