Smoking ban enforced in some New York City apartments: Secondhand smoke to blame for the ban

By Joanna Gonzalez

Published: Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Updated: Thursday, June 17, 2010 12:06

Smoking will soon be banned in some New York City apartments. With concerns of secondhand smoke, landlords are not allowing their tenants to smoke and will evict them if they do so.

According to New York City Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment (NYC CLASH), in December 2002 Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed the INTRO 256-A (NYC Smoke Free Act). The law banned smoking in restaurants, nightclubs, bingo halls, pool halls, bars, convention halls, catering halls and any enclosed public area.

With the threat of eviction if caught smoking in their apartments, tenants are having a hard time trying to find a place to smoke at home. Landlords are not only prohibiting smoking inside of apartments buildings, but even on the sidewalks and terraces that wrap around the buildings themselves.

According, to The New York Times, "Pan Am Equities, a real estate management company, may have been one of the first in New York to introduce a smoking ban to an apartment building."

Pan Am Equities properties at 270 Park Avenue South, 145 West 67th Street and 60 West 23rd Street are all now smoke free. Tenants who already lived at these residences before the ban started, about 18 months ago, are still allowed to smoke. Only new tenants are not allowed to smoke in the building.

Pam Am Equities has influenced other apartment complexes in the five boroughs of New York City, where people are closely living together and breathing each other's air, to carry out the same rules and regulations in and out of the apartments.

Some properties located in and around Battery Park City also have a smoking ban. The properties: TriBeCa Park, the Caledonia and TriBeCa Green all have a no smoking ban.

Some experts say, according to The New York Times, "there is no known law in the United States that prohibits landlords from banning smoking in their buildings," but "many trial judges have sided with the non-smoker," simply because this issue has taken an immeasurable toll surrounding the lives of people in this city and the country all together.

"I am for the restrictions on smokers. If there are designated places to use the restroom and designated places to throw out the trash, cigarette smokers should have designated places to smoke. The odor is repulsive and harmful to the surrounding people. Plus, cigarette buds pollute our streets more than anything else, so then designated places should have a place to dispose of them," junior Michael Sanicola said.

According to Science Daily, a new study was published on Sept. 29, "researchers find that smoking bans can reduce the number of heart attacks by as much as 26 percent per year." This statistic is conjured from only one year, the percentile may increase throughout the years if this regulation continues to expand and passes it as a law in all 50 states.

Science Daily also stated that, "According to projections by the authors, a nationwide ban on public smoking could prevent as many as 154,000 heart attacks each year. Direct smoking doubles the risk of heart attack. Second hand smoke increases the risk by 30 percent."

The Web site also reiterates that Meyers and Schroeder, the two doctors who did this study, "encourage clinicians to support community smoking bans and other tobacco control measures increases on cigarettes, expanded cessation services including telephone quit lines and educational campaigns."