Blaz: Can’t nix or fix thousands of basement apts.
The city has no plan to address the type of illegal basement apartments that played a key factor in most of the deaths caused by Tropical Storm Ida, Mayor de Blasio conceded Tuesday.
“We don’t have an immediate solution for this one,” he said.
There are at least 50,000 basements that have been illegally converted to tenant dwellings throughout the five boroughs, according to city estimates, and at least 10 of the 13 people who died due to Ida were trapped in such units. About 100,000 New Yorkers live in them.
For years, it’s been a thorny issue the city has dragged its feet addressing, and it came into stark relief last week after basement tenants in Queens were found drowned due to record rains and flash floods that quickly overwhelmed parts of the city.
De Blasio (photo) vowed Tuesday he wouldn’t punish the tenants living in those units, but he did not make the same assurance for landlords, who often rely on rent from basement conversions to make mortgage payments.
“I could tell you that we’ve got some miraculous plan to solve the illegal basement problem overnight. We don’t. Let me be blunt about that,” the mayor said at his morning press briefing. “It is a massive structural problem in the city. It has been for decades.”
De Blasio reiterated talking points he’s issued since last week about what the city would do to address severe weather caused by climate change moving forward — an early warning system when storms are approaching, forced evacuations and travel bans — but he admitted Tuesday that the city is still grappling to find long-term answers.
A “massive investment” of tens of billions of dollars to convert illegal apartments to legal ones and a “huge amount of work” would be needed, he said.
De Blasio was vague about whether a crackdown on illegal conversions would be coming anytime soon, though. He acknowledged the demand for such dwellings due to the city’s shortage of affordable housing, as well as homeowners needing the rentals to pay bills, but noted that the city will “hold people accountable.”
“The answer is to protect people with what we have now with new approaches, and then over time, as we get more and more resources in, particularly from the federal government, do the painstaking work of converting as many of them as possible,” he said. “It’s going to take a huge amount of public money to do that. Homeowners themselves just aren’t going to have the resources to do that, realistically.”
Hizzoner once again described the impact of Ida as “unimaginable” and nearly impossible to predict — even though flooding in some of the hardest-hit parts of Queens has long been an issue and meteorologists predicted record-breaking rainfall. Those kind of responses sparked jeers from residents in Woodside just a day earlier.
Despite that, de Blasio continued to fall back on the same refrain.
“We had Ida coming up from Louisiana, crossing across the interior of the United States,” he said. “No one’s seen a scenario like this where a hurricane goes 1,000 miles-plus across inland and still has the kind of impact to set the all-time rainfall record.”
In addition to the federal disaster relief funding President Biden authorized for New York and New Jersey, the city will be offering other forms of aid.
De Blasio announced Tuesday the city would waive permitting fees associated with needed repairs, direct the Department of Environmental Protection and the Sanitation Department to pump water from residents’ homes and work with social service providers to offer rent and cash relief for necessities like clothes.
“This is direct, immediate support right now,” he said. “We want to get this help to you quickly and easily.”