VIDEO: Vulnerable NYCHA seniors tasked with dispensing state sanitizer and PPE
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Howard Avenue Tenants Association President Rose Clifton, 86, pours state-issued sanitizer into another tenant’s empty water bottle at her Brooklyn NYCHA complex. The city and state have tasked older adults on tenant associations with distributing PPE and sanitizer. Image via YouTube/Sharon Collins
By David Brand
The coronavirus has had a deadly impact on older adults in New York City, but the risk of illness hasn’t stopped 86-year-old NYCHA tenant leader Rose Clifton from making sure her Brooklyn neighbors get needed protection.
With a surgical mask pulled just below her nose and a shopping cart full of state-issued hand sanitizer, Clifton has canvassed her Crown Heights public housing complex to pour liquid sanitizer into smaller containers furnished by other tenants. Like other resident groups, Clifton and the Howard Avenue Tenants Association have received very little support from the city and state.
“I’m not supposed to be out here, but I’m out here ‘cause I’m strong. I just turned 81, 85, 86. I just had a birthday this month,” Clifton said in a video posted on YouTube April 30.
The video of Clifton’s tour through NYCHA’s Park Rock Rehab Houses shows grateful tenants — most of them without masks — meeting her in the hallway with empty water bottles, an old dish detergent squeeze bottle and a used soap dispenser. In each delivery, Clifton sloshed yellow sanitizer from gallon jugs produced by the state before departing for another apartment or another building in the public housing complex.
Despite the lethal impact of the coronavirus on older adults, Clifton is one of many senior citizen tenant leaders tasked with dispensing sanitizer and distributing personal protective equipment to tenants at NYCHA sites citywide. The Eagle has reported on several sprawling sites — including the Ravenswood Houses, Queensbridge Houses and South Jamaica Houses — where Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office dropped off bulk supplies at property managers’ offices with no guidance for how to distribute the material.
NYCHA and the city, meanwhile, have also pledged to provide PPE, but have not coordinated with the state to distribute the twin supply streams.
Clifton and her tenants association received the sanitizer, as well as a batch of masks, from Councilmember Alicka Ampry Samuel, who chairs the council’s Committee on Public Housing.
The April 30 video was posted by Sharon Collins, another tenant who accompanied Clifton on the distribution trip. Collins thanked Ampry Samuel for the supplies but criticized the NYCHA property manager for refusing to help coordinate distribution.
“[Clifton] didn’t get any assistance from anyone else,” Collins said as she and Clifton walked between buildings. “She reached out to the management. She reached out, and nobody.”
Collins said the tenants association had already run out of the masks provided by Ampry-Samuel. As she talked, Clifton poured sanitizer into a Schweppes ginger ale bottle and empty water bottles on a ledge outside the apartment complex.
“Make sure you label it. It’s nothing to drink.” Collins said. “So they don’t think that’s lemonade or something.”
Black and Latino New Yorkers — who account for the majority of the city’s public housing population — have died from COVID-19 at twice the rate of white and Asian residents, according to city data.
To address the deadly disparity, Cuomo pledged to provide masks, gloves and hand sanitizer to NYCHA tenants. Late last month, the state began to drop off the supplies, including the jugs of sanitizer, at public housing sites across the city.
But the state tasked residents associations to navigate PPE distribution, said Daniel Barber, the head of the NYCHA tenants group known as the Citywide Council of Presidents. Barber has called for NYCHA to assist in the process. “It isn't and wasn't my responsibility to distribute Citywide,” he said in an email.
The burden on older adult tenant association leaders has also elicited sharp criticism from some local leaders.
“NYCHA residents, who are disproportionately in the higher-risk pool for COVID-19, should not be responsible for distributing masks and hand sanitizer meant to protect them,” U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney told the Eagle last month.
Former Queensbridge Tenants Association member Ray Normandeau said the lack of coordination between the city and state has left vulnerable NYCHA residents — especially older adults — at an even greater risk of exposing themselves to the coronavirus.
“Most members of tenant associations are elderly, and they should not be hauling gallons of disinfectant,” said Normandeau, who runs the NYCHA news site Normandeau Newswires. “They shouldn't be expecting people 75 years old to do it.”
In his building, he said, elevators do not go to the sixth floor, which forces the tenants association members to carry the state-issued jugs of liquid sanitizer up the steps.
Normandeau also criticized the state for supplying large jugs of sanitizer for tenants to pour into random vessels, including recycled food and beverage containers. That could pose another danger.
“My mother as a child drank lye out of a sweet and condensed milk can,” he said. “Even if they do label the bottle, can a 5-year-old read, ‘Hand sanitizer. Do not touch?’”
Cuomo’s Office has not responded to any of the Eagle’s emails seeking information and responses about PPE and sanitizer distribution at NYCHA sites.
NYCHA did not address the video of Clifton distributing sanitizer but said the the agency has stepped up to protect older adults by providing 30,000 individual 8-ounce bottles of sanitizer for tenants at senior residences.
“We are working with community based organizations, The Department for the Aging and the Department of Youth and Community Development to help distribute the sanitizer,” said NYCHA spokesperson Rochel Leah Goldblatt. “We are also going to be installing hand sanitizing dispensers at each of our 69 senior buildings.”
NYCHA has also posted health guidance at every development and sent “thousands of communications regarding the requirement to properly wear masks and all other safety precautions, on our website and on social media, as well as making individual phone calls and sending emails to all of our residents and TA leaders,” she added.
On April 29, NYCHA spokesperson Barbara Brancaccio addressed the lack of coordination between the city and state, saying that the state initiative “was planned and coordinated independent of NYCHA participation.”
“We appreciate the efforts of our State and local partners and will collaborate wherever possible, in addition to the continual work we do to provide critical and essential services while responding to the pandemic in real-time,” she continued.
The Eagle first reported on older adult tenants forced to distribute PPE and sanitizer at the Ravenswood Houses in Astoria last month. Since that story published on April 28, the tenants association has decided to stop going door-to-door pouring the liquid sanitizer into neighbors’ containers in order to promote social distancing.
“I will not let my neighbors, our volunteers or our friends do that,” said Ravenswood Tenant Association President Carol Wilkins. “We need to keep everyone safe.”
Cuomo’s Office told her the state would soon supply individually packaged, personal-use containers of sanitizer for Ravenswood tenants. Wilkins said she hoped the shipment would arrive soon.
“I don’t want to put volunteers in danger,” she said.
