NYC once again follows Boston’s lead – smoke-free housing on tap
New York City is about to get its first smoke-free apartment building. According to CBS-2 News:
[S]ome apartment buildings are now banning smoking for new tenants. Existing tenants who smoke will be allowed to continue to puff away.
That’s not the case with the new East Harlem building at 1510 Lexington Avenue, which will be the city’s first completely non-smoking residence, where tenants won’t even be allowed to walk outside and light up in the immediate perimeter of the building. Even the construction workers can’t light up.
“We feel that you’re impacting, in a rental, so many people around you that we would like to offer the public an opportunity to live in a smoke-free environment,” said Kinne Yon of Kenbar Management, which runs the building that will house 298 units.
Boston already has a smoke-free residential building – the Macallen building, in the South Boston neighborhood of Boston. The condominium building is a “LEED-certified” building. One of the qualifiers it chose to meet was making the building smoke-free. Owners are not allowed to smoke inside or outside the building. (Owners in its twin-sister, the Court Square Press building are not affected by the rule.)
Units in the Macallen building include bamboo floors, considered a sustainable source, and the bathrooms are equipped with dual-flush toilets, allowing users to decide how much water to use, depending on need.
Photo courtesy of Pictures-Images.com
[...] There have been a few cities and municipalities here in California that have either passed legislation or taken judicial action to ban smoking in apartments or mediate disputes between non smoking and smoking neighbors, and now a string of apartments are making headlines on the east coast. Individual apartments in Philadelphia, New York and Boston have all garnered press attention for smoking prohibitions. (bitterness over the World Series and smoker profiling is noted in Mr. Keith's post) [PR Newswire, John A. Keith Real Estate] [...]