‘Rec Room’ Is the New Way to Expand an Apartment

Selling real estate in New York has long involved its own sort of code. “Quiet” means dark, back-of-the-building; “cozy” means small; and “flexible” means “not really,” as in the “flex 1BR” that is actually a studio with a nook. But as developers seek to wring every last bit of space out of their projects, another term has cropped up more and more: “rec room,” meaning an underground space that is not legally a bedroom, although many people use it that way.

 

Not to be confused with common spaces open to all residents in apartment buildings, these are finished, underground rooms in ground-floor dwellings that the city does not consider habitable space. Sometimes they are carved out of the cellars of old brownstones, sometimes they are excavated from deep in the ground of new condominiums, but they often come with a garden or an patio and add valuable square footage at a discount.

 

At a new condo at 174 Jackson Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for example, Grand Street Development created two first-floor duplexes with high-ceilinged rec rooms below, offering access to private gardens. The larger of the two, a 1,245-square-foot one-bedroom, is on the market for $749,000. On the fourth floor, an 832-square-foot two-bedroom duplex with a terrace is on the market for $726,000, a comparable price but about $270 more per square foot.

 

“You get the most bang for your buck with these kinds of apartments,” said David Maundrell, president of Aptsandlofts.com, which is marketing the property on Jackson Street. “The city considers it uninhabitable space, but there are different ways and different approaches developers have taken to make the space quite nice.” At 174 Jackson, for instance, the lower level has eight-and-a-half-foot ceilings, so it does not feel like a stereotypical basement lair.

 

In addition, Mr. Maundrell said, the space does not count against the overall floor area limit for a project and can allow developers to construct buildings with greater square footage.

 

Clifford Finn, director of new development marketing at Citi Habitats, said that the rec room could make a ground-floor apartment, which is often more difficult to sell, more desirable. “It’s one thing when you’re in a brownstone and someone wants the first floor because it has the garden in the back — that’s O.K.,” he said. “But when you’re in a high-rise-type building, being on the first floor for some people is a stigma, and it’s harder to get premiums for first-floor apartments. So anything you can do to increase their marketability, even if it means giving them the rec room with it, it suddenly becomes a real value play for someone.”

 

Because these spaces are not legally intended for sleeping, they can have bathrooms no larger than 5 feet by 5 feet, and cannot have a shower or a tub, but many developers — even those who have not put in a bathroom at all — install plumbing sufficient for a full bathroom in case a resident wants to put one in later. Mr. Maundrell recalled a buyer in a new development who put a shower into her half-bath, but was required to remove it when Buildings Department inspectors, examining the building to renew its temporary certificate of occupancy, discovered it.

 

“People play with fire when they do that,” Mr. Maundrell said. “I tell people, what you choose to do with the space is up to you, but what I’m selling you is a one-bedroom apartment that has a recreation space.”

 

In New York, square footage is square footage, whatever purpose it may ultimately serve — bedroom, home office, den, storage, even, yes, recreation. The Buildings Department calls these spaces, which are 50 percent or more below grade, accessory, on the theory that they are add-ons to the larger residential space upstairs, said Shahn Andersen, a developer who is active in converting Brooklyn brownstones to condos. Mr. Andersen carved a rec room out of half of the cellar for the garden apartment at 415 Clermont Avenue in Fort Greene, listed at $469,000 through Corcoran.

 

The department generally frowns upon making accessory space larger than the main living space, Mr. Andersen said. The prohibition on using the space for sleeping, he said, was a vestige of the old tenement law, a corrective to the bad old days when slum landlords would pack as many people as possible into small, boxy rooms, with no consideration for light, air or the ability to get out quickly in a fire.

 

“Disease ran rampant because things would fester and it was unhealthy for everyone,” Mr. Andersen said. “Without proper egress or sprinklers or fire protection, you get incidents like a few years ago in the Bronx,” he said, referring to a fire in 2007 in which a woman and nine children died. At the same time, he said, the law does not necessarily seem to fit every situation.

 

“There are legitimate reasons why the Department of Buildings doesn’t want you packing people into basements,” Mr. Andersen said, “but is it such a crime when you’ve got a two-family and you want to put Grandma down in the basement?”

 

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