Thread: Queens Leads City in Complaints About Overcrowded Houses

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/nyreg ... using.html

December 13, 2005
Queens Leads City in Complaints About Illegally Overcrowded Houses
By COREY KILGANNON
and FERNANDA SANTOS
In September, a 23-year-old Ecuadorean immigrant named Ivan moved into the basement of a one-family house in Elmhurst, Queens, a tight labyrinth of rooms with cheap rents.

Ivan, who works cleaning carpets, shared the space with several other tenants until last Tuesday night, when a deadly fire swept through the building. There were no smoke detectors, and Ivan smelled the smoke only once flames swirled in the basement. Finding one exit padlocked shut and the other blocked by fire, he escaped through a narrow window.

Outside, he saw another tenant, Jennifer Gaston, screaming that three of her five children were still downstairs. The three children and an elderly tenant, Ibrahim Reyes, 80, died in the blaze, which fire officials suspect was started by a child playing with a lighter.

On Friday, the city's Buildings Department cited the landlord of the building, at 40-77 Denman Street, for illegally subdividing the house, a single-family home that neighbors say was converted to accommodate more than 20 people. A large house several doors down has been converted to 13 small studio apartments often occupied by families paying about $900 a month, a woman living there said.

Once again a spotlight shone on the many overcrowded homes of Queens - just as it did in December 2003 when a fire claimed the lives of a mother and her two children in an illegally converted house.

Once again, reporters and news crews were told by neighbors about the widespread practice of illegally converting single-family homes. They pointed to the ordinary facades of residential two-story houses, which they say have been chopped into small rooms and stuffed with recent immigrants, many illegal, along blocks near the elevated No. 7 train rattling over Roosevelt Avenue.

Once again, city officials described the barriers to combating the problem and, once again, immigrants like Ivan the carpet cleaner explained why they lived there.

"You don't move in thinking bad things are going to happen," said Ivan, who did chores at the burned-out home in exchange for rent and who declined to give his last name. "We're just trying to move ahead and have nowhere else to stay."

The streets surrounding the scene of the deadly fire teem with fliers in Spanish advertising rooms for $500 a month. This means sharing bathrooms and kitchens. Privacy is a fantasy and for safety, trust is placed in God, not a home's owner.

Landlords, either greedy for profit or struggling to pay high mortgages, avoid paying for legal structural changes that conform to the building code. They slap up walls to carve up main floors into small rooms and convert basements, attics and garages into living space and rent to poor families. Housing advocates complain that these apartments often have faulty wiring and shoddy construction, as well as inadequate sprinkler and alarm systems and emergency exits.

Most of New York City's illegal conversions - apartments built without approval, permits or a certificate of occupancy from the city - occur in Queens, which abounds with recent immigrants and older, spacious homes ripe for alterations.

According to city records, 70 percent of all complaints citywide to the Buildings Department about illegal conversions since 1999 have involved houses in Queens. Complaints about illegal conversions citywide have increased to 23,393 in 2005 from 6,064 in 1999.

In Queens, the number of complaints rose to 15,794 through November this year from 4,495 in 1999, more than double the complaints logged in the four other boroughs combined, city records show.

Housing advocates estimate that there are 100,000 illegal apartments in New York City and that illegal conversions account for half of the city's net housing increase in the last 15 years.

Overcrowding may be the most serious issue facing his community, said City Councilman Hiram Monserrate, whose district includes the Denman Street house. He called illegal conversions "a financial reality" in a city with soaring rents even for tiny studios, adding that they are a tenant's last resort before homelessness.

"These people have nowhere else to live," he said. "They're all working people - porters, dishwashers - all with limited income."

City officials say that of the 21 construction inspectors that the Department of Buildings has in Queens, 7 are assigned solely to investigate illegal conversions. They investigate only when there is a complaint and can only enter a house if permitted.

In roughly half the visits, inspectors are denied access, said Donald O'Connor, the chief construction inspector in Queens. This alone can thwart an investigation, since obtaining a search warrant is a lengthy, painstaking process of gathering extensive evidence indicating an illegal conversion.

"A lot of people caught on to what the penalties are," Mr. O'Connor said. "Landlords are getting smarter and telling tenants not to let inspectors in. We can't force our way into a house, but if people refuse us, we'll try to assess it from outside."

Signs of an illegal conversion can include a proliferation of satellite dishes on the roof, crowds of bicycles and shopping carts chained out front, and additional buzzers and mailboxes and baby strollers on the porches. Often large amounts of garbage are put out on the street.

If neighbors say they have seen indications of illegal apartments in a house, they are asked to sign affidavits. If access is finally gained, violations may be written and landlords can receive stiff fines, including a $100 penalty for each day the problem is not fixed.

If the overcrowding is deemed a direct danger to tenants, officials may order the building vacated and arrange emergency shelter for the ousted tenants. That happened in late October, Mr. O'Connor said, when his inspectors visited a two-family house in Flushing with 27 beds inside, occupied mostly by Asian immigrants.

"They were in the dining room, kitchen, every room except the bathroom," he said. "You had 10 bunk beds in one room, it was a situation where people had to climb over each other to get out."

In rare circumstances, landlords are criminally charged. Last month, for instance, a landlord who Queens prosecutors say rented a six-family building on 48th Street in Astoria to at least 17 families was charged with endangering the lives of his tenants. The Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, charged the man with first-degree reckless endangerment, which could carry up to seven years in prison.

the problem with fining landlords is the statues are so lame- the landlord can just ride it out by raising rents-
they have to shut down the property and confiscate it which then sounds like big brother and so it goes
I turned in one foreign slumlord - Seppo T. and I turned him in over and over again until finally the city of Portland shut down the apartment and fined him about 15,000 dollars- he didnt care-
however the landlords rebelled- so many were being turned in - that they went after the Portland City council and gutted the Bureau of Biuldings- now they are a nothing organization.
another problem is tenants wont speak out and nice property owners dont want to get involved and the slum lords get to do as they wish--