Smokin’ them out

Apartment landlords move to ban smoking from buildings • Smokers defend last haven; others applaud health benefits

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Mar 12, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (30 Reader comments)

Steve Goldberger, a resident of the Housing Authority of Portland’s Medallion apartments in Northwest Portland, is a two-pack-a-day smoker. He calls the housing authority’s non-smoking rule “the new communist rule” and says he won’t comply.

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Bobby Weinstock, housing consultant at Northwest Pilot Project, is worried about smokers.

Now, that in itself is a twist, because Weinstock, who works for a nonprofit that helps homeless and poor seniors find housing, doesn’t smoke, and he won’t let people smoke in his own apartment.

But faced with recent developments in Portland’s housing scene, Weinstock says he’s concerned about the civil rights of smokers. “If you can’t afford to buy a condo or your own house, it’s going to be very difficult to smoke in your home,” he says.

Few on the Portland housing scene dispute Weinstock’s assessment.

A year ago, Guardian Management, the largest manager of private apartments in Portland, made its nearly 70 buildings containing about 6,000 apartments smoke-free. Tenants cannot smoke in their apartments, and they cannot smoke in the hallways.

Last month, the Housing Authority of Portland began sending out notices to tenants announcing all its buildings, containing more than 6,200 apartments, will be going smoke-free. Tenants who need to smoke will have to make their way outside buildings to designated smoking areas, rain or shine.

The housing authority’s decision to go smokeless puts Portland at the head of the national smoke-free housing movement. No housing authority in a city the size of Portland has gone that route yet, though national experts say they have no doubt many will. And experts say more and more private apartment buildings are going to follow Guardian’s lead.

The housing authority’s new rules will take effect in August for its public housing buildings, which serve people with little income, and will be phased in more gradually for its affordable housing buildings, which offer subsidized rent for tenants making less than the city’s median income.

But Weinstock is looking beyond just later this year. “I foresee a day not too far down the road where smokers who are poor will not have an option to smoke in their rooms,” he says.

Housing authority officials say they have been talking about going smoke-free for a year and a half. About one in three tenants in the housing authority’s 115 apartment buildings smokes.

“We know this will be difficult for some folks,” says Katie Such, deputy executive director of the housing authority.

But faced with a continuing avalanche of scientific data about the dangers of secondhand smoke, Such says the new policy makes sense.

For years, housing officials say, they’ve been fielding complaints about smoke filtering into the apartments of nonsmokers. Just three weeks ago, a smoldering cigarette on a couch in the Lexington Court, a housing authority building in Southeast Portland, caused a fire that destroyed an apartment, causing $80,000 in damages.

Smoking is the leading cause of home fire deaths in the United States, according to the federal Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.

In addition, according to Rodger Moore, assistant director of public housing for the Housing Authority of Portland, apartment buildings are not just residences; they also serve as workplaces for resident managers and cleaning crews, exposing those people to smoke no other Oregon workers have to deal with.

“Some of our employees can walk into an apartment and actually write their name on a wall from the nicotine,” Moore says.

But Moore knows there will be objections to the new smoke-free rules. And the objections have begun, surprisingly enough, with city housing officials.

Andy Miller, interim executive director of Portland’s Bureau of Housing and Community Development, is, like Weinstock, worried about what the new rules do to the city’s 10-year plan to end homelessness.

For the last four years, the city’s plan has focused on what it calls a “housing first” philosophy. The policy has meant that rather than insist the homeless conform to good tenant behavior before they can stay in subsidized housing, housing is used to stabilize their lives so they can then address problems such as substance abuse.

Many of the homeless – having battled drug addiction, alcoholism and mental illness – smoke. The city wants those people housed.

“The last thing we want to do is create barriers to people entering affordable housing,” Miller says.

Miller would like to see the housing authority consider continuing to allow smoking in some of its buildings, or in parts of some buildings.

That’s a sentiment shared by what appears to be a majority of the tenants at the Medallion, a housing authority public housing building in Northwest Portland, where residents are either disabled or seniors.

Steve Goldberger, a two-pack-a-day smoker, calls the housing authority’s lease change “the new communist rule.” He doesn’t intend to quit smoking come August, and he doesn’t think most of the residents are going to make their way to a designated outdoor smoking area in winter. He says the housing authority will have to evict him, if it comes to that.

“I will fight to my last breath with this,” says the 53-year-old Goldberger. “I don’t feel they have a right to come into my home and tell me I can’t smoke with the door closed because somebody in the building says they don’t like it. I don’t like the smell of fried food. Am I going to say you can’t burn incense or cook fried food because I don’t like the smell of it?”

Many of the residents surveyed said at the least, they would have liked the housing authority to phase in its smoke-free policy slowly, by changing over apartments as smokers move out.

“The people that already live here that smoke were rented these apartments with the understanding we could smoke in our apartments,” says Goldberger.

Kamala Pati, a smoker for 30 years, says she’s been wanting to quit cigarettes for over a year and figures the new policy at the Medallion just might give her the impetus she needs.

Pati echoed sentiments from a number of the building’s smokers who themselves don’t like what smoke does to their apartments. She and others say they only smoke outside, on the walkways that front all the building’s units. In fact, a number of nonsmokers in the building say their greatest objection isn’t to people smoking in their apartments, but on the walkway outside. With the new rules, smoking on the walkways will also be out of bounds.

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