New Dev Casa Vizcaya causing damage to neighbor’s property? You don’t say.

The houses alongside the Casa Vizcaya development site, 10-40 46th Rd, LIC

The new development Casa Vizcaya is feeling some heat right now, thanks to alleged damage caused to the adjacent property, a townhouse owned by Kenny Greenberg and Diane Hendry. The Daily News reports:

“The Buildings Department recently slapped the project with a stop-work order “for failure to protect adjacent property” according to the agency’s Web site.”

“We’re defending our house,” said Greenberg, who has lived in the two-story house for nearly 20 years and owns a nearby neon company. “This has emotionally beaten us down for two years.”

“The couple’s complaints against the development include bulging walls, broken windows, water damage and cracks. They now have to replace the east wall of their home, which will force them to relocate temporarily.”

Living in Long Island City these days, it’s not an uncommon story. I’m sure many of us can relate to the headache of living near a building in construction – myself I am surrounded by almost ten within a 1 block radius, and about 4 within a baseball’s throw of my house. LIC certainly has it’s charms, and as has been noted before, Sunday is one of them. The day the construction stops. Unless of course, they have a permit, or are pretending like they do.

Anyway, lots of these old townhouses can’t take the repeated impact of the construction vibration. It really should be incumbent upon developers to take care when sandwiching a new condo building between semi-fragile townhouses where longtime LIC community residents live. Hopefully, they will. (Don’t worry, no one’s holding their breath over here.)

Incidentally, the couple who owns the townhouse was featured in this video short about the LIC community.

• Couple claims condo construction caused damage to their home [Daily News]