Property Of The Month (Part II)

Vacant, dangerous and unsafe.  For how
much longer?

Following up on my March 1st article, titled Property of the Month (Part I), we will move one block east, to the 300 block of State Street, to have a look at another ugly and concerning vacant house that is difficult to miss.  

336 State Street is a 2-family house owned by the Galvan subsidiary called Hudson Collective Realty, with a mailing address on 39th Street in NYC. HCR/Galvan has owned the building for 6 years, since January of 2017.  The property was recently assessed for $150,000 and is 100% tax exempt. 

Galvan's best effort

Fire damage is still visible at
the rear of the house (on the left)

Curious as to why 336 State looks so awful and never seems to improve, I FOILed for any Code Enforcement documents since 2021 related to the building.  Basically, I wanted to see what, if anything, Craig Haigh has been doing recently about getting HCR/Galvan to improve their property and make it habitable again (or safe and not dangerous).  The only thing I received was an ORDER TO REMEDY VIOLATIONS (OTRV) letter sent from Code Enforcement to the previous owner of the house 8 years ago, in March of 2015, after there was a fire in the house.  "This building has extensive fire damage and is unsafe for occupancy," the letter states.

The owner of the house prior to HCR/Galvan did nothing about improving the house after the fire vacated the house.  Galvan took over the property 2 years after the fire and they have done nothing since then to make the house habitable.  And for at least the past 27 months, Code Enforcement has not made one written attempt to contact HCR/Galvan about 336 State.  And so it sits and rots and becomes more and more a danger and eyesore to the neighborhood. (Of course, it's possible that Code has never reached out to HCR/ Galvan about 336 State)

Behind 336 State, a vacant house owned 
by Galvan

It's difficult to take Craig Haigh's OTRV letters seriously if Code Enforcement does zero follow up for several years (if ever) on properties they are supposedly concerned about.  Words in the letter such as "violation;" "remedy;" "directed and ordered to comply with the law;" "charges punishable by fine or imprisonment;" "dangerous and unsafe;" and "NYS Code Compliance" all look kind of silly when you take a quick look at 336 State Street, don't they?

Is Craig Haigh really ordering any property owners to get their vacant, dangerous and unsafe properties remedied, or are they just words on a page that get filed in a cabinet and never revisited?

Then there's Galvan, with their empty words: