Illegal rooms prevalent in the city

Rooms converted illegally are common in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Some tenants convert their living rooms into extra bedrooms to rent out for extra money. In other cases, building owners do the conversion, in defiance of building and maintenance codes, to generate more rental income. And sometimes people rent out the use of a mattress in an apartment bedroom, a practice called “hot sheeting” in which several people use a bed at different times of day.