CM Epstein questions on distressed housing trends, building code, and office conversions

Director Weaver, we've seen a lot of increase in distressed housing in the city, and I'm wondering what you're seeing.

And I've seen it in my district, of course, but we're seeing it around the city.

And do you feel like there's a pathway through education organizing to get more of these properties in through COPA or through some of these article elements with preservation purchasers based on the increase in distress?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important.

We thank you for the question.

We know that one of the top tools that tenants can use to ensure that their housing is high quality is to form a tenant association in their building.

And we really want to encourage tenants to come together to form a tenant association and to speak directly to the landlord about the issues that they are facing in their building.

In our Enforcement Days initiative, which we're hoping to roll out soon, we are looking to make sure that tenants have actually tried to raise issues with landlords first before they come to the city.

Yes, there is issues with the stress in our building and we also in our buildings and we also need to make sure that tenants are calling the landlord notifying them and

And working together with each other to try to get repairs made and then calling the city if that doesn't work.

But you've seen an increase in involvement there, an increase in distress, an increase in tenants reaching out.

Have you seen that kind of transition?

Well, you've been only, it's been six months, so, I mean, I've seen it.

I'm wondering if you've noticed that, too, and through your work now.

You know, we work with tenant associations every single day who are reaching out to us to try to ensure that they can get repairs in their building, and we look to continue to do that work, yeah.

The only thing I'd add here is from the DOB perspective, when you have tenants who are looking to have repairs done, or you have owners who are themselves going through extensive rehabilitation for a long time, trying to work within the building code specifically was difficult.

And so at the end of last year, we passed existing building code.

It goes into...

Deployment implementation in July of next year, and we've been spending the last year into next year trying to educate people.

Basically, I'm saying that DOB has its own responsibility to make sure that people who are trying to do the right thing have the tools to do it and the education to do it.

So whether it's a tenant or owner, we hope the existing building code, the changes, and the streamlining will help.

And Commissioner Degani, I'm just wondering about the, we've seen an increase in conversions going through DOB from commercial to residential.

Do you feel like the deadline to the pipeline that Albany's put forward is giving enough timeline for some of these conversions to happen?

Do you feel like they need to be extended?

You know, I think we've actually worked very closely with the

Division of Housing Assistance at HPD for the tax abatement projects.

But as we know, the project pipeline for office residential conversion is much larger and has been around for decades.

So there's 17,000 units between 1995 and 2007 alone in lower Manhattan using those tools.

And so we've had a lot of experience.

We do think that the process we have set up to work through the different deadlines for 467M is working.

We're tracking our information together.

And especially those projects that go through the major project program at DOB, which is

a particular pipeline that works with complex projects, assigns a project manager that actually works before filing and gives them a dedicated person to walk them through the entire process.

Those projects have been the most successful, so we're working to get the word out about that.

And actually, that's one of the areas that speed grew by investing seven additional staff members since we saw so much success, particularly with office residential conversion.