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My grandfather and his brother bought two identical houses in the 1940s and they were always as long as I can remember (I was born in 1962) occupied by two families, ours upstairs and the other in the apt downstairs. We always paid taxes as a two family house. So everything was fine for sixty years until my grandmother who is 92 years old and getting to be a bad judge of character lately rented the apartment downstairs to bad tenants who refused to pay rent and damaged the apartment and called the building dept. and everyone else they could think of to create trouble. Anyhow, the building dept. discovered that the C of O on the house was for one family (It seems that my grandfathers brother changed the C of O on his identical next door house in the 1950s but for some reason my grandfather did not) and they sent my grandmother violation notices for illegal construction etc… She was recovering from a broken hip when the letters arrived so she missed the court dates and now the violations have climbed into potentially $15,000 worth of fines. I am her grandson and finally became aware of the issue and have started the process of seeing what can be done… I went to an architect who started to tell me that he “might” be able to halve the fine but that he would need to redo the blueprints and assuming the downstairs apartment is up to code he will “only” charge me between a low of $8,500 to a high of $15,000 to do the job. I was not happy with him and did not understand much of what he was saying. I may be naive but I feel it is very unfair of the city to hit my grandmother with such huge expenses for something pre-existing for over half a century. She has a hard enough time paying her taxes from the little money she gets. I don’t know how we will raise the money for all this. Anyhow, does anyone at least know a competent and honest architect in Brooklyn who can solve this problem economically? Do I need a facilitator or will an architect be able to do everything? Sorry if I am still in the learning phase but I am very confused and inexperienced about all this.