Bags of perishable food, heavy big-screen TVs, construction debris, and the occasional shopping cart: that’s what the neighbors of a former Sports Authority store in Queens, NY are finding in the parking lot now that the store is closed. The parking lot is a disaster and a health hazard, but the city can’t just go in and clean it up because it’s private property.

“I see bags of food waste and they are being ripped open by animals,” one man in the neighborhood told DNAinfo. “It smells and it’s just cooking all day.” Only not the good kind of “cooking.”

The parking lot is a health hazard because in addition to the trash, there’s standing water where mosquitoes could breed. New York isn’t a place where the mosquitoes that transmit the Zika virus live, but there are other diseases that the insects can spread, and no one really wants more mosquitoes.

The city’s sanitation department told DNAinfo that the city sent a letter to the official owner of the property about the problem, and the owner will have a week to get things cleaned up before an inspector comes by. After that, the sanitation department will take care of it for them. The landlord is a corporation in California.

Look for more problems to crop up on the properties of former Sports Authority stores if they aren’t leased right away.

‘Dumping Ground’ Angers Neighbors of Shuttered Queens Sports Authority [DNAinfo New York]

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