Everett resident Elliott Vazquez sat in front of a City Council meeting on Monday and recounted the horror of living in the current heat in his building. He lives in Glendale Towers, a 12-story public housing complex that was built more than half a century ago and houses many elderly and disabled people. According to Vazquez, the building holds in the heat.
“My apartment, along with everyone else’s temperatures, are rising well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. At nighttime, it does not get lower than 90 degrees,” Vazquez said.
Residents are allowed only one air conditioner per unit for the sake of the building’s electrical load, and Vazquez told City Council it’s not enough. He said people have been sleeping in the air-conditioned lobby and in a penthouse community room to find relief from the heat. He described lethargic pets, dying fish and cold water that “runs hot” for 15 minutes. Vazquez said residents used to be able to go up on the roof to escape the heat, but there are now cellphone towers there and warning signs about radiation exposure.
Vazquez and other residents described unbearable temperatures — and health consequences — through the summer’s heat waves in Everett’s public housing complex. But the Everett Housing Authority executive director disputed the claim that temperatures were higher than ever and said it wasn’t feasible to add more A/C. Glendale Towers has 120 one-bedroom units, which makes up just over 40% of Everett’s public housing units offered to the elderly. None have central air conditioning.
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Glendale Towers residents can be fined for adding more A/C units and most fear being kicked out of affordable housing if they complain, 80-year-old resident Roberta Fletcher told GBH News. Because the A/C units don’t vent directly outside, she said she has to empty a pan of condensate water several times a day. Other disabled residents said emptying the pan creates an additional challenge.
She has three fans strung around the apartment, and has to climb around the wiring. But she said they have little effect.
“It’s hot as hell,” Fletcher said. “It’s horrible.”
Every summer the building gets extremely hot, Fletcher said, but “this is the year worst so far.”
“My legs swell up like balloons,” she said. “I get in the bed and I prop my legs up for a couple of hours.”
Stephen Kergo, executive director of Everett’s Housing Authority — a quasi-state agency — said there’s “nothing to be done” at Glendale Towers. Kergo said his agency has looked into the problem of heat at the 52-year-old building and “haven’t offered air conditioning because there’s not a way to put in air conditioning that we can find.”
Kergo said the building’s electrical system would have to be refitted to support additional A/C units and estimated it would cost $10,000 per unit, or $1.2 million for the 120 units in the building — money he said the housing authority doesn’t have in its budget.
“There’s no way to add air conditioning to each apartment,” Kergo said, adding that they get funded by the Department of Housing and Community Development. “We have so much money per year to deal with roof replacements and screen doors and have to keep up with all that. It’s just general upkeep of the properties that we have to use our funding for.”
Kergo said his workers recently tested a vacant apartment in Glendale Towers, leaving windows and doors open and no A/C running to see how hot it would get.
“The highest it got to was 84 degrees, and this was on the 99-degree days,” Kergo said.
When a GBH News reporter visited Fletcher’s apartment Tuesday, the thermometer on her wall read 92 degrees.
While residents say they’ve been ignored, faced rudeness and even bullied by Housing Authority workers, Kergo said workers don’t bully residents and that they respond to complaints.
“We estimate that over 80 percent of the residents [in Glendale Towers] have air conditioners in their units. And no one has called the office and complained,” Kergo said.
He added that they’ve received no complaints about the heat from other public housing buildings, either.
But 68-year-old resident Kevin O’Rourke, who said he’s lived alone in the building for three years, told GBH News he’s complained on several occasions to the Housing Authority.
“You only get the front desk,” O’Rourke said. “They just say somebody will address this. And then nothing.”
O'Rourke, a veteran who served as a Marine Corps truck driver and said he’s being treated for liver cancer, said when the heat rises he has trouble breathing and his legs swell daily. He described recently going to the emergency room at Tufts Medical Center for his swollen legs.
The City Council gave no initial response to Vazquez’s comments. Vazquez pointed to paper and online petitions, which are circulating to draw attention to the problem and call on Everett’s City Council to step in.
“If the city is equipped to go to the building for votes,” Vazquez said, “they should be equipped to help us.”
