A child plays with a lighter in a three-story apartment building in Philadelphia resulting in a fire that kills twelve people, mostly children. A malfunctioning hallway door in a Bronx high-rise apartment building leads to the death of seventeen people, including eight children – all within one week. Both tragedies housed low-income people. Both speak to the need for compliance with coded housing safety measures.
In the case of the Bronx high-rise building a self-closing door malfunctioned, filling a staircase with rapidly spreading suffocating smoke. The building had no fire escapes and residents reported that the building had door problems for years. They also reported persistent heat and fire safety issues, including fire alarms that no one actually paid attention to because “they rang at all hours of the day.”
In 2018 a fire in a residential building in the Bronx killed another dozen people. At the time, Rep. Richie Torres (D-NY) was a Bronx City Council member. He co-sponsored a bill that mandated all residential buildings in the Bronx have self-closing doors by the middle of last year. Now he has announced a federal, state, and local task force to examine residential building fire safety hazards. “We have to ensure that the housing stock is brought to the 21st century when it comes to fire safety, and the Bronx is no stranger to deadly fire,” he told the local press.
According to the press report, the Bronx building, built in 1972 under New York’s affordable housing program, only had sprinklers in the basement because, as a spokesperson for the owners of the building said, “its ceilings and floors are poured concrete and its fire doors are sufficient to make the building qualify as “non-combustible.” It’s worth noting that the current building owners include the son of a for-profit affordable housing developer.
Safe, affordable housing is a critical issue that gets little attention until there is a tragedy. Profit over people is usually the name of the game among developers and building owners, and politicians often look the other way or just don’t find time to address the urgent problems inherent in housing for low-income residents. Those problems often create health as well as safety issues, yet they remain ignored or skirted around because they are part of a complex, failing infrastructure too long denied, not only because of the expense of ensuring safety, but because building tenants at risk are not a high priority group for many building owners or politicians.
Sometimes it’s a matter of benign neglect on the part of landlords, but more often than not in large cities like New York, corruption fuels code breaking. And no landlords are more corrupt than so-called “slum landlords” whose neglect is criminal.
Take, for example, Jared Kushner, whose abuse of tenants was documented in a film by Alex Gibney called “Dirty Money,” in which one person interviewed called Kushner a “tier one predator.” According to the documentary, Kushner’s properties “have received hundreds of health code violations, including the presence of lead paint, lung carcinogens, and fire safety hazards.” In many documented cases, “the New York City Housing authority had issued violations but never followed up on collecting fine payments” nor had they checked to see if Kushner’s company actually fixed any dangerous living conditions.
Not all landlords rise to the level of Kushner’s abuse, but there are enough bad players that one guy’s mission in life is to keep landlords out of trouble. He calls himself “the real estate solutions guy” on his website which warns building owners about twelve common code enforcement violations. They include missing or inoperable smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, plumbing, heating, and electrical deficiencies, insufficient ventilation and rodents and infestations. Some cities, he adds, separate priority and non-priority violations. On his list of non-priorities? Missing or non-functioning smoke detectors.
Jessie Singer, in her forthcoming book There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise in Injury and Disaster – Who Profits and Who Pays the Price, points out that “the term ‘accident’ itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators,” her publisher, Simon and Schuster, says, adding “As the rate of [all] accidental death skyrockets in America, the poor and people of color end up bearing the brunt of the violence and blame, while the powerful use the excuse of the ‘accident’ to avoid consequences for their actions.”
That insight gets to the heart of the matter when it comes not only to building codes and fire safety but to the fundamental human right to safe, adequate shelter, as expressed in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25, which begins with these words: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing …”
As Jessie Singer said on an Instagram post following the Bronx tragedy, “Seventeen people in the Bronx died in a fire for the same reason that many Americans die in a house fire in 2022, because the only housing accessible to them is housing that is unsafe.”
In 2022, that is not only a human tragedy. It is a national disgrace.