Snuffing Out Puffing Neighbors
The vast majority of the state's adults don't smoke, but what if the people in the apartment or condo next to yours do? Should you hold your breath for a home-front smoking ban?
John Corley grew up in a family where smoking was as natural as eating. He picked up his first cigarette when he was 19 and, despite several attempts to quit, puffed away until the age of 33. That was about four years ago, when his wife, Valarie, became pregnant with their first child, and Corley decided his baby would not spring from the womb into a cloud of smoke. Yet it turned out that clearing the air in the family's Quincy apartment was not a simple matter of Corley learning to exercise more self-control. Even after he quit, smoke continued to waft into their apartment, courtesy of two heavy smokers who lived one floor below.
Shortly after the baby, Victoria, was born, the family moved to an apartment complex in Braintree. "We had originally seen a different apartment than the one we are in, and the landlord said this one was better and there were no others available," says Corley, who works in a flooring company warehouse. "We did smell smoke in the hall, but thought it was a one-time ordeal." The stench proved constant, however, and this time the source lived next door. Smoke escaped from beneath the neighbor's front door and drifted into the Corleys' apartment. The Corleys' complaints about the bothersome smoke and its hazardous effects on Victoria, who had been born 10 weeks premature, left the neighbor unmoved. The landlord offered only sympathy – nothing in the lease prohibited smokers from lighting up in their own apartments.
"You wish you could say this is home sweet home," Corley says, "but it's home smelly home." So, two years after moving in, the Corleys were moving yet again, and their ad on craigslist was specific: They wanted a two-bedroom apartment in a house where smoking was prohibited.
Multiunit housing is one of the few remaining places where the boundary lines between smokers and everybody else are still as amorphous as the wispy streaks left by a cigarette. But emboldened by renters like the Corleys and condo owners who are no longer content to hold their noses around unwanted secondhand smoke, a coalition of anti-smoking groups is preparing to scale the walls of one of the last smoker havens. Their tactics promise to be subtle: condition the public through education at the local level, roll out a bunch of examples – landlords or condo associations that banned smoking voluntarily – and gradually make smoke-free housing the norm.
COULD MASSACHUSETTS BAN SMOKING IN multiunit housing? "Certainly not in the next couple of years," says Laurie Stillman, executive director of the Asthma Regional Council in Dorchester. "But I never say never." She says that 20 years ago, if she were to have suggested that "smoking would be banned in bars or restaurants, or that anyone would even propose that, people would have called me nuts." Since that time, of course, mounds of scientific evidence documenting the damaging health effects of secondhand smoke have cast smokers out into the cold and their claim to smokers' rights onto the ash heap.
With just 18 percent of Massachusetts adults describing themselves as smokers, the balance of power has shifted so dramatically that, over the past year, nearly a third of the calls to a complaint line set up by the state to monitor compliance with the 2004 smoke-free workplace law were gripes about unwanted smoke at home. Local boards of health also report more calls from renters searching for some regulation or ordinance that might give them leverage against a smoking neighbor or unhelpful landlord. Even the Corleys' property manager acknowledges the change in attitude. "There have been more complaints than previously," says Reda Veitas, who has managed the Braintree apartment complex for three years and is a former smoker herself. A ban on smoking "is something we'd definitely like to consider. If it became law, it'd be great."
In California, two communities have already acted: Belmont is set to prohibit smoking in multiunit dwellings that share a common floor or ceiling, and Calabasas has ruled that 80 percent of rental apartment buildings must be smoke-free by 2012. Elsewhere in the nation, at least 65 public housing authorities have adopted a partial or total smoke-free policy. Yet, some advocates on the East Coast are squeamish about forcing their way into peoples' homes. "The housing environment has a dramatically different issue in that you're talking about an individual's living space, and constitutional issues crop up," says Patrick Maloney, director of environmental health for Brookline, long in the forefront of regulating smoking. He and a number of other advocates would prefer to follow the example set by Maine's Smoke-Free Housing Coalition, which has spent about three years building an online registry of some 2,000 apartments that have been declared smoke-free by their landlords. The voluntary policy has helped the coalition establish "a deeper, more friendly connection" with landlords, says Amy Olfene, the Maine project director, and worked well enough that "until we get a public outcry for legislation, we will not go in that direction."
While smoke-free apartment and condominium buildings do exist in Massachusetts, nobody knows how many. To quantify what's out there and gauge demand for a registry, the state health department's Tobacco Control Program has contracted with the Public Health Advocacy Institute, an organization affiliated with Northeastern University School of Law, to conduct a survey this spring of landlords, tenants, and condo owners and to put together a "tool kit" for landlords and condo associations considering a voluntary ban, with a sample lease or bylaw language and the estimated savings in maintenance costs. Meanwhile, many landlords are under the impression that it is illegal to ban smoking in apartments. Not so, says Eileen Sullivan, director of policy and planning for the state's Tobacco Control Program: "We see it as similar to the issue of whether to allow pets."
PLENTY OF LANDLORDS ALREADY REGULATE smoking unofficially by screening tenants and asking that smokers take their habit outside, according to Demetrios Salpoglou, the CEO of NextGen Realty, which specializes in Boston-area rentals. "It's become more automatic for young people to smoke outside, anyway," he says. "It took on its own life through conditioning in public places or maybe as social etiquette and imposed itself on residential life."
Yet there will always be those smokers – like the Corleys' neighbor – who couldn't care less whether their habit is causing coughing spasms in the apartment next door. For that reason, this tiptoeing toward smoke-free housing is unsatisfying to Michael Siegel, a professor at Boston University's School of Public Health and a bit of a maverick within anti-smoking circles. Siegel supports a more all-encompassing approach that still stops short of a ban: ordinances that declare secondhand smoke entering a residence a "public nuisance." That way, he says, "no matter what the policy is that the landlord sets up, you would have this recourse." He was inspired by a Dublin, California, ordinance that declares secondhand tobacco smoke a nuisance and authorizes citizens to bring legal action to abate it.
As it stands in Massachusetts, nonsmoking renters with smoky apartments have little recourse if both the smoker and the landlord prove uncooperative. Sometimes, a visit from the local board of health may turn up a violation of state housing standards or local sanitary codes. ("We've had a couple of cases where we've found, lo and behold, the unit's ventilation system was busted," says Maloney, the Brookline health official.) Some tenants have successfully taken their landlords to court for failing to remedy conditions so smoky that they breached the covenant of "quiet enjoyment." Nonetheless, says Edward Sweda Jr., senior attorney at the Tobacco Products Liability Project at the Public Health Advocacy Institute, "Litigation is and should be seen as a last resort."
Siegel's proposal is unlikely to get much traction within an anti-smoking coalition bent on avoiding conflict. Until Massachusetts gets its own smoke-free registry up and running, renters stuck with secondhand smoke will just have to continue apartment-hopping. As for the Corleys, they have already moved to their new home, a shared duplex in Braintree. This time, John Corley feels fairly certain there will be no smoking next door – the other side of the duplex is a chiropractor's office.
Lisa Prevost is a freelance writer in Connecticut and frequent contributor to the Globe Magazine. E-mail her at lprevost@prodigy.net.
