In the weeks that followed an eight-alarm fire that destroyed a Jackson Heights apartment building on April 6, displacing more than 150 families, the city’s response has come under scrutiny.
According to the Red Cross, nearly 500 people were made homeless by the blaze and while some found shelter with relatives or friends, 98 families required emergency lodging from the city.
Emergency hotel stays were set to expire April 20 but were extended an extra two months until June 20. On Friday, April 30, Shekar Krishnan, a candidate for City Council in Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, released a comprehensive housing policy proposal to demand accountability from the city government and ensure it provides emergency services to help tenants vacated from their homes due to fires, landlord property destruction, or other forms of tenant harassment.
“Over the course of my years as a lawyer for housing justice, I have unfortunately seen far too many tenants displaced by vacate orders and fought alongside them in lengthy battles to ensure they return home,” Krishnan said. “A vacate order is when the city determines that a building is unsafe to live in, and it mandates that all the tenants immediately leave. It can happen in the case of fire — like at the 89th Street building in Jackson Heights recently — or when a landlord has rendered the building uninhabitable through property destruction or cutting off essential services like heat or hot water.”
