A Hazardous Heater or a Freezing Home. Which Would You Choose?
When I was a child, my home life orbited around our stovetop oven. The best mornings began with bright, earthy notes of garlic, culantro, onions, and ají dulce, the distinct aroma of my mother’s homemade sofrito sizzling in oil on the stove-top. The tick, tick, tick of the oven timer counted down the minutes until—bing!—she retrieved her slow-roasted pernil from below. Through my mother’s cooking, this everyday appliance became a source of love, comfort, and care for my large Afro-Puerto Rican family.
But in the winter that ticking sound sometimes signaled something else: poor, poor, poor. Because when the heat in our low-income government assisted apartment didn’t kick on, and layers of blankets weren’t enough, that same oven often became our only source of warmth. To avoid poisoning ourselves with carbon monoxide, my family and I took turns turning the stovetop on and off every other hour—bing! We realized this was dangerous, of course. But when your formal complaints go unanswered and you’re forced to choose between a freezing home and a heat source both risky and certain, a hazard becomes a safety.
On the Sunday before last, a running space heater reportedly sparked one of the deadliest fires in American history, killing nine adults and eight children and critically injuring others in Twin Parks North West, a 19-story apartment in Bronx, New York. The flames from the heater barely left the apartment, but its toxic smoke surged upwards through a safety door that was supposed to shut but stayed wide open, allowing deadly black fumes to quickly flood the building towards another faulty open door. The building has no fire escapes or sprinkler systems. All 17 people, mostly Muslim immigrants from the West African nation of Gambia, died from smoke inhalation.
Over the week that followed, our newly elected mayor Eric Adams and other state and city leaders mainly focused on a patchwork of quick fixes, like reiterating the city’s “Close the Door” campaign. "We'd like to point out today to everyone, if you're in an apartment building that has self-closing doors, make sure it works," FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro said at a recent press briefing.
"If it doesn't, please point that out to the landlord, to the maintenance folks, and make sure your door closes as it should." Adams echoed Nigro, telling the press that “muscle memory is everything and if we can drill that in, we can save lives by closing doors not just in New York City but across the entire globe.” However, in the months leading up to the Twin Parks North West fire, residents had made several complaints, including lack of heat, broken doors, and broken ventilation systems, according to online records.
Just like a running stove or space heater, responses like the “Close the Door” campaign and the city’s (delayed) cash aid are reactionary, unreliable, and unsafe. They absolve landlords and building owners of their main responsibility to provide tenants with basic necessities and adequate living conditions. They absolve federal, state, and city officials of proactively preventing future tragedies through overhauling defective policy and infrastructure. And they absolve powerful people, companies, and institutions from a long history of violent anti-Black systemic racism, placing the blame on the victims instead.
In a recent news article, NBC BLK journalist Char Adams broke down how racism in urban planning fuels high rate of Black fire deaths. “The legacy of early zoning laws across the country that promoted segregation exists today in housing instability that forces Black people into neglected rental units rife with maintenance issues that place them at higher risk for everything from fire deaths to lead poisoning,” Adams reported.
According to the New York State Department of Health, Black people make up 25 percent of individuals killed in residential fires nationwide—almost twice that of persons of any other race—even though they only represent about 13 percent of the U.S. population. Fifteen percent of Black fire victims are children under age five, as compared to only 8 percent of white fire victims.
I’ve experienced fires as recently as last September in the Carver Houses, a historic New York City public housing development in Spanish Harlem and my home for the past 17 years. If you walk around the city, especially in low-income housing communities—or, as we call them, the projects—you’ll spot at least one building with a row of windows boarded up due to a fire. And this issue goes beyond New York City. A few days before the Bronx fire, a fire tore through a crowded federally subsidized rowhouse in Philadelphia, leaving 12 people, eight of them children, dead. None of the fire detectors in the home were working. Tragedy after tragedy has proven that only when these horrific events receive widespread media attention do city leaders and officials publicly acknowledge and commit to resolving poor housing conditions and negligent policies and infrastructure.
In the meantime, those of us living in these conditions have been forced to rely on one another and adapt by any means necessary. That’s why two years ago I launched My Projects Runway, a storytelling platform that aims to challenge stereotypes of the projects and its residents and celebrate our multifaceted goals, dreams, and accomplishments. With photos, videos, and personal archives sourced from our own communities, we highlight the people, culture, trends, and deep history of New York City Housing complexes, offering more expansive representations of life in public housing.
Last October, our photograph exhibition “Community Matriarchs of NYCHA” celebrated influential women residents of Lower East Side public housing who have contributed transformative change in their neighborhood. My goal is to raise awareness about our experiences and humanize us through nuanced storytelling because we can’t afford to only be seen as worthwhile through tragedy. People in the projects are just that—people. We don’t deserve to be neglected, judged, or seen as less than because of our addresses, our income levels, or our race. And we shouldn’t have to die for people to understand that.
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