Tragedy Involving Deadly Bronx Firetrap That Lingered For Years In Foreclosure Spurs Crackdown On Illegally Converted Rooming Houses Throughout City

In New York City, Bronx News Network reports:

• Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council announced yesterday that the city will be taking a new, more aggressive approach in identifying and inspecting apartment buildings suspected of being divided illegally.
• At the end of April, a fire tore through an apartment building in Belmont and killed three family members who had been living there--Christina Garcia, 43, Juan Lopez, 36, and their 12-year-old son Christian Garcia.(1)
• The early morning blaze broke out on the top floor of a multi-family building at 2321 Prospect Ave., a space that had been subdivided into several rooms using partitions, according to FDNY spokesman Frank Dwyer.
• The tragedy has shined a spotlight on the proliferation of dangerous housing conditions in the Bronx, and across the city. Experts and elected officials say practices like illegal divisions, erected by both tenants and landlords alike, are frighteningly common and growing in number.

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• Sally Dunford, of the West Bronx Housing and Neighborhood Resource Center, called the problem “endemic.” She described some of what she’s seen in the community in recent years:
  
  1- already small apartments portioned off into even smaller ones, blocking access to the fire escape or stationed dangerously close to the building’s heating source;
  
  2- five people living in a basement with no bathroom or kitchen;
  
  3- an elderly couple living in a closet;
  
  4- tenants moving back into a property immediately after the city ordered them to vacate.
  


• "People are more willing to do than to go to a shelter,” she said.
• Landlords, meanwhile, who are struggling to make mortgage payments on the city’s ever-growing number of financially unstable properties can collect more rents if they can fit more tenants into a given space—even if it’s a fire hazard. People who are going under are much more likely to do stupid things,” Dunford explained.
• The last known owner of the Prospect Avenue building where the fire took place, a used car salesman named Domingo Cedano, told the New York Times that he’d lost the building to foreclosure years ago.

For more, see Deadly Belmont Fire Points to Illegal Housing Dangers; City Launches Crackdown.

For the City press release, see Mayor Bloomberg And Speaker Quinn Announce New Approach To Target Most Dangerous Illegally Converted Apartments (Task Force Developed New Method Using Risk Analysis Model to Identify Properties Most at Risk for FireIn Pilot Test, 40 Percent of Targeted Properties Required Vacate Orders, Compared to Typical Rate of Three Percent).

(1) See Early Morning Bronx Fire In Illegally Converted Rooming House Leaves 3 Dead, 8 Injured; Firetrap Lingered In Foreclosure Since 2008.