In the late 1880s, sitting in the study of the huge house he built for himself in Richmond Hill, a photographer and reporter named Jacob Riis wrote a small volume called How the Other Half Lives, During the days, he dragged his camera through the corridors of Lower East Side tenements, dodging rats, loose pigs and orphaned children. At night he returned to the tree-lined repose of central Queens to write.

“[The] large rooms,” Riis said of the sub-divided tenements of lower Manhattan, “were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation ... They soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself.”

City Limits Magazine


December 1998:
Jason's Turn

One hundred and eight years after Riis published his book, Nancy Cataldi has discovered that other the half now lives in Richmond Hill.

“Half of the houses have people living in them illegally, stuffed into basements, attics, wherever they can fit them,” says Cataldi, herself a freelance news photographer and Richmond Hill homeowner. “In one house on my block, the guy’s just a slumlord. There are drug dealers and prostitutes. When the sewer line backed up, he got a sump pump and let it empty into a dumpster in the backyard. Each floor has four or five rooms. It’s just unbelievable.”

Until this kind of thing started happening, no one would have mistaken this section of Queens for the old Lower East Side. Yet, because low-cost housing is so hard to find in other parts of the city, Queens is fast becoming a gritty gateway for the city’s new immigrant homeowners and tenants.

To make mortgage payments, immigrant homeowners throughout the borough pack their modest one- and two-family houses to the rafters, filling illegal basement and attic apartments with tenants and rent-paying relatives.

The phenomenon has changed the basic nature of neighborhoods like Richmond Hill, Jamaica, Kew Gardens and Astoria--practically every corner of the borough. The signs aren’t hard to find. Illegal apartments crowd neighborhoods: Sanitation crews are overwhelmed by thousands of extra garbage bags, front lawns are enlisted as parking lots, and local school districts are among the most overcrowded in the city.

But all this wouldn’t add up to much without the fires. Over the last few years, New York City has heard the story too many times. An electrical fire rips through a Queens frame house, killing immigrant workers and leaving multiple families homeless. In almost every case, illicit construction was the cause: faulty wiring, cheap partitions and no fire protections. The most recent fatalities were in August, when a Guyanese seamstress and her daughter died in an illegal attic apartment, trapped in a building with no fire escapes or smoke detectors.

These tragedies have pushed politicians to attack the problem with rare vigor. Last year, the state legislature and City Council passed laws that led to a massive crackdown against owners who build illegal apartments. In Queens, the result has been almost 150 orders to vacate.

There’s only one problem with this vigorous enforcement strategy. New York needs these apartments, illegal or not. With affordable home construction stalled and federal housing money drying up, tenants are desperate for some place to live.

That means a war between homeowners who want Queens to remain the city’s suburbia-with-subways and the new immigrants who say they have the right to alter the neighborhood to fit their needs. Right now, Riis’ Richmond Hill is the main battleground in this conflict.