Bill’s balderdash on basements
Take a moment to contemplate the full terror of drowning in your own home. Imagine what it would feel like to be trapped in a dark room, with doors sealed shut by the weight of water gushing into the room and swiftly, horribly rising to the ceiling.
Most of the 13 souls who perished in our city during last week’s record rainfall and deadly flash floods suffered that fate. They were part of the estimated 50,000 to 100,000 New Yorkers who live in unlicensed basement and cellar apartments that are partly or fully below ground level, lacking the windows and alternate exits required under the city’s building code.
Members of the City Council, community activists and landlords have spent years pushing the de Blasio administration to figure out how to make basement apartments safe and legal. Their efforts failed: The mayor, who leaves office in a little over 100 days, has given up on the issue.
“I could tell you that we’ve got some miraculous plan to solve the illegal basement problem overnight. We don’t. I want to be blunt about that,” de Blasio said to reporters at his daily briefing this week. “It is a massive structural problem in the city. It has been for decades. We don’t have an immediate solution to this one.”
The mayor forgot to mention that his own administration actually operated — but then almost completely defunded — a pilot program in which the city, community-based organizations and private landlords collaborate on ways to bring basement apartments up to code. The program includes loans, some of them forgivable, of up to $120,000 to help small landlords renovate and reconfigure basement units.
Hundreds applied, but the de Blasio administration cut 92% of the program’s $1.2 million budget last year when the pandemic struck, when only the first eight units had been completed. That makes the drownings an especially bitter pill to swallow.
“We were understandably stricken. We had this one elderly man that we know who died in a basement in Cypress Hills,” says Michelle Neugebauer, executive director of the Cypress Hills Local Development Corp., one of the groups running the pilot program. “It’s this incredible tragedy. And we keep thinking: ‘Wow, if we could have really had the full funding, maybe we could have gotten further. Maybe we could have prevented some loss of life if there was this investment in small homes.’ ”
Neugebauer’s colleague, Ryan Chavez, worked directly with hundreds of applicants.
“There was this long pipeline of homeowners that we were working with,” he told me, starting with 900 applicants from Brooklyn’s Community Board 5 that later got whittled down to 300. “At the time that our program was cut, we had visited around a hundred basements. We were planning on doing many more,” he said.
No two situations are the same, according to Chavez. “The program is focused on bringing these units up to code and to bring just essential health and safety standards to these apartments. Making sure that they had sufficient egress, to make sure that they had sufficient light and ventilation — the basic health and safety provisions that you would expect in any housing,” he said.
Sometimes the solution might be to install a new door and stairway. In other cases, the floor might need to be excavated to create the required minimum seven-foot ceiling height. Sprinkler systems were a must in nearly all cases, said Chavez.
But the program fell victim to politics. Years ago, when the de Blasio administration was attempting to rezone East New York, the area’s city councilman, Rafael Espinal, insisted on an effort to help small landlords make their basement units legal.
De Blasio got his zoning change, and the pilot got launched in 2019. But when Espinal resigned his seat in early 2020 to take a job running the Freelancers Union, the seat remained vacant and the program, without its main defender, got slashed in the spring budget season.
But the issue remains, and has champions who are moving up in city leadership. Councilman Brad Lander, who won the Democratic primary for comptroller, is a former director of the Pratt Center, one of the groups leading the charge on basement conversions. Queens Borough President Donovan Richards fought to get the pilot established, and says he brought up the issue when President Biden visited the city this week.
“There was relatively very little real effort put into ensuring that this program could be successful,” Richards told me. “I think the answer — and this is something I talked with the mayor about, the governor as well as the president — there needs to be some subsidy put aside that would enable us to invest and bring these basements up into code.”
That should be high on the agenda for the next mayor and City Council.