Thread: Partitioned Apartments Are Risky, but Common in New York

Partitioned Apartments Are Risky, but Common in New York

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: February 22, 2009

The woman on the first floor hung a sheer white curtain across the middle of the room, to divide the space with the bed from the space with the table and chairs.




Guadalupe and her husband, Pedro, pay $650 a month for the illegally partitioned room they call home in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
The room where she and her husband live is about 23 feet long and 11 feet wide. They pay $650 a month, plus electricity. Their room has been illegally converted into living quarters in a three-story apartment building in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

According to city records, the building’s certificate of occupancy allows for five families in five units. But with rooms in the basement and other floors rented out, 9 to 12 families live there. The woman, Guadalupe, 49, asked that her last name and address not be published, for fear of being forced out of the place she and her husband, both immigrants from Veracruz, Mexico, have called home since November.

The room in Bushwick is one of thousands just like it in immigrant neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx. These rooms form a secret world of New York City housing: hidden from public view, unregulated and, too often, unsafe.

Earlier this month, a trial in the Bronx offered a brief glimpse into that world.

Two tenants of a Bronx building were accused of erecting drywall partitions in their apartments to rent out windowless rooms for $75 to $100 a week. When a fire broke out one Sunday in 2005, two firefighters died after jumping from a window, and prosecutors argued that the illegal partitions left the firefighters disoriented and forced them to jump to their deaths. One jury acquitted the tenants, and a separate jury found the building’s owner and former owner guilty of criminally negligent homicide.

Illegally converted rooms have long been a fact of life in some of the city’s poorest communities.

Some rooms, like those in the Bronx case, are carved up by tenants hoping to turn their apartments into a source of income. Others, in Chinatown in Manhattan and Jackson Heights in Queens, were converted by building owners to generate more rent. All are constructed without regard for the city’s building and housing maintenance codes, which govern maximum permitted occupancy, means of exit, ventilation and lighting.

In their room in Bushwick, Guadalupe and her husband, Pedro, have no stove, just a microwave oven on top of a big television. They keep their clothes and shoes on a metal rack. They have no lease and no mailbox. They give the money for the rent and electricity to a first-floor tenant with a lease, who slips their mail underneath their door.

For all of this, Guadalupe said she feels lucky. The couple have their own bathroom. In a nearby building where they used to rent a room, they often had to wait in line to use the toilet.

“Have you ever been to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum?â€

At least NY has laws on how many unrelated people can live together. I don't think AZ does, or if we do they aren't enforced. Having so many people who probably have never been vaccinated living in cramped spaces, sharing bathrooms and using hot plates or who knows what to cook is a health hazard and a fire hazard. Disgusting.

[quote]“We really have effectively a ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ system,â€