Disclaimer: This is a worst-case scenario.
You’re a landlord, or a co-op or condo board, and you install UL-rated gas detectors above your building’s gas stoves and dryers by May 1, as required by Local Law 157.
Before long, one starts beeping. A tenant calls 911 and, fearing an explosion, hangs up and leaves the apartment. The dispatcher can see the address but doesn’t know in which unit the alarm sounded. She sends the Fire Department to investigate the potential gas leak.
The FDNY arrives, but cannot figure out where the alarm came from. The tenant who called is unreachable. Twenty minutes pass. Because gas might be building up in a unit, creating the potential for an explosion, the FDNY shuts off gas to the entire building.
The tenant finally returns and lets firefighters into her unit. They open the windows, turn the stove knobs to the off position and tell the tenant to come back in an hour. Everything’s back to normal, right?
Wrong. Your building must pass a pressure test for gas service to be turned back on. On the first try, it fails. So you have plumbers pull every gas stove and dryer out from the wall, cap all the pipes, and run a second pressure test. Another fail.
The building is old, and the pipes have shifted or corroded over time. Somewhere, probably in several places, there are leaks. But where? No one knows.
You’re faced with two unpalatable options: re-pipe the entire building or re-wire it and go electric, like this Yonkers complex is doing. Either way, the cost is well into the six figures for a small building, and millions for a larger one.
For a co-op, that can mean refinancing your mortgage and raising your dues. For a rent-stabilized building, there’s no way to recover the cost, because the state strangled the Major Capital Improvements program in 2019.
Whatever solution you choose will take months, if not longer. Meanwhile, everyone is using hot plates, ordering in or demanding to be relocated.
What we’re thinking about: Source-of-income discrimination was the most common source of housing discrimination complaints to the city’s Human Rights Commission last fiscal year, with 554. But is the problem still “pervasive,” as City Limits claimed in this story about new City Council bills targeting the crime? Send your thoughts to eengquist@therealdeal.com.
A thing we’ve learned: Sublet specialist Ruth Colp-Haber of Wharton Property Advisors has a block on the computer of her colleague/husband Eric to make sure he is not distracted by NCAA basketball during work hours.
Elsewhere…
The Atlantic Avenue rezoning — dubbed AAMUP — was approved by the City Planning Commission, which was a formality because it is an Adams administration initiative and the mayor appoints most of the commissioners.
But it’s a good opportunity to debate the issues that have plagued the city’s housing market, particularly the notion that rezoning for “luxury” (actually mixed-income) development makes the problem worse.
The Atlantic’s Jacob Anbinder has spent years trying to debunk the myth that “new luxury housing is the reason that former working- and middle-class neighborhoods in their cities have become fancy enclaves.”
“Not only is it a simplistic analysis that absolves nearly anyone who isn’t a developer of responsibility for the problem,” he wrote, “but in portraying new housing as the proximate cause of gentrification, it exacerbates the very housing crisis it seeks to solve.”
Closing time
— Matthew Elo
