Mayor de Blasio says his successor must create storm roster of NYC basement apartments: ‘It’s a big undertaking’
Mayor de Blasio conceded Tuesday that he hasn’t made much progress on compiling a roster of the city’s illegal basement apartments, but voiced confidence that his successor will pick up the torch and resolve the critical issue once he’s out of office.
De Blasio — who promised to create a roster after 11 New Yorkers drowned in basement apartments last month during mass floods caused by remnants of Hurricane Ida — said his administration has gotten the ball rolling on a database keeping tabs on the vulnerable units.
“It will happen. It will happen ahead of next hurricane season, but not before I leave office in the next few weeks,” said de Blasio, who will bid adieu to City Hall on Jan. 1 due to term limits. “Our perfect world here is to catalog each and every basement apartment, and so we think that project is going to take six to eight months.”
Without mentioning him by name, de Blasio said he’s certain Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor, will pick up where he leaves off.
“The resources have been put in place, the order has been given and thankfully the next administration will have that tool ready,” de Blasio said.
Adams, who’s a shoo-in to beat Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in next Tuesday’s mayoral election, declined to comment via spokesman.
Basement apartments have long been of concern for the city in that they’re rarely up to snuff on fire and safety codes.
The issue took on renewed significance after Ida barreled into New York on Sept. 2 and dumped torrential downpours that turned basement apartments into death traps in the middle of the night. Of the 13 city residents killed by Ida, 11 of them — including a 14-month-old boy — died in their basement homes.
In the wake of the storm, de Blasio said maintaining a roster on the city’s roughly 50,000 illegal basement apartments would enable emergency crews to quickly locate them and evacuate residents during future extreme weather events.
But creating the database is proving easier said than done, as landlords are hard-pressed to volunteer information about illegal units that could subject them to fines. Many basement apartment residents, meantime, are undocumented immigrants who are also reluctant to share information about their whereabouts with authorities.
“It’s a big undertaking,” de Blasio said Tuesday.
Nonetheless, de Blasio has had years to straighten out the matter.
The mayor first rolled out a “Pilot Basement Conversion Program” in June 2018 that aimed to refurbish roughly 8,000 illegal basement apartments in East New York, Brooklyn and make them building code compliant.
The program was supposed to serve as a blueprint for how to convert basement apartments citywide, but more than three years later, de Blasio’s administration has only managed to refurbish 100 East New York units, the mayor said in his post-Ida assessment report last month.
The pilot program, de Blasio wrote in the report, demonstrated “just how difficult and costly” it is to fix the thorny issue.
