Culture

Is New York City’s Public-Housing System Ready for the Coronavirus?


Michael Kamber, a photojournalist and longtime resident of the Melrose neighborhood in the South Bronx, started the Bronx Documentary Center, in 2011, to provide free filmmaking and journalism training to students in the area. Kamber is a frequent visitor to Melrose’s public-housing projects, which are home to many of his friends, family, and students. In early March, as alarm was rising in New York City’s government and media about the arrival of the coronavirus, Kamber noticed a lack of information and awareness in these communities. “I was talking to people, and I saw person after person who just didn’t know anything about it, or thought that it wasn’t going to come to New York. And it was already here,” Kamber told The New Yorker. In the video above, Kamber talks with residents of the Patterson, Jackson, and Melrose Houses about what kind of information they’ve received from the New York City Housing Authority about how to be protected during an ongoing pandemic. “Building after building, there was no information at all,” Kamber said. “That’s what shocked me.”

During a public-health crisis in which the most effective preventive measure is social distancing, the density of public-housing developments makes their tenants especially vulnerable. “You can easily have a thousand people in a building with one working elevator,” Kamber says. And many tenants have health conditions, such as diabetes, asthma, and heart disease, that put them at a higher risk from COVID-19 infections.

Kamber also spoke with Gregory Russ, the chair and C.E.O. of NYCHA, who says that the agency has put out information to its tenants via posters, e-mails, and automated calls, and also through the My NYCHA app, the housing authority’s online portal. But the area of the South Bronx in which Kamber lives is one of the nation’s poorest communities, where many don’t have reliable Internet and cell-phone access. Kamber says that “the traditional means of outreach don’t work up here. You have to meet people where they are—and, in the South Bronx, they’re out on the street, they’re in the lobbies.”


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