The New York Times Real Estate section recently featured an article on an increasingly common feature of the “sharing economy”: communal apartments where the landlord rents out individual rooms rather than the entire apartment. These arrangements, while convenient for some tenants and lucrative for landlords, seemingly violate long-standing City rules against creation of new single-room occupancy units a/k/a “SRO’s.” Any tenant renting a room in such a unit runs the risk of being vacated by the NYC Department of Buildings based on illegal occupancy.
