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Q&A

Tenant and homeowner access to information after fires

1:10:47

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Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez inquires about how tenants and homeowners can access information about their buildings after a fire, focusing on communication from DOB and HPD.

DOB has an Office of Tenant Advocate that communicates with tenants about the process of lifting vacate orders and other situations.
HPD provides information on their website, including a QR code on vacate orders that leads to a page with contact information and steps to lift the vacate.
HPD has recently updated their website to show partial rescissions of vacate orders, allowing tenants and owners to see which units are habitable.

Jennifer Gutiérrez

1:10:47

And and in that exchange, at any point, are tenants trying to communicate with DOB about whether or not the timeline, the status And is that and can you make that information available to the tenants?

1:11:24

And that office, if a tenant is wondering if they could go back into their apartment or just curious if their landlord is, you know, present, that information can be shared by this particular unit?

1:11:36

Okay.

1:11:37

And then what about HPD?

1:12:54

And that's updated on the website but is there direct communication with the tenants of that building?

Yigal Shemash

1:11:03

We have a specific office for office of tenant advocate.

1:11:08

They have communications with tenants very specifically.

1:11:13

And if there's any questions on the process or how to lift the vacate or how to deal with any of those situations, that office is specifically there for tenants.

1:11:36

Correct.

AnnMarie Santiago

1:11:39

So for I have two kind of answers to your question.

1:11:43

One is tenants going back to homeowners first.

1:11:47

Mhmm.

1:11:48

Information about how to have the vacate rescinded is available on our website.

1:11:53

When we post the vacate, there is a QR code there that will take either a tenant or an owner to the same page, which is our vacate page, and it will list out who they can contact to find out more information about how to lift the vacate.

1:12:06

Our vacates are online so an owner can see what the reasons for the vacate were.

1:12:12

Recently we've made an update to our website so for those of you who use HPD online, right, you put in the building address and you can bring up a whole lot of HPD information about a building.

1:12:22

One piece of information you can look at is the vacate and the vacate order itself.

1:12:28

Recently we modified that because there are occasions where we do partial resins.

1:12:33

So we would issue a vacate for six units in the building for example out of 20.

1:12:38

Three of those units would be restored to habitability and three are still being worked on.

1:12:43

We now post information to say the vacate has been rescinded for these three units, these three units still have a vacate that's fully accessible to owners and tenants.

1:13:00

If we have information to correct connect with them, right, part of what we try to do is encourage at the at the very start, encourage tenants to register with emergency housing services, whether they need housing or not.

1:13:14

Because if we have contact information for them, we will attempt to reach out to them.

1:13:19

A lot of times, they don't register with us and there's no way for us to communicate with those tenants.

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Interagency communication after fires and vacate orders

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Proposal for a central information portal after emergencies