Sheila Thompson never leaves her apartment empty handed. The resident of the Ruth Barkley Apartments, a Boston Housing Authority (BHA) complex located in the city's South End, pushes a cart filled with prescription medicine, water and a chair.
Thompson told us she brings a chair because she never knows when the elevator will stop working and she might be stuck in the lobby for hours waiting for help to arrive. Because of health issues, Thompson is not able to climb the stairs to her seventh-floor apartment.
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"We're not just laying around doing nothing," Thompson said. "We have things to do. We have families. We go in and out."
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When we visited Thompson, one of the building's elevators had been out of service for an extended period of time. Thompson demonstrated how the other working elevator could be a bit unreliable. After it stopped on one floor, she had to physically pull the doors shut before it continued on its journey.
"My family is very upset," Thompson said. "They say, 'Sheila you got to leave or they got to fix them.'"
It seems like somebody is going to have to die for y'all to fix the problem.
Allen Chamberland gets around in a wheelchair and lives on the sixth floor of the public housing complex.
Chamberland said the BHA has put him up in a hotel when the elevators have not been functioning. On several occasions, the public housing resident also told us he's been rescued by first responders.
"I've been stuck in an elevator," Chamberland said. "The fire department had to come and pry the doors open to get me out."
The NBC10 Investigators teamed up with our colleagues at Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra to speak with residents about what kind of burden the elevator problems put on their lives.
"Promises and promises," one woman told us in Spanish. "They always say that they are going to fix it."
Have a tip for the NBC10 Investigators? Email us at tips@nbcboston.com.
When the elevators are not working, the apartment complexes can feel more like a prison to residents, said Dawn Oates, an outspoken disability rights advocate who has spent months demanding improvements at public housing properties in Boston.
"These are protected classes of people who deserve all the rights and privileges as everybody else," Oates said. "If you're stuck in the hallway of your building, sleeping in a wheelchair because you have no way to get upstairs, that's a health and safety concern for everybody."
The issue was recently front and center at a Boston City Council hearing called by Councilor Ed Flynn, whose district includes the South End.
During the public testimony, residents described the frustration of the elevator situation. One woman said her mother is battling cancer and missed a chemo appointment.
"It seems like the only time a problem gets fixed is when people start dying," another resident testified. "So it seems like somebody is going to have to die for y'all to fix the problem."
BHA officials said they are hamstrung by lack of funding. Elevators cost millions of dollars to replace and repair work can be delayed by a shortage of parts and lack of qualified technicians to do the work.
According to the BHA, the agency has total capital needs of $1.5 billion dollars, but only receives a fraction of that — $30 million — in annual capital funding for structural upgrades and renovations.
"It's a huge frustration of ours that people don't give us the federal funding support that we need," said Kenzie Bok, the administrator at the BHA. "We need people to recognize that to acknowledge the dignity of public housing residents has to mean resourcing appropriately."
Thanks in part to $4 million approved by the City of Boston, Bok said good news is on the horizon for residents at Ruth Barkley.
Ten elevators are slated for full modernization. Two of those replacements will start this month and the other eight are entering the design phase. Meantime, several other elevators are receiving upgrades, according to the BHA.
"Our hope is that our residents will see that this really happening. We are really going to get relief," Bok said.
Time is of the essence. Over the holidays, Flynn said he continued hearing from residents about missing medical appointments or feeling isolated in their apartments.
"This is simply unacceptable," he wrote in a letter to the BHA on Monday. "These conditions may very well be in violation of state and federal laws."
In a response, Bok wrote to Flynn that the BHA is offering transfers to certain households that are concerned with continuing to rely on a single elevator cab in their buildings while waiting on the replacements. The agency employs a chair service contractor to get residents up and down stairs for major appointments in the case of an extended outage, though the service requires 24 hours' notice.
Bok also said that, starting next week, the BHA maintenance supervisory team will be temporarily headquartered at Ruth Barkley to address issues that arise.
Residents told us they've heard promises before. They want to see results before celebrating.
"The most frustrating part is they act like they don't care," Thompson said.
