A Brooklyn woman is so fed up with the conditions in her NYCHA apartment she’s ready to move into a homeless shelter — the day before Thanksgiving.
Tiffany Baptiste, 41, said she and her 10-year-old son have been enduring the putrid stench of sewage in their first floor apartment at the Howard Houses for six weeks, and now — after several visits to her son’s doctor — she’s ready to tap out.
“I moved to these projects two years ago,” said Baptiste, who works construction and is two-months pregnant. “The whole apartment for the last six weeks smelled like straight sewage.”
She moved to the NYCHA complex in March 2017 from a domestic violence shelter in Staten Island, where she had lived since Sept. 2016.
The situation in her new home only recently became unbearable thanks to the nauseating odor in her apartment. A reek of bleach, feces and urine pervades her two-bedroom, $444-a-month flat, which is located above the building’s boiler.
And forget about sitting down to a hearty holiday meal. The foul funk makes everything unappetizing, according to the family.
“From the time we got here, it’s just been back and forth to the hospital,” Baptiste said. “I’m about to go to the shelter in the morning. I just can’t take it.”
Baptiste resorted to storing her and her son’s clothes inside plastic containers so they won’t stink when they leave their neatly-kept apartment. But that isn’t the worst of it. Her autistic son Curtis has been enduring nosebleeds and headaches for months.
“My throat hurts,” Curtis, who is asthmatic, told the Daily News Tuesday. His only respite has been staying with his great-grandmother in Bedford Stuyvesant and crashing at his uncle’s place.
But there’s no escaping the smell at school, where his classmates tease him mercilessly about the stench that travels with him from home — despite all Baptiste’s efforts to contain the noxious odors.
“It kind of felt traumatizing, the fact that my home life had to affect my outside life,” he said.
His mom hopes two air-quality reports from city Health Department officials documenting the constant “foul odors” will help her win a transfer from NYCHA management. But it’s doubtful that will happen right away, so the only other alternative for Baptiste is the shelter system.
The doctors, she said, told her her son has viral syndrome. She blames the apartment, which she called “unlivable.”
A News reporter who visited Tuesday for less than an hour left with clothes reeking from the odor in her unit.
Michael Garfield, director of the Michigan-based Ecology Center, said there’s little doubt Baptiste and her son are inhaling some type of chemical — and depending on what it is, the effects could be serious.
“It can be harmful,” he said. “In high doses, it can be a huge problem.”
Baptiste claimed she has been complaining to NYCHA about the stench and other problems — like bullet holes in her windows and the intense heat created by the boiler — ever since moving in. Results have eluded her.
“I’ve put in numerous orders for things that need to be fixed and changed, and they just vanish into thin air,” she said. “They just don’t care. This is Brownsville.”
City Hall spokeswoman Jane Meyer said NYCHA is planning to send a team to her apartment Wednesday.
“NYCHA is going out there to investigate and address the conditions,” she said, adding the Health Department is planning to send inspectors Friday.
DOH already did some tests that did not show abnormal levels of carbon monoxide or other volatile substances, according to NYCHA.
The tests did not suggest any need to immediately evacuate, the agency noted.
As of Tuesday, Baptiste’s apartment continued to feel like a hot, fetid swamp.
To ventilate the heat and the smell, she keeps the windows open. Asked if she worries about burglars, she offered a curt reply.
“I ain’t got nothing to steal,” she said.
