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Neighbors Suffer With Fallout From Illegal Conversions of Single-Family Homes To Rooming Houses; Rampant Scourge Impacts Quality of Life, Home Prices
EDITORIAL
Imagine you’ve been living in your single-family house – likely your greatest asset – for many years, mostly in peace. Sure, you endure the lawnmowers, leaf blowers, maybe even an unfriendly neighbor, but it’s still your slice of paradise.
Until one day your neighbor’s house is sold to an absentee landlord or investor who either personally or by way of his renters turns the property into a boarding house. Imagine you’re living next door or across the street from a house where cars, vans, and rattling trucks with trailers sail in and out of the driveway day and night. Imagine a situation where a parade of people, often different people, some in neon yellow vests, come and go with huge backpacks slung across their shoulders, picked up and dropped off by a specific fleet of cars, again and again. Imagine the cars picking up the workers, idling at the bottom of the driveway, leaning on the horn, day and night. Imagine on garbage day how the piled-high detritus, spilling and exploding in all directions from multiple garbage cans and bursting garbage bags, tells the story of how a once-suburban single-family house has turned into a holding space for disenfranchised people who are given a mattress on the floor in exchange for manual labor. They are constantly picked up and dropped off, likely because they do not have drivers’ licenses. Maybe they lack legal working papers. And you feel bad about the exploitation these people are likely subjected to – but you’re also apoplectic because you’re being woken in the night and disturbed in the day while the profiteering landlord is infringing on your rights as a human being.
Your once-serene existence is now punctured by cars passing your house, bass notes thumping from the stereo, going in and out of their driveway at 5 am, 10 am, noon, 3 pm, 4 pm, 6pm, 8 pm, 10 pm, 11 pm 1 am, 3 am, 4 am – until the cycle starts up the next day, every day, Monday through Sunday.
You live in this space, so you were the early warning system. You could tell that something was wrong right from the start, and you let the town know. You informed everyone: the police, the code enforcement officer, the town’s attorney, your elected officials.
Months pass by and your only hope is that your town will be responsive. You don’t want to hear “this is happening everywhere.” Let’s set aside why this is happening “everywhere” in Rockland County for a moment and talk about why it’s both necessary and feasible for towns to root out this scourge. To begin, there is little a neighbor can do to cure the problem himself, but residents can be the greatest asset to code enforcement officers. They are the eyes and ears, they have a front row seat, they know what’s going on, and they have the most to lose. When a house is converted to a boarding house, you lose a sense of continuity, safety, stability, on your street. Inevitably it will impact a neighborhood’s quality of life and home prices – when it becomes common knowledge that this kind of abuse is tolerated or goes unprosecuted by a town.
In fairness, it takes time for building inspectors to compile evidence to show a single-family has been converted but the important thing is for code enforcement officer to stick to the case, to tenaciously gather evidence, to work with neighbors’ leads. In some of the county’s more egregious cases, you hear about 30 people living in spaces that have been doored off, have illegal kitchens, hanging electrical wire, are safety traps for firefighters and EMT workers. Those cases are high profile; officials like to hold press conferences about those cases.
Let’s look at Clarkstown’s code, for example. A landlord is out of compliance if the house is occupied by unrelated people. That seems like a difficult bar in a day when unrelated and blended families live together. But that’s different than finding more than a dozen mattresses strewn across the floors, along with all the testimony a code enforcement officer has been given regarding the movement of cars and people.
If — and when — this reaches town court, you will see a landlord come to court without a lawyer, miss court dates, represent to the judge that he’s “working” on the issues. And before you turn around, six months will have slipped away without any relief for you, the unlucky homeowner who is watching a slow dance in which this landlord has figured out that every day he collects rent, every month he runs an illegal boarding house, is somehow a profitable enough equation to keep doing what he’s doing while the wheels of town justice court grind glacially.
But let’s get back to “this is happening everywhere.” This rooming house “business model,” used by shady landlords, or contractors who sublet and fill these houses with immigrant workers and day laborers, didn’t start yesterday. It’s become noticeably more egregious because of a handful of factors: lack of affordable living spaces in Rockland County, New York’s safe sanctuary policies on illegal immigrants, and insufficient code enforcement and legal resources to fight the surge.
Landlords using single-family houses as boarding rooms have figured out that they have a long lead before a town cracks down. Maybe they calculate fines for violations as the cost for doing business. They are patient, so long as they’re enriching themselves on the scheme. They can wait it out.
Towns must become more proactive by enlarging code enforcement staffs, secure search warrants as expeditiously as possible, engage the community to participate in neighborhood watches, enforce violations of rental registries, involve police detectives when possible, and use the town’s bully pulpit to telegraph that these conversions will not be tolerated. However, the last goal is only effective if the town has an actual record of cracking down – one that follows from indictments to the restoration of the single-family home back to a single-family home.
