Councilman Reynoso bill proposal raises fines on home illegal conversions and loft studios

Crains New York

Councilman Antonio Reynoso isn't interested in preaching to the converted. 

The Brooklyn lawmaker will introduce a bill next week that will jack up penalties on landlords who allow their buildings to be used for purposes contrary to their approved occupancy and zoning—a proposal aimed at illegal renovation of manufacturing buildings to loft residences and houses to multifamily residences. The legislation comes just months after the state Legislature voted to allow factory and warehouse buildings in swaths of Lower Manhattan, North Brooklyn and Western 
Queens inhabited continuously through 2015 and 2016 to become lawful dwellings under the 37-year-old Loft Law.

Critics complain that Albany's repeated expansions of the 1982 statute have tacitly encouraged people to illegally convert industrial spaces to residences, by signaling to them that the state will intervene to protect their homes. Reynoso himself raised fears that this has also contributed to the erosion of blue-collar jobs and businesses.
 

"Landlords are currently exploiting the weak protections in place for manufacturing spaces and see the low penalties for converting them to residential as the cost of doing business," the councilman said in a statement sent to Crain's. "We must ensure that protections are in place to preserve our manufacturing spaces and the workers who depend on them."

At present, the city fine for "immediately hazardous violations" is set at $1,000 to $25,000. Reynoso's bill would establish a new minimum penalty of $10,000.

Is Jamaica where the artists want to be?

From the Times Ledger:

Jamaica may provide the stage artists are scouring the city for, one study suggests.

An 18-month analysis on art workspace in Queens by Exploring the Metropolis Inc., which connects artists and performance facilities in the city, found Jamaica is ripe for an artistic revival.

David Johnson, Exploring the Metropolis’ executive director, told the Greater Jamaica Development Corp. at its quarterly meeting last week that the neighborhood could take steps to bolster its attractiveness to artists, including soliciting an affordable loft development.

“Jamaica is so well-positioned in terms of transit, it just seems like low hanging fruit,” Johnson told nearly 50 peopled gathered in the Harvest Room Oct. 15. “With the upcoming development, it’s a great opportunity to really focus on artists’ live-work space, find the space, find the developers who can do this.”

Johnson noted an East Harlem school that was transformed into a 90-unit live-work development for working artists received 53,000 applications.

“Clearly, there is a demand for this,” he said.

The Greater Jamaica Development Corp. leaders expressed interest in buttressing the area’s creative capital, saying it spurs economic development and personal fulfillment.

Rent collectors must maintain buildings

From the NY Times:

The state’s highest court ruled on Thursday that a Brooklyn loft tenant who has not paid rent since 2003 could not be evicted because the landlord had not brought the building up to residential standards.

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The ruling by the State Court of Appeals could affect tenants in some buildings covered by the 1982 Loft Law, which has allowed hundreds of former manufacturing or commercial buildings to be rented to tenants as long as the landlords make necessary changes, namely in fire protection and other safety measures, to bring them up to residential building codes.

The tenant, Margaret Maugenest, has lived and worked as an artist in her Gowanus loft at 280 Nevins Street since 1984. According to her lawyer, Margaret B. Sandercock, Ms. Maugenest began withholding rent in 2003 because of maintenance, fire and safety issues. That rent, Ms. Sandercock said, was under $600 per month.

In 2008, the building owner, Chazon L.L.C., sued to evict Ms. Maugenest for nonpayment, and two lower courts ruled in Chazon’s favor. But on Thursday, the appeals court said that because Chazon had missed deadlines for bringing the building up to residential code, and did not receive an extension from the city’s Loft Board, state law prohibited it from evicting tenants, even for nonpayment.

Gentrification is a bitch

From the NY Post:

The last of the starving artists who colonized Williamsburg two decades ago and began its transformation into the hipster capital of New York could soon find themselves out on the street.

...in 2010 the state revised the Loft Law — to put such artist-occupied spaces under rent stabilization.

The Berry Street tenants claim the legislation supersedes their agreement. But Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Bert Bunyan two weeks ago sided with the current landlord, Mona Gora-Friedman, who wants to show them the door.

She finds the artists unpalatable, they claim, because they’re standing in the way of converting the building into luxury condos.

If the decision stands, the artists appear to have two alternatives: Leave their beloved Billyburg and trek east to Bushwick, where many of their fellow painters and sculptors have been driven.

Or try to get enough money together to move into the expensive new legal artist lofts that are being built in their current hood.

More Brooklyn lofts forcibly vacated

From BushwickBK:

Residents of a large loft building at 345 Eldert Street, home to artists for many years, have been served with a partial vacate order by the fire department. The tenants in 41 of the 76 units — up to 160 people — have been ordered to leave their apartments by 9pm tonight (June 16).

Resident Beth Hommel told BushwickBK that inspectors came Tuesday to look at units in the building. Wednesday, Carnegie Management, the building’s owners, informed tenants inspectors would return. Inspectors came yet again this morning.

“I let them in at 10am and they didn’t say anything was wrong, but when my roommate left at 2pm there was a vacate notice on our door.”

The Dept. of Buildings lists 345 Eldert, a former manufacturing building, as a legal residence. Violations recorded recently include illegal and poorly built mezzanines, illegal plumbing, blocked sprinklers, and blocked egress.

Now that's living!

From the NY Times:

This is life in what some refer to as the McKibbin “dorms,” a landing pad for hundreds of postcollegiate creative types yearning to make it as artists, and live like them too, in today’s New York.

Newcomers marvel that such a place exists: two sprawling, almost identical five-story former factories filled with mostly white hip young things, smack in the middle of a neighborhood that has little in common with Williamsburg proper, its cocktail-mixing neighbor to the west.

Perhaps 300 people live in each building, which face each other and sit, respectively, at 248 and 255 McKibbin Street. Between one and eight people live in each loft. Few were born before the mid-1980s. Rents can range from $375 for one person to roughly $800 for a space. Perhaps not surprisingly, there have been citations for more than a few housing violations at one of the buildings.

After the honeymoon stage comes denial when, say, one gets woken up by someone’s band at 3 a.m. or mugged on one of the tough surrounding streets. Next comes anger, usually after someone hurls a 40-ounce beer bottle from the roof and then urinates outside your door. Then comes acceptance and, finally, departure.

Warrenlike as the loft spaces may be, they are, for the most part, legal. No. 248 is zoned for residential use. No. 255’s owners were given a permit to convert the space into artist lofts, though according to the Buildings Department, the required work was never done. Repeated violations have been issued. One came after a vacant second-floor apartment in 255 exploded three years ago, possibly because wood sealant combusted.

They are also a hotbed for crime...

Sexless living in LIC

From the Village Voice:

Location: Long Island City, Queens
Rent: $3,000 a month/$600 per person
Size: 3,500 square feet (industrial loft)
Occupants: Tanya Horo (musician), Tim Maybury (bartender/guitarist), David Benge (band manager/tour coordinator), Lani Terry (graphic designer)

The first thing people ask about the Sherlock's Daughter loft is: How do you handle carnal affairs? A fair question, given that none of the bedroom walls reach the ceiling. The answer is: You don't.

Actually, the first question that came to my mind was: Is it legal for people to have created a commune inside a factory? The second question that came to mind was why didn't the Voice ask my first question?

More hipsters evicted in Brooklyn

From the Brooklyn Paper:

City inspectors ordered dozens of Williamsburg artists out of their decrepit loft building on Thursday — and now the tenants are suing their landlord, claiming that they had no idea they were living in an illegal warehouse space with hundreds of building code violations.

The building, on Metropolitan Avenue near Lorimer Street, houses 40 or 50 residents in lofts and studios, despite the fact that it’s zoned for commercial use and the owners have 157 open violations with the city.

Tenants said that Department of Buildings inspectors arrived in the morning and demanded that the residents leave by sundown — mostly because there hasn’t been an emergency exit or structurally sound stairs for years.

And the problems are actually worse than he could have imagined. The city has smacked the landlord with 64 structural violations — 63 of which were never resolved — since 1993, and the Environmental Control Board still has 94 open cases against the building, ranging from the building’s allegedly unsafe elevator and apparently blocked emergency exit, to reported structural dilapidation and illegally erected walls and rooms.

Department documents show that landlords filed for a permit on Oct. 6 to fix the place up, just a week before Thursday’s raid — but records show that the same owners have appealed to fix it up before, yet did no work.

Bill mandates legal conversion of illegal loft space

From the Brooklyn Paper:

Gov. Paterson signed legislation on Monday to require illegally converted loft buildings to get up to code — a move that could make such residences safer, but at the same time could result in higher rents that will push out Williamsburg’s artists and the industries they live near.

The bill, known as the Loft Law, will extend rental protections to tenants living in the illegal apartments in former factories and warehouses in manufacturing zones in Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Maspeth.

As such, the bill’s champions heralded it as victory for tenants.

“Loft tenants finally have the peace of mind and protections that they deserve,” said Assemblyman Vito Lopez (D-Williamsburg), who worked on the bill for 10 years.

But such protection comes at a price, opponents say. Manufacturers and their supporters fear that they will be further displaced by a new wave of conversions and subsequent gentrification when landlords pass along the cost of their building renovations in the form of higher rents.

Mayor Bloomberg agrees. As the passed bill was making its way to Paterson’s desk, the mayor sent a last-minute plea to the governor urging a veto on the grounds that the bill would “send a clear and discouraging message” to industrial tenants looking to settle in the city by prioritizing residential ones.

“Residential uses, even illegal and unsafe ones, pay far higher rents than, and place enormous economic and political pressure on, industrial and manufacturing uses,” said Bloomberg. “Ultimately, the encroachment of residential uses in these areas will force businesses to relocate and, in many cases, leave the city altogether, along with the good-paying jobs and economic diversity that they support.”

Police Find Stabbed Woman In LIC Loft

From NY1:

Police say officers found a woman who was stabbed to death in a loft in Long Island City, Queens on Saturday.

The 49-year-old woman, who received multiple stab wounds to her torso and back and had packing tape around her neck, was found just after 11 a.m.

She was declared dead on the scene.

Locals said two other women ran out of the building to ask for someone to call for police.

While locals told NY1 that a couple lives in the building, and that some artists live in the area, Department of Buildings records show that the building is intended for industrial use and not residential use.

As of late Saturday, police were still investigating the incident.

More from Eyewitness News

Imagine that: You CAN conform with zoning and be profitable

From BushwickBK:

Most of us were introduced to the 1717 Troutman warehouse when its 220 tenants, mostly artists, were kicked out in 2007 because they inhabited an illegally converted industrial building. Today, after two years and a long list of renovations, the building is once again filled with artists, but this time it’s strictly for work space.

In May 2009, the building was reopened as a work space with 60 rentable units ideal for light manufacturing, workshops and artist studios. A large banner hangs outside 1717 Troutman advertising its available spaces, boasting their 14-foot ceilings and flexible leases, without any signs of the building’s troubled past.

Loft Board folded into DOB

From GlobeSt:

The city’s Loft Board, which oversees the conversion of loft buildings from commercial to residential use, has been folded into the Department of Buildings, the Bloomberg administration announced on Friday. Mayor Michael Bloomberg made the change via an executive order.

The transfer is intended to streamline communication among code enforcement agencies, including the Fire Department and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and to facilitate compliance with the law by the remaining 300 buildings under the Loft Board’s jurisdiction, according to a release. Bloomberg says in a statement that the order "provides the board with more resources to ensure the remaining properties that do not meet code standards are renovated to meet those standards."

Created in 1982 as a result of the state Legislature’s enactment of a law to establish a framework for converting lofts, the Loft Board is chiefly responsible for working with owners and tenants of loft buildings on making renovations to comply with code provisions and obtain residential certificates of occupancy. Once compliance is reached and certificates of occupancy are issued, the buildings move out of the board’s jurisdiction.