NYCHA tenant Trinita Lee thought she’d finally caught a break the night in October 2012 when Hurricane Sandy slammed into her Coney Island development.
She and her six children had lived for years with sickening black mold in their Gravesend Houses apartment — a nightmare for her children, ages 6 to 19, all of whom are asthmatic.
She’d fought for years with NYCHA to clean it up, and says beyond quick fixes — painting over the problem — the mold festered and her children suffered.
So when Sandy struck, she was delighted to learn she’d be getting a new apartment at the optimistically named Hope Gardens in Bushwick.
But today she and her children are once again facing their old problem — black mold crawling across her bathroom ceiling.
Five of her children need a nebulizer to breathe properly; the sixth uses an inhaler. Her severely asthmatic daughter, Kris, 16, spent more time in emergency rooms as a toddler than most people do in a lifetime.
“It’s depressing,” Lee, 41, said as she gestured toward the festering bathroom ceiling. “I’m concerned about the health of my children.”
Lee’s ordeal is emblematic of what medical professionals say is growing evidence that links household mold to serious respiratory woes, including asthma.
Mold has been a serious issue in thousands of NYCHA’s 178,000 aging apartments for years, but a year ago this week the authority signed a consent decree promising to aggressively clean it up.
The decree, overseen by a federal judge, settled a lawsuit brought by asthma sufferers under the Americans With Disabilities Act.
But an investigation by the Daily News and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s NY City News Service revealed that NYCHA’s promises have so far largely fallen flat.
NYCHA is struggling to address systemic roof and pipe leaks in its aging 334 developments — giving mold the moisture it needs to thrive.
The ramifications for tenants and their children with asthma are ominous indeed, experts say.
“It’s important for NYCHA to recognize that mold is an important trigger of respiratory problems,” said Matthew Perzanowski, associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “In low-income populations, it’s important to intervene early to remove mold. Doing so is imperative to children’s health.
“Though we don’t yet understand the mechanisms of asthma development, it is clearly related to mold,” Perzanowski said. “Longtime exposure could lead to long-term problems in your lungs.”
Sister Susanne LaChappelle, a nurse who’s been treating children with respiratory problems since 1999, said repairs that address the root of the problem — moisture behind the wall or ceiling — are the best medicine.
But tenants say NYCHA often chooses the quick fix over lasting repairs, and a PowerPoint presentation the authority offers to tenants suggests that they clean mold with bleach spray and a scrub brush, and prevent further problems by “keeping the area dry.”
Experts say this is a stopgap approach.
Lee, though, has had enough.
She recently joined a class-action lawsuit organized by the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project aimed at forcing NYCHA to act.
“It’s the obligation of their landlord, in this case NYCHA, to fix these problems,” said Leah Goodridge, an attorney representing Lee and 35 other tenants at Hope Gardens. “They have not lived up to their end of the bargain.”
This story was reported in conjunction with the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s NYCity News Service as part of the Stop the Mold project, funded in part by the first Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education. Contributors include Allegra Abramo, Natalie Abruzzo, Julia Alsop, Frank Green, Gwynne Hogan, Ross Keith, Roxanne Scott, Melisa Stumpf and Maria Villasenor.
