They can’t sit on their balcony because other people above or below them are smoking. “My gas hasn’t worked for a month”.
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“Having to deal with the smoke smell, and all that”.
Luis Torres smokes a cigarette outside the NY City Housing Authority’s Chelsea-Elliot Houses where he lives, Thursday, November 12, 2015, in NY.
The ban, by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), would also require that common areas and administrative offices on public housing property be smoke-free. But according to HUD, public-housing residents can not smoke marijuana inside-even though it’s illegal under D.C. law for them to smoke pot outside.
This rule will protect the health of public housing residents, including many children, elderly and people with disabilities who are particularly susceptible to the health effects of secondhand smoke. Now, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to extend the ban to apartments in public housing. About 600 housing authorities – comprising about 200,000 households – already ban smoking indoors, and at least two – in Boulder, Colorado, and Springfield, MA – this year added e-cigarettes to their policies, she notes.
In one sense, the case for a federal smoking ban in public housing is plain: Smoking is bad, and smoking bans in public places are good for the public. “Once you close the door, that’s your home”, she said.
“To truly realize the potential health benefits of smoke-free public housing policies, residents who want to quit must have access to affordable and comprehensive (smoking) cessation services through private insurance, Medicaid or Medicare”, Hansen said.
In addition, secondhand smoke causes hundreds of newborns to die each year from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, the surgeon general estimates. Smoking also would be prohibited outdoors within 25 feet of housing and administrative buildings. But one sidebar concern makes me wonder. “It gets in your clothes; it gets in your furniture”.
At Eastview Terrace in Fair Haven Heights, Antoinette Ferris and her brother were visiting their mom, a smoker who has lived there for three years. Under a pilot program supported by NYCHA, 85 percent of 159 apartments signed a pledge to “keeping my house smoke-free”.
The policy will probably become part of each lease agreement, and enforcement will depend largely on complaints by other residents, said Ed Cabrera, a HUD spokesman in San Francisco. Angela Todd visits her family here often.
Smoking kills people. ‘Nuff said.
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Inside, both smokers and nonsmokers coexist. And it’s hard to evict people from a facility created specifically to house people who don’t have anywhere else to go.
