On a rainy March afternoon, the tenants of 135 Kent Ave. in Williamsburg set up a tarp and a table outside their small apartment building. With baked goods and fresh chai, they were thanking their neighbors for their support and celebrating a victory.
The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation had just barred their landlord from attempting to renovate and remediate the ground floor of their building — which sits on a contaminated Brownfield site – while the tenants are still living there.
“That was a big relief for us, that the DEC is putting a block on this, and we feel protected by that,” said Christian Anwander, who has lived in the building with his wife, Mitra Farahmand, since 2012.
Though the plan would have cleaned the contamination off the site, Answander and his neighbors didn’t trust their landlords — Michael and Jay Weitzman of DoubleU Development — to keep them safe during construction.
They worried that digging below the protective sub-slab barrier under the building could have stirred up the carcinogenic chemicals in the soil below. Closely supervised by DEC, the developers said they would carefully contain any vapor, dust and debris to the ground floor.
But tenants said in the two years they have lived under DoubleU management, they have dealt with myriad of health and safety issues, mostly related to construction. If they struggled with even run-of-the-mill construction, they asked DEC, could they handle the Brownfield remediation?
The recent history of 135 Kent Ave.
Many tenants at 135 Kent Ave. have lived there for years. Sacha Dunn moved in in 2003. When she first toured the building, a converted factory, the apartments weren’t even done being built, she said.
Jake Kaplan moved in in 2008, followed by Chris Niemczyk in 2011 and Anwander and Farahmand in 2012.
In 2013, a decade after the first tenants moved in, they got an unwelcome surprise when the DEC discovered hazardous chemicals in the ground…
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