TRD
New York
Flooding raises questions about the future of basement apartments and storm mitigation
When water started seeping into Jackeline Franco's house in East Elmhurst on Wednesday, she called the company that had just repaired her roof, frustrated that it was already leaking again. Then she looked outside.
“The water reached halfway up my thigh, easily a meter above the ground,” he said.
She and her family survived the storm, unlike more than a dozen other New Yorkers, but they spent the next two days moving waterlogged furniture from the basement to the patio, hoping some of it could be salvaged. Franco's mother, who had recently been widowed, had lived there since April.
“We completely remodeled the basement and furnished it for her,” Franco said. “It was a very nice and livable apartment.”.
Fortunately, his mother wasn't there when the water burst through the plexiglass window in the door. Within 15 minutes, the water reached the ceiling.
(Getty)
According to reports, at least 11 of the city residents killed by Tropical Storm Ida were in basement apartments at the time, and five of the six where people died had been illegally converted, the Department of Buildings said Friday.
The deaths have raised questions about efforts to legalize such units, with some urging caution and others saying they underscore the need to help those living in them. Attorney General Letitia James on Friday called on the city to provide emergency housing vouchers to all residents of illegal basement dwellings.
To be considered a legal residence, basement units must have a minimum ceiling height of 7 feet, a window in each room, and an exit to the outside. In February 2020, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed legalizing basement apartments citywide, based on a pilot program launched in East New York. At the time, he estimated that such a move would add about 10,000 affordable housing units over the next decade.
But it's estimated that the city has more than 100,000 basement apartments. Furthermore, the program's budget was decimated during the pandemic, and plans to implement it citywide have stalled.
De Blasio told MSNBC on Friday that he is establishing a task force to create new evacuation rules for basement apartments. The city had already planned to implement a system to alert basement residents about predicted “extreme rainfall events,” but not until 2023. According to the New York Post, the city is also considering standardized stormwater management rules to prevent runoff at development sites.
Jay Martin, president of the Community Housing Improvement Program homeowners group, said he sees a path to safely legalizing some basement apartments and believes the city desperately needs more housing, but cautioned against rushing the process. Robert Nelson, president of Nelson Management, said the flooding serves as a “stark reminder of why some of these basements shouldn’t be legal.”.
But Annetta Seecharran, executive director of Chhaya, who has long advocated for legalizing basement apartments and helped shape the East New York pilot program, said she was fed up with the delays in legalizing these units. She believes this week's flooding should spur elected officials into action.
“We see this as evidence that basement apartments are real homes for real New Yorkers and that they should be safe,” he said. “That’s all.”
She emphasized that simply legalizing basement apartments would not automatically make them safe, so additional action is needed.
“People live in basement apartments all over the city. By not addressing the problem, by not giving people a path to bring their properties up to code, we are endangering people’s lives,” he said. “This storm—do we need another example here?”
Despite warnings earlier in the week that the remnants of Tropical Storm Ida were heading northeast, the city was not well prepared for Wednesday's flash floods. But some of its limitations are built into its infrastructure.
The city's storm drains are designed to handle 1.75 inches of rain per hour. An unprecedented 3.15 inches of rain fell in a single hour on Wednesday, overwhelming the drainage and sewer systems. In May, the administration released a report citing projections that every five years from 2040 to 2069 the city could expect a storm dumping 2.15 inches in one hour. Ida exceeded that by 47 percent and 19 years ahead of schedule.
Videos from Wednesday night show raging rivers in subway stations, people wading through knee-deep water, and abandoned cars floating through city streets.
“I don’t know anyone who could have prepared for a situation like this,” Nelson said.
After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, many building owners moved essential infrastructure from their buildings to higher ground, often the roof, and invested in mitigation equipment, such as floodgates.
But the ability to move mechanical systems and modernize pre-war apartment buildings is limited, said Michael Wolfe, president of FirstService Residential, which manages more than 12,000 apartments. He noted that the sudden surge of water during Wednesday's storm caught homeowners off guard, and some may not have raised their floodgates in time.
“It wasn’t like, 'Hey, we’re going to have a trillion inches at a time,'” he said of Wednesday’s forecast.
Wolfe spent Thursday responding to buildings that, in some cases, had six feet of water in their basements. Properties in his portfolio that had floodgates fared well, but those that had never experienced water events, and weren't even in flood zones, were among the hardest hit.
“We had storm drains in our garages and basements burst. We’ve never had that before,” he said. “How safe is that? If the city’s system can’t handle this kind of rain, where is it putting the water?”
Your company is studying how to add drainage options for buildings at higher risk of rainwater accumulation.
Michael Rothschild of AJ Clarke Real Estate said his company might consider adding waterproofing to its portfolio of doors, but he's not sure what else to do.
“By modernizing a pre-war building to cope with massive aquatic events, I don’t know where we would go with that,” he said. “It’s hard to think about what you could do.”.
Martin said his members are preparing for a boiler shortage, given the number destroyed by Wednesday's floods. He noted that homeowners had already been trying to figure out how to pay for modifications to comply with the city's emissions limit, Local Law 97, and have been lobbying for subsidies.
“Making these buildings airtight and energy efficient, on top of that, is going to cost billions and billions of dollars,” he said.
