Harlem's Toxic Nightmare

Sarah Martin has lived in the Gen. Ulysses S. Grant Houses in West Harlem for 48 years, since she was 16 years old. She met me one brisk Sunday afternoon in April to give a guided tour of the public housing complex -- and of the army of rodents with which residents share it.

After years as the tenants association president, Martin has morphed into the archetype of a neighborhood matriarch-activist. Her union local is stitched in gold on the back of her windbreaker; her long, grey hair flows from under a matching union cap. And as we stroll through the complex, she genteelly answers the reverent greetings of neighbors in one breath, then heaps scorn on the public housing authority in the next.

The complex is a rodent's dream, an all-you-can-eat buffet supplied by the trash of 4,400 residents. "The whole area is infested with rats," Martin says. "And as long as they have food and water, all they do is have sex and have babies."

She points out open-top trashcans overflowing with discarded food containers. Old recycling bins at the buildings' back doors have long transformed into makeshift garbage cans, also overflowing. Residents are supposed to put their trash down chutes on each floor, but the bags are often too big and thus get tossed in the stairwell.

Two large metal compactors that Martin finally cajoled officials into installing as safe outdoor spots for trash storage haven't actually been turned on or emptied in a while. During the day, pigeons feast on the Wonderbread slices and McDonald's fries that are scattered around the compactors; come nightfall, the rats will dine.

A coalition of state attorneys general say this is the scene in far too many public housing complexes around the country. In September, five states and the Virgin Islands sued the Department of Housing and Urban Development to change its pest control policies. Housing authorities, the suit charges, employ thousands of pounds of highly toxic pesticides in an effort to fight pests that could have been prevented in the first place. The result is a growing annual case load of childhood poisonings -- a case load that is disturbingly heavy with poor blacks and Latinos.

Pesticides of all sorts are extremely toxic; one of those on the market today was previously a World War II nerve gas. Nearly 100,000 human exposures to pesticides were reported in 2003, about a fifth of those involved rodenticides, or rat poisons. Young kids, who crawl around and put things in their mouths, account for the bulk of the rodenticide exposures; they racked up 15,000 poisonings in 2003. The Environmental Protection Agency, however, estimates that all of these reported numbers represent no more than a quarter of the actual totals.

There's no national data on the amount of pesticides used in public housing, but Sarah Martin's complex alone used 800 pounds of rat poison in one year. Other data from New York paint a troubling picture of racial and economic disparity. Eighty-three percent of New York kids hospitalized for exposure to rodenticides are black or Latino, nearly a fifth are in families with incomes below the poverty level.

Not that this sort of imbalance is unusual. From low birth weights to asthma, poor urban communities are besieged by preventable illnesses associated with environmental hazards.

Martin's Harlem neighborhood is typical. She's old enough to remember when the iconic Hudson River waterfront was a place you actually wanted to be near. "We would go on boat rides," she recalls. "They used to have concerts over there. But all that's long gone."

Today, the view of the Palisades perched on the opposite bank is still there, but there's also a plant treating 170 million gallons of sewage a day. The ferries that used to shuttle area residents along the river stopped in the 1950s when a highway cut the neighborhood off from the waterfront. That highway now links to the George Washington Bridge, which boasts a higher volume of daily traffic than any in the country. That's probably not as significant as the diesel fumes that shoot out of more than 200 city buses housed a block away.