Finding a Home After a Fire: ‘It Feels Like Your Life Is on Pause’

NEW YORK — Gawayne and Kadian Blake emerged from another interview for an apartment, again empty-handed.

It has been almost three months since a fire raged through their Bronx apartment building, killing 13 people, including five of the Blakes’ relatives. It was the deadliest fire in New York City in nearly three decades and it left the Blakes and 29 other families searching for new places to live as they cope with the loss of loved ones and the homes that had held families together.

Outside the rental office, Gawayne Blake opened the car door and pulled out a bouquet of white roses that remained from the funeral and turned toward a trash can. The flowers had turned a pale yellow and were as fragile as parchment.

“Don’t throw those away,” Kadian Blake told him from the sidewalk.

She wanted the flowers pressed, she said, as a keepsake for their new home, whenever they found one.

But that felt a long way off. The family’s search for an apartment they can afford has come up empty. The city’s housing market is painfully tight and rents have been soaring in the Bronx, where they want to remain. With a baby due in May, they are eager to start rebuilding their lives and making a new home.

Fires displace hundreds of New Yorkers every year, and recovery is often slow and difficult. Many of the 30 families, consisting of 64 adults and 23 children, that lost apartments in the Dec. 28 inferno remain in limbo, living in shelters or hotels paid for by the city. Their five-story, rent-stabilized building in the Belmont neighborhood offered rents ranging from $920 to $1,300, and tenants have struggled to find similarly priced apartments in New York City, which has a shortage of affordable housing and one of the highest average rents in the country.

The Blakes are doubly burdened: They are among the tenants who lost loved ones in the fire that also took their home. For them, the hunt for an apartment, important as it is, often feels trivial, overshadowed by grief.

“The only thing we’ve been thinking about has been our loss,” Gawayne Blake said. “We haven’t even thought about ourselves. I feel like it’s not even a reality that they passed away.

“Even though I’ve seen the bodies, I can’t accept it.”

The deadly fire was started by a 3-year-old boy who was playing with a stove in his family’s apartment on the first floor of the building at 2363 Prospect Ave. His mother left the door to the apartment ajar as she fled with the boy and a younger child, creating a draft that fueled the fast-moving flames, fire officials have said.

Among the dead were Karen Stewart-Francis, 37, who was Kadian Blake’s aunt; her daughters, Kylie, 2, and Kelesha, 7; and her niece, Shawntay Young, 19. Firefighters found them huddled in the bathroom of their fifth-floor apartment, dead from smoke inhalation, according to the medical examiner’s office. Stewart-Francis’ husband, Holt Francis, 27, was taken to the hospital in critical condition and died a week later after being taken off life support.

They were all part of a close-knit family that had emigrated from Jamaica. More than a dozen members of the extended clan lived in the century-old building, where they enjoyed gathering for barbecues outside on Saturdays. Gawayne Blake, 34, and Kadian Blake, 32, shared wedding anniversaries and birthdays with the adults. Their 10-year-old son, Jeremiah, considered Kylie and Kalesha his sisters; he gave a eulogy at their funeral.

The search for an apartment in New York can be a consuming, grinding ordeal for almost anyone. But for the Blakes, every failed attempt is another reminder of the event that upended their worlds. Since the fire, the Blakes have crammed into a familiar space: the apartment of Kadian Blake’s mother near Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center, which is a 15-minute car ride from their old neighborhood. Kadian Blake’s two younger brothers also live in the one-bedroom apartment that was converted into a two-bedroom by building a makeshift wooden wall in the living room. They all share one bathroom.

The husband, wife and son all share the same bed. Their clothes, some salvaged, some donated, overflow from suitcases stacked high. Plastic bags stuffed with belongings cover the dining room table. The entranceway and living room are an obstacle course of boxes and plastic tubs.

The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development temporarily accommodates New Yorkers displaced by fires or city-issued orders to vacate apartments. The department’s three shelters, with a total of 225 units for families with children, are full, city officials said. That has left more than 600 displaced families in the 17 hotels the department works with in Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens.

Only 18 of the 30 families displaced by the Bronx fire registered with the city. Of these, nine families remain in temporary emergency housing arranged by the city, five are living with relatives and four have found permanent new homes, according to the housing department.

The Blakes hope to continue living in the Bronx so Jeremiah can remain at his school.

“When we ride out a storm together, you’re stronger for it at the end,” said Kadian Blake's mother, Andrene Paul, greeting her daughter as she returned from the disappointing interview..

That day in late January, the couple had been applying for an apartment with Bronx Pro Group, which manages more than 70 affordable housing buildings in the city. For more than an hour, they sat in a lilac-colored room going over paperwork with a company employee. They were missing their Social Security cards and Jeremiah’s birth certificate. But it would not matter.

They were told they did not qualify for affordable housing. Their income exceeded the maximum income for a family of four — $57,240 — to be eligible. (The couple’s baby, due in mid-May, was taken into account.) Even if the family had qualified, only 2 percent of the 1,975 apartments that Bronx Pro Group owns are vacant, said Samantha Magistro, the company’s managing director of new business.

For those who work in the affordable housing industry, the struggle is evident every time they turn a family away because of availability.

“If I had to go through this process, I would go crazy,” said Jennifer Ryan, a Bronx Pro Group manager.

The Blakes, who left Jamaica in 2004, had paid about $1,020 a month for their third-floor apartment, where they lived for more than six years. The rent allowed them to have certain comforts, as Gawayne Blake puts it. They could afford two cars and occasional trips to visit family in the Caribbean.

But their finances have been strained in the aftermath of the fire.

They spent the better part of January organizing and helping to pay for funeral services in the Bronx, followed by burials in Jamaica, where they stayed for more than a week. They contributed $4,000 toward the funerals, and are paying hundreds of dollars every month to store their salvaged furniture.

They now find themselves in a predicament familiar to many families searching for an apartment: They make too much to qualify for government-subsidized housing, but are hard-pressed to afford a market-rate unit. The listings Kadian Blake has found as she scouts the internet advertise rents ranging from $1,700 to $2,100 a month, and are beyond their reach, she said.

Gawayne Blake recently went back to work as a collector for a private sanitation company. Kadian Blake, a phone operator for the city’s 311 help line, hasn’t clocked in since the fire.

“I’m not ready to go back to work, emotionally,” Blake said. But the couple have depleted their savings, and the financial implications are weighing on the family.

As a result of the stress, Kadian Blake has sought help at the hospital numerous times during her pregnancy. Doctors said the couple’s unborn daughter has a high heart rate and elevated blood pressure. The smell of smoke can trigger anxiety in Gawayne Blake. Still, the fire’s effect on Jeremiah has been starkest.

The night of the fire, Gawayne and Kadian Blake were fast asleep, even as smoke began to fill their apartment and other tenants scrambled down fire escapes. It was Jeremiah who woke them.

“Mommy, it smells like smoke,” he told his mother. The Blakes were the last family to descend a fire escape at the back of the building.

Jeremiah, a fifth-grader, has felt responsible for his parents’ safety ever since, they said. He had a panic attack while at school in late January. He had to be taken out of a classroom so he could call his parents and make sure they were safe.

“We don’t want our child to feel that he needs to protect us,” Gawayne Blake told his wife as they rode in the car.

Jeremiah has told his parents he is afraid to live in an apartment building. He began seeing a psychiatrist last month; so did his parents.

“Sometimes when I’m by myself I have that breakdown, but not in front of Jeremiah,” Gawayne Blake said. Kadian Blake said she sometimes avoids text messages and phone calls for days at a time. She finds solace in the images on the camera memory cards she salvaged from her aunt’s apartment. In one video, she discovered Kylie, the 2-year-old, dancing to Jamaican music in a living room. Holt-Francis had urged her on playfully as he filmed the toddler while his wife was at work.

“I had never seen that side of him,” Kadian Blake said, watching the video on her phone and holding back tears.

On a recent Sunday, the Blakes rested in their temporary apartment.

Gawayne Blake and Jeremiah shared a couch with Kadian Blake’s brother, Michael, and watched television. The Boston Celtics were playing the Cleveland Cavaliers. The father and son exchanged their usual banter, jokingly calling each other “punks.” Gawayne looked up a slime recipe for Jeremiah’s science project.

It had been several weeks since they last received apartment leads from the city’s housing department, and Kadian Blake had become resigned to giving up on the search until after the baby was born. Out of desperation, Gawayne Blake contacted the city to ask about being placed in a shelter. The housing agency told them there was an availability, but Kadian Blake isn’t enthused by the idea.

“I don’t want to be in a shelter, be bringing my kid back from school to a shelter,” she said. “We’re not really homeless, but it definitely puts it into perspective.”

She said she craves a degree of normalcy.

“It feels like your life is on pause,” she said. “It feels like you can’t do anything until you have a roof over your head. You don’t feel grounded.”

On the street outside the apartment, inside the trunk of their car, the white roses from the funeral were still waiting to be pressed.