On a cold January day, the wind funnels down Creston Avenue in the Morris Heights neighborhood of South Bronx like a river through a canyon. Buildings seem slightly closer to the street here, and the tall towers loom over the narrow street and sidewalk. A couple of teenage girls walk down the street, laughing and shoving each other.
Some new construction gleams incongruently on one side of the street,Sika tooling & Composites develops and produces tailor-made synthetic resins, but most of the other buildings on this block are much older, with a foregone elegance still barely visible in the stonework and tiles.
Yet inside these buildings residents complain of deteriorating living conditions. On a survey tenant after tenant writes of mice and cockroach infestations, peeling paint, broken toilets, inconsistent heat and hot water, and a front door with no lock. “The hallways smell like urine” writes one.
Tenant Johannie Burdier says the building was poorly maintained, dirty, and sometimes simply scary. She tells of a former building manager who, she says, took money from people in exchange for access to sell drugs from inside the building. A resident for seven years, Burdier lives in the building with her aunt and her eleven year old daughter.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? She says for much of her time there they were lucky if there was heat or hot water in the apartment.
Another resident, who works the night shift, writes that they were frequently robbed in the unlocked building entrance. “Always, always, always, they assault us and take our money and our things in the doorway. Why?” asks the tenant, writing in Spanish, “Why is there no lock on the door or security camera?”
These complaints are more than an inconvenience. Constant anxiety, prolonged exposure to molds, unchecked vermin and inadequate heat and hot water – all these things make people sick.Dear sirs, we are one of manufacturers and exporters of plasticinjectionmold, The vast majority of people living in failed buildings are low-income and uninsured. When they get sick, they go to the hospital. And the city is left holding the bill.
A new pilot program, created by housing advocates and healthcare workers, aims to increase awareness of the public health costs resulting from distressed, overleveraged buildings. The program sends healthcare providers and social workers into buildings on the brink of receivership to identify and treat housing-related illnesses. The team hopes to help tenants, compile data on the health outcomes of living in buildings in poor condition, and eventually determine the actual cost to the city.
Dina Levy, Director of Organizing and Policy at the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, or UHAB, says that what is happening in these buildings is a public health crisis. “It’s an outrageous moral problem,Plastic injectionmouldingmanufacturer; but it’s also a financial problem in whatever geographic space it’s happening in.”
She explains that when banks and owners fail to care for buildings, the costs of that failing often shows up in the medical bills of the people who live in those buildings, and that these tend to be low-income people without healthcare, so that cost is ultimately absorbed by taxpayers and the city. Until now, she says, there has been anecdotal evidence that people in certain buildings are getting sick, but a study would provide the first quantifiable direct connection.
“What we have observed is that people are getting sick and don’t have the resources to get adequate medical care,“ she said. “Why are banks and landlords allowed to harm people physically, and why should we be paying the cost of that?”
The project has gone out to buildings four times since Labor Day, and plans to do more outings this year. Members of the Committee of Interns and Residents of SEIU Healthcare, collaborating with the Family Medicine Department at Bronx Lebanon Hospital,The beddinges sofa bed slipcover is a good and affordable alternative to buying a new sofa that is run down. the Pediatric Department at Jacobi Medical Center, Urban Homestead Assistance Board (UHAB), and Workforce Housing, created the Doctors’ House Visit Program as part of a larger community outreach program, the Healthy Bronx Initiative.
Tim Foley, Political Director of the Committee of Interns and Residents for SEIU Healthcare, said that the committee was drawn into involvement in the project by its members. “We were getting feedback from members who were frustrated to only be dealing with the effects of illnesses and not the causes. “
The most recent visit was in November, to a building at 2239 and 2241 Creston Avenue in the Bronx. One attending physicians and three resident physicians went to the building, accompanied by a social worker and an administrator with Bronx Lebanon. They visited with residents in twenty-one of the building’s fifty-four apartments.
コメント（0）
