Nydia Canales has stuffed plastic bags into every crack around her door, caulked every gap in her walls, even put cling film over her light switches. She still can’t escape the cigarette smoke that filters into her apartment, triggering an allergic reaction that wakes her up coughing every night.
Since moving into the Bella Vista high-rise elderly housing complex on the east end of town in January, Canales has been waging a losing battle against second-hand smoke. A lifelong New Havener, Canales is now considering moving as far as Portsmouth, N.H., where the housing authority has a smoke-free policy.
With the help of the New Haven Health Department, Canales has been released from her lease at Bella Vista — where tenants can smoke — due to “extenuating circumstances.” But the 50-year-old said she can’t find an apartment that will take her federal Section 8 rent-subsidy voucher in a neighborhood she feels safe in.
“This is a very hard place to live for a non-smoker,” Canales said. There should be a warning for new tenants: Not only is Bella Vista not smoke-free, it’s actually smoke-full, she said.
Meanwhile, the health department is working with New Haven property owners and managers to increase the amount of smoke-free housing in town, said Brooke Logan, the department’s programs director. She said the city is surveying property owners and looking to find ones interested in pursuing smoke-free policies.
The move comes amid a national trend toward public housing authorities adopting no-smoking rules. New Haven’s authority does not have such a policy.
William Johnson, executive director of operations for Bella Vista, said was “not free to comment” about Canales’ particular situation, just as he would not comment about any other individual tenant. He said Bella Vista’s policy is to allow people to smoke in their own apartments.
Johnson said the complex is about to implement new rules that would prevent cigarette smoking within 25 feet of all building entrances and exits.
He said complaints about indoor secondhand smoke have not been a significant problem for the housing complex. “Occasionally you have people sensitive to different types of cooking smells,” he said. In those cases, the management has installed hood fans over stoves, Johnson said.
But with high-rise buildings that comprise several hundred apartments, “there’s going to be different scents that travel through the building,” he said.
On Friday, before Canales opened her 15th floor Bella Vista apartment to a visitor, the sound of her removing the masking tape from around the doorframe could be heard in the hallway. The tape is just one layer in the array of defenses Canales has erected against smoke since moving into the apartment on Jan. 3.
Canales, who has been on disability for years, said she first moved to Bella Vista because she had heard it’s quiet. The first night she slept in her new apartment, she noticed the smell.
“It was so strong. It was like cigars. I said, ‘What is this?’” she recalled.
She managed to fall asleep the first night. Then second-hand smoke from other apartments and even from outside started triggering her allergies.
“I’m allergic to lots of things,” she said. “Almost everything. Smoke, dust, mold, trees.”
She had thought the smoke would die down at night as people stopped smoking and went to bed. But it didn’t. “It seemed like it never stopped.”
The smoke triggered post-nasal drip, which caused phlegm to enter her trachea, Canales said. Soon she was waking up two or three times a night, coughing.
She started working on sealing all entry points, starting with the door to the hallway. She put a draft-blocker under the door and called maintenance to help straighten her door so there wouldn’t be a gap at the top.
“It still came through,” she said.
Canales stepped up her defenses: towels, a weather-proofing curtain. Now she stuffs plastic bags into the cracks with a butter knife, and seals it over with masking tape. She’s done the same thing to a door out onto the apartment’s balcony.
She contacted the building management. “They don’t get involved, they said,” Canales recalled.
Canales continued her campaign. She caulked around all the pipes in the closet and under the bathroom sink — anywhere where a gap in the wall might allow smoke to enter. She even put freezer-film over the light fixtures and the fuse box.
“It comes in through the walls,” she said.
She has the bathroom fan on all the time with another fan set up to blow air towards the vent.
“I get desperate. I get so desperate,” Canales said. She said she realizes that some of her measures are probably doing nothing but making her feel better mentally. “If I don’t do anything, I feel worse.”
Canales contacted the New Haven Health Department in January. She and Logan had a meeting with Johnson, the manager of the Bella Vista leasing office. In a Feb. 21 letter, he agreed to let Canales out of her lease and return her security deposit so that she can move out.
But Canales said she hasn’t been able to find another Section 8 apartment in a neighborhood she’d feel safe in. Meanwhile, her belongings are still in boxes around the Bella Vista apartment. “I can’t stay here.”
She said she doesn’t understand how her neighbors can live with the smoke. “Some people love their cigarettes like they love their life,” she said. “They don’t have the idea of what fresh air is.”
She picked up an unopened letter from the Portsmouth housing authority. She had found online that that town has smoke-free public housing and sent away for information. But she was still too afraid to open the letter; “that’s my last resort.” She said she’s never lived anywhere but New Haven.
Alderwoman Barbara Constantinople, who lives in Bella Vista’s D building, said she supports the new policy limiting smoking by entrances to buildings, out of respect to people on oxygen. She remembers when she moved in to Bella Vista nine years ago, people could smoke in the hallways. No longer.
However, Constantinople disagreed with the Portsmouth policy. She called it unfair to renters.
“I still smoke in my apartment. I have a cigarette lit right now. There’s no problem” with that, she said. “People pay their rent. People live in that apartment. That’s their home. People should have the right to do what they want in their apartment.”