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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Of the 13 people who died as a result of Hurricane Ida in New York City, 11 died in flood basements. These tragic deaths have brought renewed attention to the unregulated and precarious conditions many low-income New Yorkers face in underground dwellings. I think you know that by now, after the storm, but in a city with such a dire shortage of affordable housing, these illegal basement units fill an urgent need for people who may not have other are options.

It's urgent that we look a little more closely now that we have basically dug out from the storm and don't have to report on the emergency recovery. We can ask what to do about these basement apartments and how to prevent them from becoming deadly in an era of intensifying rainstorms. With me now are, Rebekah Morris, urban planner, and senior program manager at the Pratt Center for Community Development, and Reza Khanbilvardi, professor of Civil Engineering at City College of New York and director of CUNY Remote Sensing Earth Institute. He's also a licensed professional engineer in New York state. Good morning, Rebekah. Good morning, Reza. Thank you so much for coming on WNYC.

Rebekah Morris: Good morning. Thank you.

Reza Khanbilvardi: Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we will open our lines to anyone who lives in a basement apartment or rents one out. 646-435-7280, tell us about your situation, what are the risks of living or renting where you do, how did you manage during Hurricane Ida? What do you want to say about the infrastructure drainage or anything else? Do you have enough exits to get out of your place? And what do you think would improve your housing conditions if they need improving, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. For anyone who lives in or rents out a basement apartment, or you can tweet @BrianLehrer. Rebekah, do you want to start by describing the threat to the most vulnerable basement units and what makes some more vulnerable than others to big rainstorms?

Rebekah Morris: Sure. I'd like to just start by saying that what happened is a really big tragedy, as part of the Basement Apartments Safe for Everyone coalition, we've been working for 10 plus years on trying to get the attention of the city to acknowledge that people are living in these spaces and that we need to really think about how to make them safe so tragedies like this don't happen. Currently, there is a pilot in East New York that is working to do just that, however, it has been defunded by the mayor.

What has typically been considered safety problems has been around fire, not so much flooding, right? Because the idea was we just don't build these in floodplains. The main rule is you just don't build in the 100-year floodplain but because of climate change, obviously, we're seeing that our understanding of what's going to flood is completely changed.

There is a need now to really reassess and look at what the safety measures are that can be done to keep these places safe during floods but the idea of not doing anything and just trying to keep people out, I think, is unrealistic because people live there, there's just not enough housing in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Exactly. Reza, is there anything to add about what in particular makes particular units unsafe? I guess we should say that not all basement apartments are illegal and are the legal ones any safer than the illegal ones in general?

Reza Khanbilvardi: Well, one of the important criteria for floods is really elevation. If the buildings or the house is located in the low-end area, obviously they will be receiving a lot of runoff that's coming from the neighborhood. That's one of the key elements of it. The other one is really, there is a big difference between basement and the cellar. A lot of illegal rentals are probably are in cellar area. Cellar is not supposed to be a living space. As defined by the department of building, cellar are those that are 60% or more or 50% or more below ground. The majority of the unit is really underground. Basement on the other hand, they are more above ground until there are more means of egress. There is less danger for the basement than cellar in terms of the type of the building that they are. The location obviously is important, and existing of stormwater collection system in the vicinity of those neighborhood are a critical area for controlling the floods.

Brian Lehrer: That's a distinction I never heard before between a basement apartment and a cellar apartment. Reza, is that a legal distinction in the eyes of the city as well?

Reza Khanbilvardi: Correct. New York city law prohibits living in a cellar.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Rebekah, where are the units most likely to be found that are either basements or cellars. Do you make that distinction too? Does the city have any idea of exactly how many there are across the five boroughs?

Rebekah Morris: Most of these units, like the community partners that I work with that are on the ground Queens Legal Service, Chhaya CDC, Cypress Hill LDC, a lot of them and bunch of other organizations. The homeowners that typically come to them to ask questions about basements are in Queens. Queens is a big area, Brooklyn, little part of the Bronx, maybe little part of the Staten Island, but typically these one-and two-family buildings, or the smaller homeowners that are looking for some extra rent to help them pay the bills.

Yes, the cellar versus basement distinction is there. I think that it's a little bit, I'm not sure what the right word is, but it could be mere inches determining the difference. One of the things that the pilot has been looking at, and what we've been arguing as advocates is that this is really a building-by-building thing. You need to go in and see what the potential is because it could be possible that a basement doesn't have the opportunity to have all of the egress required, but maybe a cellar, which is defined as a cellar is only one or two inches below the 50% curb mark could. We really need to be getting into these units, seeing what's going on, working with architects that come up with appropriate design features to make them safe.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Let's take a phone call, our first caller Meg in Hightstown, New Jersey, who says her daughter lives in a cellar apartment. Hi, Meg you're on WNYC.

Meg: Hi, thanks for taking my call. Yes, my daughter lives in an apartment in Crown Heights. They have the first floor, which is a few steps up from the sidewalk, and then there is a cellar part of their apartment, which has a bedroom, a half bath, and their living area. They were flooded by Ida. They flooded again, two days later and Tuesday, they had sewage in their apartment in the cellar. Now I went online and looked at the C of O and it is classified as a cellar. It says that it's a boiler room storage and accessory use. Now, I don't know what accessory use is, but I always questioned the fact that there was a bedroom down there without a wind know you could get out of.

Brian Lehrer: Without a window, you could get out of?

Meg: Yes, there's a door that goes to a common area but I just thought this was a terrible idea for them to rent this apartment [laughs].

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Did they come home with you now? [chuckles]

Meg: No, actually they're living with friends but they don't want to go back. The place smells terrible. They've already been dealing with moisture and mold. My husband said, should they be legally paying rent for this space?

Brian Lehrer: Is it a legal space to your knowledge?

Meg: Well, the apartment itself is, upstairs they have a kitchen, eating area, two bedrooms, and a full bath.

Brian Lehrer: I see.

Meg: There is a wrought iron spiral staircase that goes down to the cellar, which has a living area that's got a linoleum floor, but there's a bedroom down there that has a little tiny window. None of the windows open but there is a door that goes to this common space where the washers and dryers are.

Brian Lehrer: Meg, thank you so much for your call. Reza, with your engineering experience, let me go to a couple of things that she raised there and I referenced them briefly in the intro to the segment. One, the fact that it was sewage that backed up, not just water, does that indicate that drainage is an issue we should be talking about in these buildings’ construction and also no openable window, just a door that would lead upstairs or multiple exits, something that are in the building code that makes some of these cellar apartments illegal, lack of multiple exits.

Reza Khanbilvardi: The one thing that she mentioned the word certificate of occupancy, C of O of building. Every building has a certificate of occupancy, and it clearly indicates what's the use of the basement or cellar for that building is. If it says boiler room and utility and accessory, that means it's storage type things. This is not a rentable unit as the C of O does not indicate it's a living space. That's number one. Number two, you're talking about the sewer backup. We have to understand the majority of the stormwater collection system in New York City are combined sewer system, which means the stormwater being collected at some point is going to be connected to the sewer system, which is also running underground for buildings. If there is a major storm coming and the rainfall is going to be exceeding certain value, the majority of those systems are going to be occupied by the stormwater runoff.

As a result, the sewer system is going to back up and it's going to flow off the system because there is no room to go to and also the location. As I indicated, the lower floors are very vulnerable because as the soil gets saturated and the sewer system cannot find a way to go to the sewer system connections, they are going to be backed up. Now mentioned, the windows are very small, again, those are the sign of cellars. Cellar being the majority of the unit is underground, the windows are a small. Normally, the windows are close to the ceiling rather than to be at a lower elevation. It becomes very difficult for anybody to get out with those small windows. Normally, they don't have a second means of egress, which is just in case one of the entrances to the basement or cellar are being filled with a storm runoff, they can't get out. There's no way to get out from the window or from the same exit unless there are two exits that means they have two means of egress.

Brian Lehrer: Is that part of what makes a unit legal versus illegal?

Reza Khanbilvardi,: No, but that it helps. I agree with Rebekah, that mention that each building, each house, has its own characteristic and they have to be checked upon it because the directions of the entrance to the basement, normally there is side door to the basement or the back door to the basement or front door, is very critical. With a severe storm like Ida, the runoff is really coming from the streets. The majority of the time, it comes from the streets and from impervious areas that they have, and the soil is saturated. They cannot take the runoff infiltration anymore so everything becomes runoff in a very short time.

The location of the entrance of the basement becomes critical because if the entrance to the basement is in the path of that runoff, quickly, all going to be filled up with the water coming from the street or from the surrounding area.

Brian Lehrer: I guess yet another barrier to exiting through those windows would be that in New York City, a lot of first-floor or ground-level windows have bars on them. People don't break-in. I invited people who live in or rent out basement apartments to call in. I didn't think to invite people from the construction industry who might have a relevant viewpoint on this, but somebody like that is calling in, It's Aaron in Schenectady. Aaron, we really appreciate it. Welcome to WNYC.

Aaron: Thank you, Brian. Nice to speak with you again. I still listen. I'd left the Brooklyn Navy Yard when they raised my rent 60%, but it wasn't the only reason. I was asked to build illegal basement apartments. I was asked to break every term of my license by homeowners. I was a worker too, and I had to leave my home in New York City. I landed on my feet and I can afford to tell you this because I didn't break the law. I did not break the law, when I didn't do illegal work, when I didn't renovate basements and cellars, someone else did. I was told over and over again, that if I was following labor law, I wasn't doing it right. If I was working by check or depositing the money in a bank account, I wasn't doing it right, over and over again. The licensing program, homeowners believe is to protect them from high prices. The licensing program actually is designed to have a law. We have to follow the law as licensed contractors.

Brian Lehrer: Talk a little bit more. We're running a little short on time so let me get you to a particular point to follow up on something that you've said that I think is really important. That is, if I understood you right, as a contractor, you were refusing to build illegal basement or cellar apartments into people's homes but part of your point here, I think, is that there was a lot of demand and there is a lot of demand to do that, right?

Aaron: Yes. Homeowners have a power in this equation. These are property owners and we're workers, and the people who own properties in New York City, even in poor neighborhoods are relatively wealthy compared to where I live. The city protects property owners from workers in regard to who does this work.

Brian Lehrer: Aaron, thank you very much for your call. We appreciate your contribution. Rebekah, that brings us to the legal questions. We've talked so much in this segment about the landscape. I think it's been useful for people who are not involved in this personally to hear what the basement apartment landscape in New York is like. Now we have, what to do to prevent a repeat of this tragedy. Mayor de Blasio's administration has launched a program aimed at bringing basement apartments up to code and making them safe for habitation but, Rebekah, I understand you think that program sort of faltered, right?

Rebekah Morris: Well, first of all, I'd like to push back on the comment by the last caller that most of these homeowners are wealthy. A lot of these homeowners are not wealthy. They are living in low and moderate-income communities and they need this-- Maybe they bought the house with the understanding [unintelligible 00:16:41] that they would be able to write this unit to help them pay for their mortgage.

Brian Lehrer: Fair enough.

Rebekah Morris: Right. I just wanted to make that point. In terms of whether I think that it faltered, this is a very, very complex problem. You have the interplay of zoning codes and building codes and the housing crisis, right now, we have the climate crisis. There's a lot going on here. It's going to be complicated to solve, but we have to be able to do hard things. We have an enormous housing crisis here.

The pilot was a hard-fought-for and won by advocates on the ground for years pushing for this. We won the pilot. It was like three years of a task force working together with all these different city agencies and advocates and homeowners to come up with a pilot that can test a safe way to make sure that people can live in these and be safe and healthy. There was a ton of demand in east New York, ton of demand. Hundreds of hundreds of homeowners came out. They wanted to do this. Then, the mayor's line has been that it was way too hard logistically, except the problem is that they cut almost 90% of the funding before we even got to get through the pilot to test actually just it works or not. First of all, it's still going on. We only have eight homeowners. The neighborhood was promised 40, the reminder, this was a promise to the neighborhood when they rezoned east New York. Only the problem that I see and that a lot of us see that are working on this day-to-day is that, if you don't put the money and you don't have the political will to actually do the hard work, then it's easy to say it's logistically challenging.

Brian Lehrer: For you at the Pratt center for community development, are there a set of policies that you're recommending in response to the 11 deaths in basement apartments during Hurricane Ida? Or are the laws already in place and they just need to be enforced?

Rebekah Morris: No, I think it's a mix. Nobody, not even all of the experts in city agencies were thinking about flooding when this pilot was created. Everyone was thinking about fire safety. The idea was that you just damp and waterproof depending on what the subsoil conditions are for the unit, and you don't build in a floodplain. This is one of those moments where, because it's a pilot. Here's an opportunity to say, we really do actually need to think more about what needs to happen in terms of flood safety, and not just with basements, but let's talk about garden apartments and first-floor apartments. What clearly this showed, it was that we don't exactly know what's going to happen now with climate change, nobody was prepared for, or what's going on with our infrastructure. There's a lot of challenges, but I think that the BASE campaign is currently working with technical experts, architects, engineers, trying to figure out what are some solutions that can be integrated into a model that can continue to make these units safe?

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned garden apartments. I think we have someone calling about a brownstone garden apartment and that sector of housing, Elliot in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Elliot: Hello, Brian, how are you today?

Brian Lehrer: Good. [inaudible 00:20:05]

Elliot: I live in a brownstone in the Lincoln Center, Historic District, and over the years, landlords as part of the overall drive to push rent-stabilized units into the open market have been duplexing. They've been building up on the roof and building down into the cellar. The two neighboring apartments on my floor, the basement floor below stoop level, have been duplex down. The service staircase into the cellar is an old battered wooden staircase. It does not meet fire safety codes.

These extra rooms that have been added on, on paper, in the process of the city are called recreation rooms and yet people are sleeping in them. They do not meet fire codes. In fact, I was running an errand one day and two gentlemen passed me going in the other direction, one with a clipboard, one with a badge, and I thought, "Wait a minute," I turned around and hurried back. I said, "Excuse me, are you from fire department?" One was from the building and one was from the fire and they were walking around the neighborhood looking at the fire escape situation and these conversions, because the codes are not keeping up with what building owners and landlords are doing.

Brian Lehrer: That's such a revealing story. I'm going to leave it there for the time, but even in the Lincoln Center, Historical brownstone District, but Reza some of these units, which are illegal and have been illegal for years, are a function of the housing crisis, which will always relegate people without means into dwellings like these units until they're significant change in New York city. In the meantime, what can be done to mitigate the risk of severe flooding in basement units, or what do you think the big picture is?

Because there's a basic tension here between not having things that are unsafe because they're illegal, but at the same time trying to have enough housing for the lower-income, the immigrant population in particular, and others who need housing in the permanent housing shortage condition of New York City.

Reza Khanbilvardi: The answer to the question is really two folded. What can we do to mitigate the flooding in the basements or cellar apartments? That's number one. Number two, a bigger picture is what can we do to mitigate the flooding or stormwater management in the system, in the New York City areas, especially in the neighborhood that they are in the lower elevation. Rebekah mentioned climate change. The climate change is causing the increasing frequency and the magnitude of precipitation.

The existing code for the stormwater collection system in the city is based on what we call the Intensity-Duration-Frequency curve, which is really the history of the rainfall that has come in New York City for a long, long time. They do the analysis and they find what's the highest rainfall that comes once every five years. This rainfall intensity, duration curve has changed in the last few years with the climate changes, but our code has not changed. It has not kept up.

In certain area, they go for three years storm return period. You notice in the last month we had two or three major precipitation that exceeded those five-year return period or three-year return period. We really have to upgrade our stormwater collection system. We can also retrofit some of the existing building that they're already there. In terms of finding a better way of maybe diverging the runoff that is coming to the building, or maybe put a temporary barrier or sandbags or even sloping sidewalk on the door next to the entrance of the buildings, also moving some of the what do you call the utility line from the basement to higher elevation.

Normally, electrical outlets, the meters, and the gas meters, everything is on the basement. If you move it up to a higher elevation, at least you are not going to lose your electricity, your sump pump is going to work. Everything else is going to work out. More importantly, we have to increase our capability in forecasting. Forecasting has improved a lot in precipitation, but not to the local place, for example, we say Brooklyn is going to get 3.5 inches tomorrow, or 2.2 inches, but not everywhere in 2.2 inches are going to come in Brooklyn.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Hyperlocal weather forecast.

Reza Khanbilvardi: What we need is [crosstalk] forecasting, we need nowcasting.

Brian Lehrer: Let me do the legal ID that I needed to do near the top of the hour. I want to ask you a follow-up question about one piece of that, that I think is really interesting. Then we'll give Rebekah last word. This is WNYC FM, HDN, AM, New York, WNJT FM 80.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio. Reze, you're saying that the buildings themselves need to be upgraded in some cases for protection in the current climate era. You also said that the basic infrastructure, if I understand you right, of New York City, the whole sewage system needs to be upgraded in terms of the municipal infrastructure. For you as an engineer, how big a job is that?

Reza Khanbilvardi: That's major job and major investment on part of the city and agencies. We are not talking about the entire system we're talking about areas that are vulnerable to floods. Maybe they can create an auxiliary stormwater collection system for those areas, or maybe they can design a retention basin for the runoff, all the runoff doesn't come at the same time so that there is a delay in runoff. There are a number of ways that they can do on certain location for some of those community to alleviate the problem.

Brian Lehrer: Rebekah, last thing, how can folks get help if they're still cleaning up or assessing the damage from Ida, if you know?

Rebekah Morris: Well, I think you should look to your local community-based organization. They tend to have and understand the lowest local resources on the ground. I do think that this points to the need for us to really build out the social infrastructure of the city and the local community resilience, educating people about what climate change could bring, how to make sure that they're connected into emergency response notifications. Then lastly, rather than making homeowners more scared to come and look to see how to make it legal, let's find an avenue to make it so people come and ask for the help they can to make these safe spaces safe.

Brian Lehrer: A great way to end. Rebekah Morris, urban planner and senior program manager at the Pratt Center for Community Development, and Reza Khanbilvardi, Professor of civil engineering at City College. Thank you both so much for an important segment.

Reza Khanbilvardi: Thank you.

Rebekah Morris: Thank you so much.

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