“I’m surprised, I’m baffled, I’m angry,” said City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who represents East New York, where the city ran an earlier basement conversion pilot in 2019. The area is excluded from the new program, which will only apply to 15 of the city’s 59 community districts.

A new pathway for the legalization and conversion of basement and cellar apartments in the city was included in this year’s state budget—but excludes many of the neighborhoods hardest hit by flooding in recent years.

Housing advocates have long called for a plan to regulate the estimated tens of thousands of subgrade apartments across the city, often low-cost units rented by working class and immigrant New Yorkers. Most existing basement and cellar homes are occupied illegally, making them more vulnerable to unsafe conditions, and tenants now face increased risk of flooding in the face of climate change-driven extreme weather.

“I was a brand new governor for about a week when Hurricane Ida hit. I walked those streets in Queens. I saw what happened in places and homes where people were flooded and literally drowned in their own home because they were trapped in those illegal basement apartments,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show on April 17. “That was one of the reasons I said we must bring them into code.”

But in a surprise, only a single Queens community district—CD 2, which encompasses Long Island City—was selected to participate in the pilot program authorized by the state budget, despite the wider region’s susceptibility to flooding and the basement drowning deaths of 11 people in other parts of the the borough during Hurricane Ida in 2021.

A total of 15 community districts were selected to participate in the five-year pilot, including four in the Bronx (districts 9, 10, 11, and 12), four in Brooklyn (districts 4, 10, 11 and 17), and six in Manhattan (district 3, 4, 9, 10, 11 and 12), but only one in Queens and none on Staten Island.

Just as surprising was the exclusion of Brooklyn Community District 5 (CD5) in East New York, which was the guinea pig for an earlier basement legalization pilot attempted under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration in 2019.