Rockland County Fire Demonstrates Potential Dangers Of Illegal Boarding Houses
POMONA, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) -- A house gutted by fire was shedding new light Thursday on a pervasive problem – affordable, but extremely dangerous apartments.
The fire broke out at a two-story home on Route 45 in Pomona on Wednesday afternoon. Officials believe it started with a stove.
No injuries were reported.
As CBS2's Lou Young reported, the house appears from the exterior to be a single-family home. But it turned out to be more than that – multiple residents, locked doors, and illegal apartments.
Firefighters found an illegal basement apartment, building materials for subdividing and multiple electric meters that had not yet been connected, WCBS 880's Sean Adams reported.
"The apartment in the garage was vacant, but there were still people living in the basement paying up to $1,000 a month," Rockland County Fire Coordinator Gordon Wren said. "And then there were people living upstairs. ... There are five bedrooms upstairs."
Illegal boarding houses are a chronic problem in the county.
"We go into these places, we have no idea what we're going in to," said Rockland County fire Wren. "The dangers are vast, they're large, they're numerous."
The home that was on fire has been cited numerous times for building code violations. A woman cleaning up the day after the fire said the others in the house were just visitors.
"That was my cousins; they live downstairs and they use my kitchen," she said. "It's a one-family!"
But as Young reported, the house is a "one-family" with multiple electricity hookups, and Rockland County officials said it was one of hundreds of such setups offering cheap housing on a tight market.
"The going rate in our area is $500 per month cash per room," Wren said. "If you have two people in that room, that's $250 a month, and you can't live much cheaper than that."
Last month, a woman died in a fire in a Central Nyack home that had been illegally subdivided for four families.
Another one-family home in Chestnut Ridge tops the county's list for code violations. A resident counted the illegal apartments in it.
"One, two and three in the house – three apartments," he said. There are two others behind the house.
In New York City, the Fire Department would do the inspections on these houses and decide if they met the code. But up in Rockland County, the local towns are in charge of inspections, and the county executive said there is a powerful incentive for them to look the other way.
"The reality is there are significant dollars are being had by the landlords -- I call them slumlords because they aren't landlords in my eyes," said Rockland County Executive Ed Day. "I would suspect there's other money that's finding its way back into the political system. So there is no enforcement."
Wren said illegal subdivisions are deathtraps because of insufficient exits, boarded-up windows and doors, and substandard electric wiring.
"It's only a matter of time," he said. "We're playing Russian roulette with the lives of people and the lives of our firefighters."
Rockland County has been using health and sanitary regulations to get at what are essentially unenforced building codes. They also want residents to report any home construction work in their area on the county website.
Even when local building violations are issued, CBS2 is told the fines are sometimes only a few hundred dollars. The county said it has been building cases that have brought penalties in the tens of thousands of dollars.