On a sunny day in early April, minutes before flames ignited across a 133-unit apartment building on 89th street in Jackson Heights, Andrew Sokolof Diaz returned home from a doctor’s appointment for his two-month-old son.
He opened the windows to get some fresh air, before leaving to take their dog out for a family stroll.
“So I remember opening the windows and feeling a little nostalgic, like aw, this is our little home. I actually remember that feeling,” said Sokolof Diaz, 33, a leader of the building’s tenant association. “And that’s it. The worst possible thing that could have happened, happened.”
Around 1 p.m., the electrical fire, which fire marshals said was sparked by an overloaded power strip, began burning on the top floor of one wing of the six-story, two-address building and spread rapidly, fanned by an apartment door left ajar.
Tenants scrambled outside, some exiting through the main entrance and others climbing down fire escapes, and watched the destruction from the sidewalk. Billowing plumes of smoke clouded the sky for blocks.
It took 12 hours for hundreds of firefighters to quell the eight-alarm blaze, which injured 21 people. Ultimately, the sprawling building’s more than 140 households — about 500 New Yorkers — were displaced from their homes.
A season later, more than 100 residents of the rent-stabilized, block-long apartment building are without a permanent home. By the tenant association’s count, some 60 families remain in city-sponsored hotel rooms across Queens and Brooklyn, following Red Cross emergency relocation.
They were told they could stay for a month — two months ago.
After losing their homes and in many cases all their possessions, those former tenants are now confronting difficult choices on offer via the city’s affordable housing program. Some are being offered pricey new rentals in the neighborhood and others, apartments on the far side of the borough.
Meantime, displaced families told THE CITY, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development has attempted to relocate them from the hotel rooms to homeless shelters — first on Father’s Day and then again this month.
For families, that would mean leaving Queens entirely, since HPD doesn’t operate any emergency shelters for displaced people in the borough.
“We are just waiting to see what HPD and other organizations are going to do. I really do not want to go to a shelter,” said 16-year-old Kimberly Sinchi, who’s living in a hotel room in Downtown Brooklyn with her parents and her dog.
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In the meantime over a million people crossed our borders in the last six months.
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