Jacqueline Silva misses the days when she could store food in her cupboards without thinking. Or step away from the kitchen table for a moment without worry. “You can’t cook breakfast and leave it there,” he said, “because as soon as you come back, you’ve got a cockroach in your food.”
It’s not just cockroaches in her apartment in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but also rodents. Mice, mostly — he thinks. “Some of the mice look like baby rats,” he said. He takes pictures so he can compare the images. She empties out her cupboards so she can deep clean. She buys hard plastic containers so she can store her food where rodents can’t tear through the packaging. However, nothing keeps the insults at bay, which started five years ago.
“I don’t know how many mousetraps I’ve walked through in this apartment,” he said. “We have them on the kitchen counters, on the floors, in the cupboards. I’m a very clean person and it’s embarrassing to see all these cockroaches and mice.”
Ms. Silva has requested and received extermination services from Kraus Management, the company that manages the building, but fumigation has not helped.
There is also mold in the apartment, which is an acute problem for Ms. Silva who has asthma and multiple sclerosis. Her husband, Rafael Silva, is her caregiver. “We’re getting by,” he said.
It all creates an unhealthy environment in which to raise their three daughters. AmirahRose is their youngest, at 8, and, like her mother, has asthma.
In early 2023, AmirahRose became ill with symptoms of pneumonia and in February was put into an induced coma for a week. One of her lungs completely collapsed while the other partially collapsed. Finally, he recovered.
The quality of life outside the apartment is also problematic. For a while, the building’s door could be opened with a MetroCard. The corridors are often filled with cigarette smoke, unfamiliar faces and the smell of urine. The washing machines rarely work and the coin boxes are sometimes broken to remove the money.
When the elevator broke down in 2018, tenants in the building formed a union with the help of Southside United HDFC, better known as Los Sures, a local housing organization. “In this neighborhood on the south side of Williamsburg, which is gentrifying very quickly, her situation is not unusual,” said Lina Renick-Pool, a tenant organizer in Los Sures who works with Ms. Silva and others in the building. “Unfortunately, this is a normal experience of being a rent-stabilized or affordable renter in Williamsburg.”
Some of the other units in Ms. Silva’s building don’t have such an extensive history of rodent infestation, and she has made a request to move to a different apartment, but that hasn’t happened yet. She worries that if she were to leave the building entirely it might be difficult to find another home in the neighborhood where her family has built a life for the past 15 years.
And the issue of rodents is a problem in every municipality. In May 2013, there were 1,159 reports of rodent infestations in the city. a decade later that number doubled to 2,350, according to the city’s Open Data website.
$444| Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Jacqueline Silva, 39
Occupation: Housekeeper
In the family: For Ms. Silva, one of the hardest parts of dealing with her living conditions is seeing the effects on her three daughters. “They’re really spontaneous, cool kids — very quiet and respectable, but they’re sick of living with all these bugs and mice.”
About the food budget: Because it is so difficult for Ms. Silva to store food without the rodents getting to it, she often has to throw away the items before consuming them. “I spend a lot of money on food,” he said.
Ms. Silva, whose family moved into their three-bedroom home in 2009, said service and communication from Kraus Management is hard to come by. “They won’t give us a phone number for the super, and if we call the management company they never answer,” she said. “I pick up a machine and leave a message, but they never answer.”
Lisa Zeiger, vice president of Kraus Management, acknowledged in an email that tenants in the building do not have a phone number for the building inspector, but said tenants can still reach out for help. “We have a 24/7 contact person available to tenants to report necessary repair work.”
Ms. Zeiger also noted that some of Ms. Silva’s cabinets had been replaced in January 2023 to address mold and rodent concerns. And he said the front door had recently been repaired so that entry could no longer be gained with a MetroCard.
However, the building currently has 47 open violations reported to Housing Preservation and Development, the city agency that administers Ms. Silva’s participation in Section 8, a federally funded program that helps defray housing costs for applicants based on needs. When a building has open violations, HPD will suspend subsidy payments as part of the housing quality standards protocols established by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In the case of Ms. Silva’s apartment, HPD pays $1,771.74 to make up her monthly payment of $444, but stopped payments in August 2023 because the unit failed a housing standards inspection.
Natasha Kersey, deputy press secretary for HPD, said in an email: “HPD’s Housing Quality Standards serve as a safeguard for tenants by ensuring they have access to a safe, clean and hazard-free home environment. In no event shall it be the tenant’s responsibility to pay for uncorrected violations attributed to the landlord for repair.”
Ms. Zeiger wrote in her email that Kraus Management informs Section 8 tenants that they are only responsible for their portion of the rent. However, the Kraus invoices Ms. Silva received show that the Section 8 subsidies that have been suspended are included in the “total overdue” listed on her statement.
She continued to pay her share of the rent until September, when the tenants’ association staged a rent strike, placing the rent payments in an escrow account instead of submitting them to Kraus. “I said to myself, ‘It’s not fair, they’re taking my rent, but they’re still not fixing anything,'” Ms. Silva said.
She and another tenant filed a claim in housing court the following month, working with legal representation they obtained through Communities Resist, a nonprofit legal service.
Erin Heneghan, the lawyer representing Ms. Silva, said the dangerous conditions in the building amounted to potential harassment. “The landlord is not allowed to hold the tenant responsible for Section 8 rent,” he said, “but they will try to put pressure on the tenant, to get them to put pressure on the Section 8 program to start paying again.”
Ms Silva said she started receiving letters threatening legal action for non-payment last summer and they haven’t stopped. “I’ve received so many of them,” he said, “I could make an album.”
She said while she was nervous about filing the claim in court, she knew it was something she had to do. “I will defend me and my family and my children,” he said. “Because if I don’t, who will?”
She wishes she could step away from her breakfast plate for a moment. She wants to stop holding the door to her house with duct tape, and she wants to stop getting calls from AmirahRose’s teacher, expressing concern about another report of cockroaches in the family’s apartment.
“I want my kids to be able to be healthy,” she said. “I want my youngest not to be afraid to go to the kitchen to get something to eat or drink.”