Beulah Toombs, an 89-year-old resident of Ohio,
is being forced out of her home for refusing to quit smoking.
Toombs lives in Cincinnati’s AHEPA 127 Apartments, a building for
low-income seniors whose rent is subsidized by the U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
According
to the Cincinnati Enquirer, building residents were
given one year to quit smoking when the building went totally
smoke-free in 2013. Toombs refused. “I don’t think so,” she told
the Enquirer. “This is my home, and I think you can do
whatever you want to in your home.”
Clearly, Beulah is a badass (and a healthy one at that—the
Enquirer reports that despite her lifelong cigarette
habit, Toombs is in remarkably good health). But badassery is
frowned on by building management, who deemed Toombs
“non-compliant” after maintenance workers spotted ashtrays and
cigarette butts in her apartment and another resident reported
seeing a lighter and cigarette inside. Toombs is now being forced
to evacuate by the end of April.
“My mom is getting older, and this is causing her so much
stress,” her daughter, Mary Ann Burgoyne, told the
Enquirer. “She kept telling me that she was paying her
rent. She was a little confused. She thought they might put her in
a debtors prison.”
Burgoyne approached a senior-advocacy group for help, but said
they declined, saying her mom should quit
smoking.
The group probably couldn’t have done much anyway—and that’s
somewhat as it should be. Toombs’ apartment building is private
property, and owners are free to impose whatever rules they like on
tenants who choose to live there. If tenants don’t like the rules,
they’re free to move somewhere else, as Toombs is doing. “This is
the free market at its best,” one commenter on the
Enquirer article wrote.
I wouldn’t go that far. Private properties subsidized by the
government aren’t exactly “free market.” Toombs’ building is part
of a national network of HUD-subsidized AHEPA apartment buildings
for low-income seniors.
HUD doesn’t have the authority to force subsidized but
privately-owned apartments buildings to go smoke-free. But it has
been encouraging them to do so. Since 2010, HUD has been
sending notices to property owners pressuring them to implement
smoke-free housing policies.
When the folks in charge of your financing strongly suggest
something, that’s a strong incentive to do it. I’d wager many
low-income buildings wouldn’t be instituting no-smoking policies if
it weren’t for HUD butting in.
At Toombs’ building, it doesn’t seem like residents were calling
for the change. “I have been in this apartment bulding many times
as my Mother lived there before she passed away a year ago this
March,” Trisha Dufresne commented on the Enquirer article.
“It is very clean and you can’t smell the smoke from inside the
tenants apartments, so no one is really getting second hand
smoke.”
Good thing HUD was around to stop the menace of an old lady
unobtrusively smoking within the confines of her apartment!
More proof that government will use any particular power you
grant it (in Toombs’ case, by living in subsidized housing) as an
excuse to reach into totally unrelated areas of your life. But hey,
I mean, people should quit smoking anyway, right? I’m sure Toombs
will be comforted through her stressful move knowing HUD was
just trying to help her.
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