Federal government wants to ban smoking in public housing

“Tenants in public housing pay”.

The public will be able to comment on the proposed rule change for 60 days.

“My apartment desperately needs a paint job”, said Higgs, 60.

“I think it is completely bogus”, said Devante Barrett, a 24-year-old non-smoker who lives in the Elliot-Chelsea Houses in Manhattan’s gritty Chelsea neighborhood.

Julian Castro, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and a rising star in the Democratic party, introduced the measure as a cost-cutting, healthy initiative. The rule would ban lit tobacco products in all residences, indoor common areas and administrative offices. They wondered how smoking suddenly became a priority given the deteriorating condition of numerous public housing complexes and the persistent financial struggles of the NY City Housing Authority. “Inside your house you should be free”.

If government is going to ban smoking in NYCHA projects, let government also prohibit smoking in all multi-family residential buildings in the city.

But there’s an easy solution to that: Indoor smoking should be banned everywhere – inside bars, restaurants, your home. “Yeah, it smells like they smoked in there, but can I prove it?” “It gets in your clothes; it gets in your furniture”. Earlier this year, the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) banned smoking in all PHA units, becoming the largest city in the country so far to do so.

“People who can afford it choose a smoke-free unit. If I want to come out and sit in the esplanade and enjoy it, I don’t have to worry about smelling cigar or cigarette smoke”, Griffin said.

Individual housing authorities can be as restrictive as they want, extending the prohibition to areas near playgrounds, for instance, or making their entire grounds smoke-free, officials said.

How will the government enforce such a wide-reaching possible regulation as the one proposed Thursday, smokers and non-smokers alike asked. Hipolito said he’s happy he quit so he won’t have to worry about violating the new smoking ban.

She said that while she doesn’t tolerate smoking around her kid, “in the common areas there should be definite designated areas” for smokers. “That would be messed up”. “You don’t know what’s going on in people’s apartments”.

HANH has gotten a start on a smoke-free policy by banning smoking at one development, Dixwell’s Monterey Place, this August. “I don’t”, said 21-year-old Aaron Castaneda, who grew up in the warren of two-story apartments built during World War II and now hemmed in by railroad tracks and warehouses.