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More Than A Month After Ida, A Family That Lost Everything Is Still Without a Home
By
Gwynne Hogan
Published Oct 13, 2021
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Scott Heins/Gothamist
By
Gwynne Hogan
Published Oct 13, 2021
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Oscar Gomez had spotted a flyer for a basement apartment on a lamppost in Queens.
In 2011, he was looking for apartments for himself, his sister and her 10-year-old daughter Litzy, who Gomez was helping to raise. The three had been living together with other members of their extended family in a house they’d rented in Woodside. But the owner was selling off the property and wanted them out.
The hunt for a new place to live was discouraging. Few landlords would rent to recent immigrants who lacked documentation. But the owner of the basement apartment welcomed them with relatively little paperwork, perhaps because it wasn’t up to code. The ceilings were too low. There wasn’t enough natural light and ventilation. All they needed to move in was a letter of recommendation from their previous landlord and proof of employment.
Gomez took a room with a small window at the front of the apartment that fit little more than a twin-size mattress. Litzy and her mother shared a windowless room in the center. A small hallway that ran between the bedrooms doubled as the kitchen. It was cramped and dark, but at $1,250 a month, it was what they could afford.
“It was a drastic change. We had a large space. We had a spacious dining room, a living room, a large bathroom,” Gomez said. “To then go to a little apartment, it was difficult.”
As years went by, more family members moved into the basement, and then later into the first-floor apartment above. In total, 15 people, including another four of Gomez’s siblings, their partners and children called the small house in Woodside home—thousands of miles from Guerrero, Mexico where Gomez grew up.
Together, they covered a gamut of jobs essential to New York City’s economy—a construction worker, a nanny, a housekeeper. Gomez and two other siblings stock shelves at a supermarket. And yet, a member of the family was always around to cook, clean and entertain their children.
Then there was the rain. During heavy downpours, an inch or two of water would sometimes accumulate in parts of the basement. Typically, the family would lift their possessions off the ground and begin to mop.
That was before the remnants of Hurricane Ida hit the city last month with a ferocity that broke all records. More than three inches of rain fell in a single hour, destroying their basement apartment and everything in it. Now, more than a month later, Gomez and his family are still searching for a place to live, looking for anything except another illegal basement dwelling. But without legal status, bank accounts and lines of credit, they may have no other choice.
The Gomez family moved into a basement in Woodside in 2011.
Scott Heins/Gothamist
Vivir Para Contarla, ‘Living to Tell the Tale’
The night Ida hit, Gomez stood in his basement apartment—mop in hand—as sewage gurgled up from the toilet and other plumbing fixtures. He soon found himself in knee deep water that was rising fast. Abandoning the mop, he shook awake his 10-month and 9-year-old nephews and carried them to safety in the apartment above. Minutes later he returned for valuables—passports and other paperwork, his cash savings—but by then the water nearly reached the ceiling.
“We saw our dreams disappearing. Things that it took years to work for. We lost everything,” Gomez said, so overcome with emotion he was barely able to finish his sentence. “I’m a person of faith, and I prayed so many times to God that something like this wouldn’t happen to us.”
Still, he counts his family among the fortunate ones. Blocks away, on the other side of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a family of three, including a toddler, drowned in their home, along with eight other people across Queens who died in basement apartments that night, most of them illegal dwellings. If Gomez had been asleep when the storm hit, he believes the city’s death count would have included him, his nephews and sister.
“We have to be thankful to God that we’re alive,” said Gomez, who then paraphrased the novelist Gabriel García Márquez. “Others didn’t have the same luck. They didn’t live to tell the tale.”
Swarms of fruit flies that took over the rotting basement have now moved to the floor above.
Scott Heins/Gothamist
The storm and its aftermath have focused renewed attention on an issue that lawmakers have long struggled to address. Estimates put the number of New Yorkers living in unregulated basement apartments at 100,000 people, though advocacy groups think the numbers could be twice that. No official tally or demographic breakdown exists.
But housing advocates say they see common threads among those who living in basements.
“They’re often immigrants, they’re often people of mixed-status families. They are the essential workers. They are the lowest wage earners,” said Annetta Seecharran, executive director of Chhaya Community Development Corporation. “The most vulnerable New Yorkers live in basement apartments.”
After Ida, Mayor Bill de Blasio laid out a plan for how he believes the city can avoid the deadly consequences of further catastrophic flooding by targeting outreach and evacuation notices to basement dwellers. Before next year’s hurricane season, the city’s emergency management agency is supposed to partner with community-based groups to create a registry of likely basement apartments.
But a long-term solution to stave off future damages in flood prone areas would require an estimated $100 billion investment in sewer upgrades, a cost officials said the city couldn’t begin to pay without substantial federal funding. Previous efforts to bring more basement dwellings up to code have faltered after the city cut funding for a pilot program last year at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
De Blasio has also stressed, given the city’s ongoing affordable housing crisis, he will not pressure city agencies to ramp up enforcement of illegal dwellings.
“I don't think it's realistic to say let's just have no one live in [illegal basement apartments] because I don't know where all those folks are going to end up who need a place to live,” de Blasio said at a press briefing shortly after the storm. “But of course we need people to be safe. This is a really, really tough problem.”
A month after the Gomez family is still looking for a place to live.
Scott Heins/Gothamist
“We Just Need A Home”
More than a month since the flood, the belongings that could be salvaged from the Gomez family’s basement apartment are still stacked in front of the house, covered in blue tarps. Life is precarious.
Gomez has applied for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which he qualifies for because his children are U.S. citizens, but he’s still waiting for the funding to be approved. In the meantime, he, his sister and her daughter Litzy, are sleeping with family in the apartment above their flooded home. Ten people now share a three-bedroom apartment. Others who lived in the basement have scattered, staying with extended family in other parts of Queens.
The family went two weeks without cooking gas or hot water. Swarms of fruit flies, first drawn by the mold growing on the basement walls, have now migrated to the floor above.
Several nights a week, after his shifts at the supermarket, Gomez leads a group of friends to practice traditional Mexican folk dancing, in preparation for a friend’s daughter’s Quinceañera. Litzy, now 19 years old, has started her freshman year of college while working a part-time job.
Scott Heins/Gothamist
“It’s very stressful because you’re like, ‘Wow, I don’t have a home to go to and do my homework in peace,’” Litzy said. She’s been pulling late nights at the school library, thankful for a quiet place where she can put on her headphones, listen to music and try to focus on schoolwork.
“We just need a home,” she said, although no one in the family can imagine ever living in a basement again.
“The fear is there, the worry, the uncertainty,” Gomez said. “As soon as it starts raining, you can’t sleep.”
But just as it was a decade ago—when he first saw the flyer for the apartment they’re now leaving behind—the search for a new home poses several obstacles. Other family members have been turned away by landlords in recent weeks. Gomez believes they’re being discriminated against because of their immigration status.
“It’s very difficult to rent an apartment in a building, if you're not a citizen or a legal resident,” he said, adding that most of the people he knows live in unregulated apartments like he did. “It’s as if it were prohibited for immigrants to attain housing with dignity.”
Tagged
climate change
Ida
new york city
housing
flooding
queens
affordable housing
flood
Gwynne Hogan
Gwynne Hogan is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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