New Laws Aim to Support NYC Tenants Displaced by Fire

“Displacement following a fire or a structural emergency in your home is one of the most disruptive experiences a family can have,” said Bronx Councilmember Pierina Ana Sanchez, who sponsored one of two bills passed Thursday.

During the most recent fiscal year that ended in June, 476 single adults and more than 500 families—including nearly 300 families with children—stayed in the city’s Emergency Housing Services (EHS) shelters, which house New Yorkers displaced by fires or vacate orders on their homes.

These aren’t commonly short-lived stays: individual adults spent 592 days on average in EHS shelters last year, while families with kids were there for an average of 337 days, or nearly a year, according to Department of Housing, Preservation and Development (HPD) data.

“The scene that often you see is people in total distress, with no information, overwhelmed by what has just happened to them,” Brooklyn City Councilmember Alexa Avilés said ahead of a Council meeting Thursday, referencing several residential building fires in her district over the last few years.

“While the city offers support, there’s still very little information around their rights and the responsibilities of landlords, particularly when buildings are ordered to be vacated and folks are left to their own devices while trying to pick up their lives,” she added.

Lawmakers passed two bills Thursday aimed at making that process easier. The first, sponsored by Avilés, requires that HPD provide tenants displaced by a blaze with handouts detailing their occupancy rights, the process for rescinding a vacate order and what their landlord is required to do under the law.

The materials would need to be made available in the top 10 languages spoken in the city, what Avilés said was inspired by watching the struggles of immigrant renters in her Sunset Park district navigating the aftermath of fires that destroyed their homes.

“This bill really comes from that experience, over and over again, where residents experience no ability to get their belongings, no information of where they should go, no information of when the vacate orders actually are being lifted, and do they have a right to return,” Avilés explained.

Incidents include a spring 2022 fire in a building on 54th Street that forced dozens of families from their rent stabilized apartments for more than a year, the immigration news site Documented reported last year. The tenants sued the building’s owners, accusing them of dragging their feet on making repairs.

In a separate case, tenants at another rent-stabilized building on Sunset Park’s 43rd Street were displaced by a fire for two years, despite their suing for the right to return, according to Gothamist.

“If landlords are intentionally misleading tenants about their rights to re-enter, this likely constitutes tenant harassment, thereby violating existing New York City housing laws,” Avilés said at a Council hearing on her bill in February.

“However, as with so many of our non-English-speaking residents, they are not aware that their landlord is in fact violating laws and instead resign themselves to complete displacement and loss of all of their possessions,” she added. “This bill aims to close the information gap through a very simple education process.”

The bill is expected to take effect in 120 days.

Another piece of legislation that the Council approved Thursday will require the city to notify councilmembers when a serious fire takes place in their district, within three hours of the incident. This will create “an infrastructure of redundancy,” to ensure displaced families get the resources they need and don’t fall through the cracks, said Bronx Councilmember Pierina Ana Sanchez, who sponsored the bill.

“On dozens of occasions in just my short three years in office, and I know this is true for my colleagues, I had visited fire sites—we all have—discovering problems,” she said, recalling one incident where city agencies failed to issue a vacate order for an apartment with no windows in the cold of winter.

Sanchez said the issue was “personal” for her, having experienced a fire in her family home when she was just 3 years old. “Displacement following a fire or a structural emergency in your home is one of the most disruptive experiences a family can have,” she said.

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