Secondhand smoke and renters’ rights
Re “Lighten up,” editorial, Jan. 30
The Times misses the mark in ridiculing one city’s attempt to address a significant health and safety issue -- the prevalence of secondhand smoke in apartment/condo buildings. This is not, as your editorial suggests, an issue of government overreach but rather an important public health measure to ensure that the majority of nonsmokers can enjoy a smoke-free environment in their own residences.
As a renter myself, I recently experienced the very problem that the measure in Belmont, Calif., seeks to address. After silently enduring cigarette smoke seeping into my apartment from the unit above, I finally asked the landlord to intervene. After attempting minimal remedial measures, the landlord told me in writing either to move or file suit if I did not wish to breathe secondhand smoke in my residence. Obviously, these are not particularly enviable options.
Secondhand tobacco smoke, a recognized carcinogen that does not always stop at apartment doors and walls, is an appropriate subject of further municipal regulation for multiunit dwellings.
DARRIN HURWITZ
Washington
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Re “This smoking ban has some fuming,” Jan. 29
Let’s clarify one thing: “Sanctity” is a right that applies to nonsmokers’ multiunit homes every bit as much as it does to smokers’. So, to nonsmokers in general, may I say: The beleaguered, the choking, the nonsmoking renters who are stuck in a truly horrific secondhand smoke quandary in their apartments (or condos) need your support.
I was in one apartment for too long (I couldn’t afford to move), and many simply may have no conception of how bad it can get.
HARVEY PEARSON
Los Angeles
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It is amusing how poor smokers in Belmont are threatened with punishment for not being able to afford detached single-family homes. Even more amusing is the fact that the proponents of the ban even know how shaky the law is on this kind of intrusion. What’s next? Only residents of single-family homes can consume trans fat?
This is the kind of government creep that scares me because so many people hate smoking and are thus oblivious, or worse, are eager to abandon the concepts of protection of the minority and private property just to see smokers punished. Now it’s smokers; soon it will be fatties, TV addicts, car owners, religious zealots or anyone else deemed to be undesirable by the lifestyle Nazis.
CHRISTINA PENN
Centreville, Va.