NEW YORK (AP) – The federal government’s proposal Thursday to ban smoking inside and out of public housing nationwide got a decidedly mixed reaction from the people most affected.
Some who suffer from second-hand smoke were thrilled, but others, including some non-smokers, worried that it gives the government yet another reason to harass or even evict poor people for doing what would otherwise be a legal activity in the privacy of their own homes.
“I think it is completely bogus,” said Devante Barrett, a 24-year-old non-smoker who lives in the Elliot-Chelsea Houses in Manhattan’s gritty Chelsea neighborhood. “You might as well have us all chained up in bondage now.”
Smoking is already banned in about 20 percent of the nation’s federally subsidized housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to extend that to the other 940,000 units around the country, in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Miami.
“I would not like that. And other residents wouldn’t like that either. But I would have to comply with it,” said chain-smoker Dana Jones, shaking her head as she escorted her 11-year-old son past a clutch of smokers outside Bethel Towers, an apartment complex next to a church in downtown Atlanta.