Posted on 12/01/2003 2:00:05 PM PST by Clemenza
Mexican immigrant Guadalupe, with 10-month-old daughter Sonia (l.) and three-year-old son Cesar, in tiny room that serves as home for her family of five.
The city's skyrocketing immigrant population and tight housing supply are forcing tens of thousands of New Yorkers to cram into illegal apartments, many of them potential deathtraps, a Daily News investigation reveals. In extreme cases, as many as 10 people are packing one-bedroom apartments, denying them basic human dignities of privacy, fresh air and cleanliness.
Children are forced to sleep on kitchen floors, and parents and their youngsters lie side by side in bunk beds. For many kids, beds double as play areas.
Families are piling into basements, attics and garages converted into illegal apartments that are a match or a frayed wire away from becoming lethal firetraps. Others are forced to double up with relatives lucky enough to have an apartment.
Experts estimate there are more than 100,000 illegally subdivided apartments in the city, created by greedy, unscrupulous landlords looking to make a quick buck.
In a city where tiny studios can rent for thousands and penthouse apartments can go for millions, the scandal of the have-nots doling out what little they have for virtually unlivable dwellings is shocking.
"We don't want to live like this," said Guadalupe, 32, a Mexican immigrant, who shares an $826-a-month two-bedroom East Harlem apartment with nine relatives. "We do it because that's the only way we can afford the rent."
Guadalupe, who didn't want her last name used, shares an 8-by-10-foot room in which she, her husband and three kids sleep in a bunk bed and crib squeezed against a wall.
In the bedroom next door is Guadalupe's nephew, his wife and baby. Guadalupe's brother and cousin occupy the living room, behind a green curtain.
The living arrangement doesn't even come close to city standards dictating that every person should have a livable area of 80 square feet and a bathroom serving no more than six.
For six months, Elizabeth Campos, her husband and three children have shared a one-bedroom apartment in East Harlem with her sister, Alba, and her four children. The place is so small that Alba sleeps on a mattress in the kitchen. The children, between 9 months old and 13, pile up in bunk beds that double as play and study areas.
Although every adult in the house works — Campos and her sister are baby-sitters and Campos' husband is a cook — it is an arrangement they must tolerate to afford the $800 monthly rent.
"We work two, three jobs sometimes, but the money is still not enough," said Elizabeth Campos, 30, a Mexican immigrant. "I think you have to be very rich to pay the rent in New York."
The housing shortage has been intensified in the past decade by a skyrocketing immigrant population and the gentrification of working-class neighborhoods, a process that has displaced thousands of families.
"The population has been growing without the corresponding increase on the housing supply, and the illegal market has filled the gap," said Frank Braconi, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a Manhattan-based think tank.
"Since [former Mayor Ed] Koch, each administration has been reluctant to enforce housing and zoning codes, and the longer the problem is ignored, the more difficult it becomes to solve," Braconi said. "But if they simply decide to crack down on illegal units now, where will all the people who are living in these apartments go?"
While New York's housing stock increased by 7% — or 208,000 units — in the past decade, the city's population jumped by nearly 700,000, census data show.
At the same time, the official number of homes occupied by at least two families increased by 18,000 to 221,000 from 1996 to 1999, according to the Census Bureau's 1999 New York Housing and Vacancy Survey.
Mayor Bloomberg announced last December a $3 billion program to create 65,000 affordable homes in New York by 2008, the biggest city commitment to new housing in 15 years.
Housing advocates say the effort will put only a dent in a problem that will inevitably get worse as the population grows.
"It's a shame that New York City has always relied on immigrants and the working class to keep the economy going, but it has never provided these people with a decent place to live," said Awilda Cordero, president of Emergency Rights Inc., a Bronx-based housing advocacy group.
To meet the demand, landlords are furiously subdividing apartments and houses and turning basements, attics and even garages into living areas.
But the wiring in illegal units is often unable to support overcrowded apartments — a fire hazard made worse by the fact that most of these homes do not have adequate sprinkler systems and only one way in and out, city officials said.
Fires are the most serious problem, but not the only one, caused by illegal conversions. Every extra family that moves into an already-crowded neighborhood burdens schools and parks, increases traffic and parking congestion and strains sanitation, fire and police services, community leaders said.
The problem is most prevalent in Queens, which accounts for half of New York's illegal units. Housing experts estimate there are 4,100 illegal homes in Jackson Heights and Corona, and 5,200 more in Howard Beach and Ozone Park — the two city neighborhoods that experienced the largest population increase in the past decade, census data show.
"We haven't had affordable housing built in this city for over 15 years — nothing — and we don't get the extra services we need to accommodate the extra people," said Rudy Greco, president of the Jackson Heights Beautification Group, a community organization.
"The overcrowding is so bad here that the garbage is always piling up on the street."
Complaints against illegal units in Queens have decreased since 2001, though, after peaking at 10,685 in 2000, city records show. That year, Buildings Department inspectors issued 7,164 violations against Queens homeowners renting illegal apartments. This year, inspectors had issued 2,307 violations as of Sept. 20, according to city statistics.
"The problem is that when somebody is reported, the inspectors go there and give out a fine, but they don't follow up, so people don't see the point in complaining," said Darryl Hoss, a member of Queens Community Board 3, which covers Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst and North Corona.
"The homeowner is collecting rent in these illegal units, so they'll pay the fine and keep the tenants there," Hoss added. "If the city doesn't do something about increasing enforcement personnel, there will never be a solution to the overcrowding."
Buildings Department inspectors only investigate complaints. They do not hunt for illegal units. Investigators are not allowed to enter an apartment unless they have a court order or they are invited in.
"Our primary concern is safety, and we try to work with the landlords if there's a possible way for them to convert an illegal unit into a legal one," Buildings Department Assistant Commissioner Robert Iulo said.
"We're not in the business of putting tenants out in the street, so we do try to help the both sides, because we realize the difficulties of the housing market in New York."
Evicted tenant's lament: 'Now I have to leave, and I have no place to go'
By RUTH BASHINSKY and FERNANDA SANTOS DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Two years ago, Angela Peña paid an $800 fee to the real estate broker who found her a basement rental apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Last week, she found out the two-bedroom unit with narrow windows and a single entrance past the boiler is illegal.
"How was I supposed to know that I shouldn't be living where I am?" Peña asked last week, a day after she found an eviction notice under her door.
"I just paid my rent, and I never asked any questions," she said. "Now I have to leave, and I have no place to go."
Peña, 48, and her disabled son live in one of the 50,000-plus illegal apartments in Queens, which accounts for half of the city's illegal housing stock, experts say.
"We have been getting more and more reports of illegal conversions and problems related to them," said Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, who last year reconvened an illegal conversion task force created in 1997.
April Newbauer, the lawyer in charge of the Legal Aid Society's civil division in Queens, said 25% of the housing cases handled by her unit are connected to illegally converted homes.
"These apartments could be a potential source of affordable housing, assuming that the units can be fixed up so that they're not dangerous for the people living in them," Newbauer said.
But legalization is a complicated process that requires navigation of zoning and building code regulations and significant structural changes, often at a high cost. Homeowners would rather force their tenants to leave after a neighbor complains and a Buildings Department inspector shows up on their door, Queens officials said.
That's what happened to Peña, a disabled factory worker who is running out of time to find a new home.
"I have no one, nowhere to go. Can you help me?" she pleaded to a Legal Aid lawyer she met at Queens Civil Court. "If I leave my place, the only other place I'll be able to rent is another illegal apartment."
Bump your right and 70% of us don't even have the news we do!
As for the guys in my nabe, just ask them if they are undocumented and 9 times out of 10 they will say "si."
I've been landlord to many apartments overcrowded with Mexicans. I've known many in neighboring buildings. I've never heard complaints. Since they work such long hours, they aren't really home that much. My tenants slept in shifts, 3 single guys in the same bed, but never at the same time.
The best explanation is the book El Otro Camino - The Other Way.
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