Derelict Vehicles Are Emerging Within Canarsie
BROOKLYN- Canarsie has experienced an onslaught of derelict vehicles being parked within the neighborhood streets.
On May 6, the Department of Sanitation announced that their Derelict Vehicle Unit worked with the 69th Precinct to remove 26 derelict vehicles and issued 23 summons within Canarsie.
Vehicles that have been damaged, demolished or partially dismantled, or dumped and are inoperable are referred to as derelict vehicles.
“If the vehicle has a license plate on it, then it gets referred to the New York City Police Department and what they do is investigate it to see if it is stolen or not,” said Andrenia Burgis, a retired deputy chief of sanitation that used to help write tickets on vehicles that violated parking rules.
“If a vehicle has no plates on it, and it is sitting there for a long time, the sanitation supervisor that works in the field would identify it by seeing if it is an abandoned or a damaged vehicle,” Burgis said. “Then sanitation puts the information of the location of the vehicle into a computer program which feeds data to the derelict vehicle operation.”
The derelict vehicle operation notifies the vendor that is hired by the city of New York to remove the vehicle off the street.
“If they find a family in the vehicle, then that family would be referred to homeless services and they would speak to the family.”
RV Homes can be considered as derelict vehicles as there have been a slew of RV homes popping up around Canarsie.
On April 7, the 69th Precinct reported that their Neighborhood Coordination Officers have removed an RV motorhome from East 105th Street and Seaview Avenue due to complaints.
The complaints are unknown, however, that wasn’t the only vehicle that was removed from the area.
“There were a few RV homes lined up in the area,” a dog walker said. “There were a few before the police took them away.”
Now, there is only one RV home on that block but it seemed abandoned as the door would be opened and closed by the wind.
Paerdegat North was another area that has an RV home that’s parked in a reversed parking lot.
“I’ve seen that mobile home on that street for a while now,” said Canarsie resident Reaz Jordan. “I can’t even count how long that has been there. It was probably there for over a year. It’s honestly weird and creepy.”
A man does live there but the vehicle was recently removed off of the premises.
New York City has seen a downward trend as there have been 8628 derelict vehicles that were reported in the fiscal year of 2021 compared to the 8883 vehicles that were reported in the fiscal year of 2020, according to open data from the DSNY.
However, the amount of vehicles that were removed has gone up as there has been 3841 removed vehicles in the fiscal year of 2021 compared to the 3720 vehicles that were removed in 2022.
If there is a derelict within your neighborhood, call 311 so either the DSNY or the NYPD can remove more of these vehicles off of the street.