When I was adopted, that was pretty much my home. Like I was good, ’til when I got to the group home.
[Aiden you gotta move your head.]
It’s really been since I was in a group home, since 16-17… [Put it in the garbage Aiden!]
Since i was 16-17 I’ve pretty much been on my own.
At first my rent was $117, when I first moved in, it was only $117. now it’s like 2-something because my sisters living here. It’s not bad at all, I mean.
Well, actually when they told me it was mold, I showed them how like here, and there’s a couple of places where there’s a lot of paint peeling. That’s where I showed them, in the bathroom there’s a lot of places. I was like listen, I’m concerned because I have a child and have a child on the way.
So then, they went in the bathroom and looked and was like “you also have mold” and I was like, I didn’t know about that. I was just mainly concerned about the paint peeling, and you know, lead poisoning and everything, because I caught my son picking at the wall too.
And housing has came here multiple times, they never told me nothing about that being mold, never. They’ve been in the bathroom multiple times, they’ve seen it… I called for the paint peeling and everything everywhere and I needed plastering done and everything in the bathroom, and they told me June.

NYCHA houses about half a million low-income New Yorkers and has an extensive backlog of apartment repairs requested by residents. One of the more pressing concerns in the units is mold and mildew infestations in bathrooms, kitchens and other areas. However, mold isn’t even one of the categories for complaint on NYCHA’s forms, so there’s no way to know how wide the scope of the mold problem really is.
Samantha Carasquillo, 22, is six months pregnant and lives with her son Aiden, 3, in a one bedroom unit in NYCHA’s Jefferson Houses in East Harlem. She recently found out she has a mold problem after a community outreach organization called Little Sisters pointed the issue out to her. They’d visited to make sure her pregnancy was going well and to look at a paint peeling problem she was concerned about.
Carasquillo says NYCHA has been in her apartment numerous times to check out other problems in the apartment, but never acknowledged or pointed out the mold problem to her, which was right in front of their eyes. She’s now put in a work order request, which under a new agreement with the city, must be at least investigated by NYCHA within 15-days of the complaint.