Zachary Groz photo
LCI's Brennan: Looking for tools to assess mold's impact.
Daniella Herget has lived in New Haven her entire adult life and loves the city, but now she’s seriously considering leaving for good.
Every apartment she’s lived in, she said, has had the same issues: poor conditions that exacerbate her asthma, and landlords who refuse to repair them.
“Landlords in New Haven take advantage of the poor because we can’t afford anywhere else,” she said at an asthma-focused City Hall hearing on Thursday night, “and they take advantage of us being afraid because we aren’t listened to and then the landlords retaliate.”
She’s tried working with pro bono attorneys, but her current housing situation, she said, is unlivable. Construction on her unit in the Edgewood neighborhood was interrupted by a stop work order and the place was left in disarray. Lead dust now hangs in the air. Mold spores are growing all over. And that “toxic environment” has made it harder and harder for Herget to breathe.
Although pollution and poor air quality are often the sources attributed to asthma attacks, Herget said, “a lot of the exposure is coming from our homes.”
That seemed to be the consensus at an informational hearing held by the Board of Alders’ Health and Human Services Committee on “asthma and related public health challenges” on Thursday. The meeting took place in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall. Herget was one of five members of the public to testify on the issue.
In her testimony, Laura Chen, a pediatric pulmonologist at Yale New Haven Health (YNHH), painted a picture of the broader public health problem in the city. “Each year, I continue to take care of children who have asthma attacks, require strong medications like oral steroids, or even hospitalization, despite being on the maximum amount of medication therapies,” she said.
“Many of these families tell me they have mold lining their ceilings or in their bathrooms, or even worse standing water from flooding that hasn’t been addressed in weeks.”
New Haven runs a “Healthy Homes” program to subsidize repairs for landlords who qualify for assistance, but, Chen said, the “rate of access is low.” To try to improve the situation, she’s been partnering with primary care pediatricians employed by Yale University and working at Fair Haven Health, the pediatric-focused medical-legal partnership at YNHH, and the Hispanic Federation. With support from the Community Health Equity Accelerator at Yale School of Medicine, the team will launch a clinical pathway at the hospital focused on “asthma advocacy and social determinants of health.”
Before the public testimony on Thursday, the committee alders heard from city officials about the work their agencies have been doing to address asthma in New Haven.
City Health Director Maritza Bond, Livable City Initiative Executive (LCI) Executive Director Liam Brennan, and Climate and Sustainability Executive Director Steve Winter all testified.
Bond came with a PowerPoint presentation on statistics related to asthma in New Haven, which painted a dramatic picture of the problem in the city, though the data was six to ten years old, aside from a screenshot of 12-hour air quality monitoring statistics taken by the 11 PurpleAir Flex sensors stationed around the city.
In 2018, the New Haven metropolitan area ranked seventh in the nation in “asthma prevalence” according to a report by the Allergy Foundation of America. In 2017, the city had an asthma hospitalization rate of 75 per 10,000 residents, in a state where the average is 14 per 10,000, according to a study by the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership’s Asthma Working Group.
The city also has some of the oldest housing stock in the country, which ups the risk of chemical exposure, excessive moisture, and disrepair. In 2018, according to the Justice Partnership, 51 percent of New Haven’s housing stock was built before 1940, compared to the national average, which is 13 percent, and 72 percent of units were rented that year, compared to the national average of 36 percent.
According to LCI’s Brennan, when city inspectors go into these homes to check on derelict conditions, they also have no available regulatory or legal standard for assessing what concentration of mold poses a health risk. “Each individual interacts with the different contaminants differently, so it affects some people more than others,” he said.
Downtown/East Rock Alder Eli Sabin, the committee’s chair, and Board of Alders Majority Leader Richard Furlow, who sits on the committee, told the Independent after the hearing that the committee plans to set up a related working group in the coming weeks. As part of that working group, they will be collaborating with city agencies to gather more current data and deliberating on a course of action to tackle asthma in the city.
Herget: “A lot of the exposure is coming from our homes.”