Williamsburg is ground zero in the growing scourge of stalled construction that has left the neighborhood littered with 18 vacant lots and rusting steel building frames — more than in all of The Bronx, The Post has learned.
Block after block in the trendy Brooklyn community and a few adjacent streets in Greenpoint have been declared stalled construction sites by the city.
A team of building inspectors found 143 stalled sites around the city. But the cluster of lots in Williamsburg, where development was white-hot just two years ago, is the biggest.
By contrast, The Bronx and Queens each had just 14 stalled construction sites, and Staten Island had 13, city records show.
There were 39 in Manhattan and 63 in Brooklyn.
Philip DePaolo, who moved from The Bronx to Williamsburg in 1979, said the neighborhood looks like the arson-scarred streets he left behind.
“It looks like I never left,” said DePaolo, comparing his old neighborhood to Williamsburg today.
“The problem we’re having now is that we’re starting to get squatters in these buildings and lots,” said DePaolo. “Blight draws crime, and if you have blocks and blocks of vacant lots with no people, that creates a problem.”
DePaolo pointed to broken construction fencing surrounding some of the sites and piles of blankets and cardboard shacks left behind by homeless squatters who spend nights there.
Officials say they’re working on the problem as a growing number of developers struggle with financing in a slumping housing market.
In February, the Department of Buildings designated a stalled-sites unit with five inspectors to identify and monitor sites where construction work has stopped.
“We created this unit to ensure stalled job sites are safely maintained until work can resume,” said Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri.
Developers have responsibility to keep construction sites safe, whether work is ongoing or suspended, and “we are going to hold them to it,” he said.
Buildings officials and City Council members have drawn up a bill that would create incentives for owners of stalled sites to maintain their property by granting unlimited extensions of building permits if they follow the rules.
Under current law, developers who let construction stop for a year lose their permits, forcing them to go back through the arduous and expensive process of getting new ones once they are ready to resume work.