All true!!!
Just as an aside illegal immigrants are the firefighters biggest friends. Their ignorance is what starts at least 75% of residential fires today in the NYC-NJ area. They do it via illegal gas hookups and overloading electrical circuits with space heaters as they try and duplicate the tropical climate they grew up in.
Check out this blog from time to time—— http://queenscrap.blogspot.com/
Every code is violated with impunity by immigrants especially illegal basement conversions
http://queenscrap.blogspot.com/2009/11/fire-in-illegal-basement-apartment.html
I agree about the illegal apartments contributing to the fire problem, but there is usually an American that owns the property behind them. A neighboring town here conducted thorough inspections (checking every room of the homes) to find these illegal apartments; somehow the population was stagnant but the schools were bursting at the seams (anchor babies and such; many of the students weren’t Americans).
The space heaters are just a cheap solution to basements that aren’t connected to the central heating systems. There was a fire a few years back in one of the fairly wealthy towns on the NJ side of the Hudson River, and it turned out the basement had been rented out as rooms to single people from a few different countries. No plan for escape from a fire; a few of them died. In NYC a suit was brought against a property owner who did this when a firemen died in a maze of illegal modifications; he couldn’t get out (IIRC, another jumped several floors and lived, but was seriously hurt).
The better towns force the owner to remove the illegal apartments; in my county they are more likely to allow them and just increase the taxes on the homes. It really blights a neighborhood...