City Raids Williamsburg Loft Divided Into 8 Tiny AirBnB Rooms

Photo via Booking.com

Story has been updated with additional info from the Mayor’s Office.

EAST WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN — The jig is up for Karlsson Guesthouse, an eight-room hotel carved from a single loft in an industrial building at 210 Cook St., near Evergreen and Flushing avenues.

Officers with the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement busted into the loft while guests were still there last week and kicked everyone out, according to the young man who built and now runs the place. (The young man did not wish to reveal his name for this story. However, he did say he was in his early 20s and was living in one of the rooms himself — until the raid.)

City records show the mayor’s inspectors originally tried to enter the loft at 210 Cook last Monday, on a complaint from the Department of Buildings, but were “denied access” by a man at the entrance.

So they returned the next day with a “partial vacate order,” the records show, citing “eight furnished rooms exceeding occupancy load, no natural light and ventilation.”

The code violations found inside the building were “egregious,” according to Christian Klossner, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement.

Klossner said City Hall recently gave his office additional resources to “increase and accelerate” investigations such as the one at 210 Cook.

Beds at Karlsson Guesthouse are listed as low as $34 on Kayak and $29 on Booking.com — and were previously listed at $24 on AirBnB, but have since been pulled from the website.

AirBnb sent the following statement to Patch in response to the raid.

“Nothing is more important than the safety of our guests and while these situations are incredibly rare, we take them very seriously, and are committed to continuing to identity and remove bad actors from our platform. We have no tolerance for illegal hotels and have removed these hosts from our platform. Our team is rebooking these guests to ensure they can enjoy the rest of their time in New York.”

The guesthouse founder said he had been making enough money off the listing to survive, but that it was really “more of a non-profit.”

“They’re doing a really bad thing for the city, for the people,” he said of NYC officials. “For people who are ambitious and want to do something valuable for society, who want to create jobs and create good emotions for an affordable price.”

Photos of the DIY hotel at 210 Cook show bunk beds artfully arranged to fit four to a room. The walls of the units are covered in brightly colored posters, shelves and other doodads.

Guests had access to two shared bathrooms, a shared kitchen and a shared living room, according to online listings.

“Absolutely gorgeous loft guesthouse is full of great energy and homelike atmosphere, where you can feel true comfort,” reads the listing on Booking.com. “It’s a great place to stay for young and modern people, who love to safe money and enjoy meeting new friends and getting valuable connections.”

“There was so much work and money put into this,” the guesthouse founder told Patch. “This is just ridiculous, honestly.”

He called the city raid “a very upsetting thing” and said officials should instead be targeting “flophouses with bedbugs.”

The New York Daily News apparently busted into 210 Cook, too, and had a look around. “Guests would punch a code into a keypad at the door to get into the space, which was divided into cubbyholes marked 1 through 8,” the newspaper reported.

A phone number listed online for the building owner, Castal Baljac Inc, went unanswered Monday afternoon.

Castal Baljac’s CEO, Jacob Hoffman, has been fined $7,800 by the city for a laundry list of alleged violations at 210 Cook, including “work without a permit,” “failure to maintain building in code compliant manner, “occupancy contrary to that allowed by the Certificate of Occupancy or Building Department records,” “failure to provide unobstructed exit passageway” and other miscellaneous violations.