Parking rules, ceiling heights and soaring costs are torpedoing efforts to make basement apartments safer for low-income and immigrant New Yorkers, despite the city’s attempts to bring existing units up to code, a new analysis shows.
Owners of just five buildings in East New York have stuck with the city’s 2019 basement legalization pilot program, with renovations underway at just one building, according to an analysis by the Citizens Housing and Planning Council released on Tuesday.
While many basements or cellars already in use could have qualified for conversion, cost-prohibitive rules prevented the needed renovations, CHPC found. The city pilot program estimated that there are 16,000 small buildings with basements in East New York alone.
New York City’s tens of thousands of basement units drew renewed attention after Hurricane Ida flooded homes throughout the area in September 2021, killing 13 people in New York City, including 11 who were trapped in basement apartments at the time of the storm.
CHPC Executive Director Howard Slatkin, a former city planning administrator, said the pilot program reveals just how many hurdles are in place when it comes to legalizing the units.
“Basement and cellar apartments are an important part of the housing system,” Slatkin said. “Immigrant New Yorkers in particular rely on small homes with additional apartments in them. This is part of the set of housing resources that they might have available to them.”
Slatkin said many of the safety requirements make sense, like installing multiple exits, retrofitting windows to serve as escape hatches or installing sprinkler systems. But other measures, like forcing owners to add a parking space or dig out their foundations to add a few extra inches of ceiling height, add unnecessary costs or automatically disqualify buildings.
The city’s housing and planning agencies had hoped to renovate 40 underground apartments under the 2019 pilot program. They partnered with the…
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