By Doug Miller
On Tuesday, representatives from the planning firm Saccardi & Schiff, members of the city's Planning Advisory Board and a smattering of elected officials heard an earful on a topic that has for years been the third rail of Long Beach politics: illegal apartments.
They are the city's secret shame, an addiction it will not confront. Publicly, everyone condemns them; privately, too many voters depend on them to pay their mortgages and property taxes. They rely on politicians' queasiness about criminalizing neighbors, especially those who vote.
Tuesday night provided the perfect setting for the discussion, the city's ground zero for illegal rentals, West Elementary School in the heart of the West End. "I'm not looking to start a revolution in the West End," promised the first speaker to broach the subject, Mary Lou Monahan.
And certainly the idea is not new. Municipalities in other states have begun issuing occupancy permits to apartments that meet certain criteria - fire codes and parking, certainly, but they generally also need the blessing of the neighbors.
Another speaker, Rick Jackson, who gave an address on Monroe Boulevard, said he worked in mortgage underwriting and explained that illegal apartments are so ubiquitous that his industry allows home buyers to declare illegal rental income. "On Long Island, 60 percent of apartments are illegal anyway," he said.
Monahan, who freely stated that her Maryland Avenue home has an accessory apartment, which she uses as a guest room, said that legalizing the apartments would not cause any change in the population or character of the West End. "For the most part," she said, "these people are here already."
With less than a month to go before a very important local election, this was not a topic the candidates were keen to discuss, and opinions on the matter ranged far and wide even within political parties. The topic was broached recently by Herald staffers to the Democratic Nassau County executive, Tom Suozzi, and Democratic Fourth District legislative candidate Robert Solomon, whom Suozzi heartily endorses. They gave opposite answers.
Suozzi said the very idea of accessory apartments flies in the face of his definition of suburbia. "Right now the suburban model is a single-family home with a lawn around it and a baseball field down the street," he said. "I don't want to change that."
Suozzi's opponent, former Town of Hempstead Supervisor Greg Peterson, said the subject has come up in frequent discussions. "Been there and done it," he said, claiming he was part of the movement to allow such apartments, but only, so far, for seniors. "And it's not enough. I have three adult daughters - two are living with me in the same rooms they grew up in. ... There is very little around here available to them."
Meanwhile, Solomon said that legalization was a conversation worth having.
The split is just as obvious among the local candidates. Rob Tepper, a Democrat who works in the county attorney's office, took the hard-line Suozzi route. "I'm not in favor of adding apartments to one-family neighborhoods," he said. "I have no problem with people applying for variances, but I'm not in favor of a wholesale shift in zoning policies. Just because we have not in the past done the job in enforcing illegal housing, the solution is not to legalize it."
Tepper's running mate, incumbent Democrat Leonard Remo, was more receptive, if also hedging. "Amnesties do not traditionally work for illegal apartments," he said. "Before considering legalizing an apartment, it must be in full compliance with all the codes. Once that's done, then we can have the conversation based on parking, safety and neighborhood density."
All who commented said that a homeowner must be willing to accept a re-assessment as a two-family home to make up for the added use of the schools, police and fire departments and other services. "Otherwise, they are just a huge financial drain on the community," Remo said.
Among the Republicans, there was greater unity. Mona Goodman, stressing that the argument is completely hypothetical, conceded that the public might be served by an increase in the housing stock combined with a gold-rush of new tax revenue. And she said she was delighted that such an enriching conversation was initiated at one of the city's planning charrettes.
"This is exactly why we're doing this Master Plan, to collect this public input," Goodman said. "Until all the information is gathered and processed, I would not make any changes. But what I suspect is there are many more illegal apartments than we know about, and if you legalize that, then part and parcel is the homeowner pays as if it's a two- or three-family house.
"I don't know if I would want a massive zoning change, but maybe a non-transferable permit," she added, concluding, "I don't know if we're anywhere near the decision-making process."
Denise Ford, the West End resident who represents Long Beach and its surrounding communities in the Nassau County Legislature, also said she was willing to talk the process through. "I've always believed we should look at it, with all these apartments [in the West End] that we should have our building department go into them and make sure they are up to code," she said. "There are a lot of considerations to be made. I would probably lean toward something like that."
Certainly, city officials can not claim they make no money off illegal apartments, since the fines landlords face are steep, and they are collected with a certain amount of glee. Last month the city announced that its building department had prosecuted two landlords who were fined the maximum of $6,250 by the city court, according to City Manager Charles T. Theofan. The court further warned that any repeat offenses could result in jail time. These cases are the first of some 30 pending prosecutions against landlords.
On June 30, Richard Schuh, a building inspector, conducted an inspection at 27 E. Fulton St. and reported finding that two-family residence being used as a four-family house, with people occupying the cellar. The landlord had installed illegal kitchens and bathrooms in the basement and rented out rooms, according to Schuh.
Then, on July 14, Schuh conducted an inspection at 92 E. Fulton St. and found that the basement had been converted into an illegal apartment, with an illegal kitchen and bathroom.
"These are significant fines that are part of the city's ongoing enforcement efforts to help the quality of life of our residents," said Scott Kemins, the city's building commissioner, in a statement released by the city. Kemins added that both basements are considered nonhabitable spaces, and are unsafe for people to live in. Both landlords were required to hire plumbers to remove all illegal plumbing.
But these homes, it turns out, were not housing young professionals seeking cheap rent, but rather tenants who were relying on public housing assistance. "The Long Beach Housing Authority was part of the joint effort with the city, and withheld all rent paid for the legal apartments until the houses in question were brought into compliance," said Corey Klein, the city's deputy corporation counsel, in a statement released by the city.
"We had the full cooperation of the city's Housing Authority," Klein continued. "The Housing Authority discontinued the subsidy given for legal tenants until the zoning violations were corrected. The violations were based upon unsafe conditions that the illegal units posed to the tenants. It was a good inter-governmental effort to put a stop to zoning violations in our city."
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