NY City relies on housing programme it deplores

New York

BEYOND the unlocked front doors of 60 Clarkson Ave in Brooklyn, the lobby is a half-lit cavern, its ornate plaster mouldings and patterned floor smeared with dirt. The windows gape onto a courtyard dense with weeds and trash. On the days when it comes at all, the elevator smells of urine.

Inside Apartment 6M, where Merlinda Fernandez, her husband and their six children have lived for five years, cockroaches saunter along the walls and invade the refrigerator, and mice nestle in the baby's blanket. A bedroom door lost its glass panes long ago, then one of the wooden boards used to patch it. Toys lie untouched in their packaging, the only way the family knows to keep them safe from the roaches.