In the Brooklyn Paper, Aaron Short has this quote from one of the few legal tenants in the building:

“It’s horrible!” said Ralph De La Rosa of Go Yoga, which occupies a first-floor business space. “The city should be doing something else instead of vacating them in this way.”

Let’s review, shall we. This is a six-story building with 12 “apartments”. There are no sprinklers (as is required for hotels and other transient uses), there are no secondary means of egress (as is required for hotels and other transient uses). Most of the four-story addition is constructed of combustible wood framing. All of the DOB permits for this building describe a three-story commercial building, so the top three stories seem to be some form of immaculate construction (DOB issued a violation for the construction of the third story in 2002, but somehow missed the fourth, fifth and sixth). There is no certificate of occupancy (so technically, even Go Yoga is in there illegally).

What else, exactly, would you have the city do? Other than the fact that a lot of people are out of their (very expensive) home, what is horrible about this whole episode is the fact that the city didn’t do something about it eight years ago.