Watch Your Butt at The Brooklyner and 180 Montague

By on January 17, 2014 7:51 pm in Brooklyn Heights, Real Estate, War On Fun

The Daily News reports that the Brooklyner, the Lawrence St. high-rise that looks like a cigarette, will be smoke-free as of March. Smoking will also soon be prohibited at Archstone Brooklyn Heights at 180 Montague, which like the Brooklyner is owned by Equity Residential.

All new residents in the [Brooklyner], where one-bedrooms start at $2,955-a-month, will be required to sign smoke-free addendums attached to their lease. All current residents will also have to abide by the policy. The smoke-free acknowledgement will be included in lease renewals. Residents who light up inside will be in violation.

What do you think? Is this a wise move to protect tenants’ safety? Or is it a violation of rights? (Or meaningless in the face of all the exhaust New Yorkers breathe in daily?)

Photo: Joy Keh/Daily News

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  • AudreySilk

    Violation of homeowner rights, scientifically ludicrous on its face and… prove it. Got a warrant (to enter)?

  • David on Middagh

    ^ Disqus riffraff.

  • AudreySilk

    Okay, I’m riffraff. Now that we have that covered how about actually saying something of substance about the issue?

  • Jazz

    With the new evidence announced today by the surgeon general, smoking is now more than ever the dumbest thing for anyone to do. Standing up for smokers rights is insanity personified .

  • Jazz
  • HicksOnHicks

    If these buildings were built with quality, you wouldn’t have to ask tenants not to smoke. As a prior Archway tenant I can vouch for the cheap materials and workmanship. Nevertheless, this is just mktg hype. It isn’t enforceable and I doubt that it will dissuade casual smokers (tobacco and other substances).

  • HicksOnHicks

    these are rental units. tenants lack “homeowner rights”.

  • HicksOnHicks

    just because something is “dumb” doesn’t mean that it needs to be banned.

  • Strauss

    Personally, I’d pay a premium to live in a smoke-free building. For odor. I accept the fact that if buildings’ ventilation systems were perfect, it wouldn’t matter, but the reality is that they’re not, and I don’t want to smell cigarette smoke in my home.

  • BKNYnative

    I’m with HicksOnHicks, I’m an ex-smoker and have little tolerance for second hand smoke but the real issue here is cheap construction and marketing.

  • Heights Obeserver

    Really? Specifically, what legal homeowner’s rights right do renters lack? I’d be curious to know.

  • HicksOnHicks

    I’m no lawyer, but I imagine that the eviction process for tenants is more streamlined than for mortgage holders, or that home improvement options may be limited, or that the tenant needs to provide access to prospective new tenants in the event of an expiring lease.

    However the point I was trying to make was that these were rental apptmts and that was not clear when discussing “ownership” rights.

  • Rick

    Contrary to some opinions expressed here earlier, cigarette smoke can easily travel between apartments in even the best constructed buildings. Smoke from cigarettes has been proven to travel between apartments in numerous ways, such as via small cracks. But even more surprisingly, it travels through electrical wall sockets and even bathtub and sink drains. Including up and down between different floors of a building.

    And it is far more dangerous than the inconvenience of being “just a bad smell”. Studies have proven that non-smoking partners of smokers are much more likely to experience smoke-related health problems.

    And hospitals are now concerned about the dangers of “third-hand smoke” (when health care workers go outside to smoke and then carry smoke on their clothes back into the hospital).

    But these non-smoking buildings are not creating these rules out of the goodness of their hearts. Non-smoking buildings are so popular now that they command a premium, so the builders are making more money.

  • petercow

    The people that own the apartment, can enter the apartment if they have cause to believe the lease is being violated.

    They also may have other rights in the lease.

    So evicting someone for smoking is not going to be too difficult. Also, the landlord would be under no obligation to offer a renewal.

    So to answer your question.. plenty.

  • Flagel

    maybe it will keep the hipsters away from the area.

  • Jorale-man

    I would certainly pay more to live in a smoke-free building. All it takes is one smoker in a unit below you who decides, on a warm summer’s evening, to open their window and blow their carcinogens out the window and up into your home. As previously noted here, it’s not just unpleasant, it’s dangerous. I think it could be easily enforced as smokers leave their mark pretty obviously wherever they go.

  • AudreySilk

    I’ll put you in a garage for half an hour with 100 people smoking at the same time and then put you in another garage for half an hour with a running car. Which one do you think you’re coming out of? Meanwhile it doesn’t seem to concern you that the latter comes in through open windows. Why is that? Not to mention that we’re talking about constant traffic versus a cigarette every now and then that somehow — from one cigarette each time — manages to fly out one window and right into yours. No breeze, no dilution. It’s magical I tell you!

  • AudreySilk

    You want to extrapolate still debatable studies for long-term exposure of people living within the same 4 walls for 30 years to whiffs of cigarette smoke people SAY are making it from one apt. to another. That’s like saying because people drown in water that if a drop of water leaks from my ceiling into your place you’re going to drown. Though this does not mean I concede to the “surprising” (read ludicrous) notion that cigarette smoke is traveling down drains or through wall sockets, only that to believe that is to also believe that the dose rises to any level of harm.

  • AudreySilk

    It’s not as simple as that. Starting with the premise that the general “accordance with the lease” provision for entry can be articulated to inspect for smoking, it still provides that written notice must be given. The landlord can’t just barge in unannounced. I believe 24 hours is standard if not rent controlled (then it’s 5 days). With notice I dare you to prove when you come in that you’ve found what you’re looking for.

  • AudreySilk

    Thinking that standing up for the right to be left alone in any of our legal choices is “insanity” will find you with no food or drink of your own choice just for starters. “Why those stupid football players and boxers! How can anyone stand up for those potentially brain-damaging sports! **I** don’t play them and neither should you!” I always find it amusing when someone thinks that one’s intolerant opinion holds any importance to another.

  • AudreySilk

    Ummm… and? Was I hiding? Unlike you, my name’s right here.

  • Rick

    That cigarette smoke travels within buildings through electrical wall sockets and drains is a fact that is both measurable and proven.

    That shouldn’t surprise you. Smoke is like both sound and water in that it continues to move until it finds an opening through which it can pass. Actually, it travels further than water, as it has little weight and is propelled by moving air currents.

    But it appears you’re not actually serious, as you’re questioning the health hazards of cigarette smoke, a notion you can’t possibly believe.

  • AudreySilk

    The only way it’s “fact” is because some activist researchers with an agenda have tried to say so. But their methodology is shaky and results weak. Measurable? No.

    Then it appears you’re trying to confuse people with a general statement about “hazards of cigarette smoke” and using it to smear me. Don’t conflate a discussion about secondary smoke with primary smoking. It’s intellectually dishonest.

  • Heights Observer

    In a co-op or condo building, those tenants who are rent stabilized actually have more rights than owners. My co-op just adopted a “no smoking” policy and we legally had to exclude rent stabilized tenants from the rule. They can’t smoke in the public areas of the building (halls, stairs, lobby) but they are allowed to smoke in their apartments. Owners cannot.

  • Rick

    “Activist researchers”?

    No, scientists and engineers.

    Using their non-activist smoke measuring equipment, which measure smoke and smoke flow direction, and have shown that smoke moves as described earlier, through electrical outlets and drains.

    But your own agenda shows me that no amount of facts are going to dissuade you.

  • AudreySilk

    Dr. Jonathan Winickoff is one of like two researchers who have dabbled in this particular area. Here’s his bio (no link because Disqus doesn’t like them):

    He currently chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics Tobacco Consortium and has over 30 peer-reviewed publications, 15 specifically about tobacco control in child healthcare settings. Two of these studies were the first to evaluate the delivery of smoking cessation pharmacotherapies to parents in the pediatric setting. He is the Harvard site PI for the Julius Richmond Center of Excellence, Addressing the Secondhand Smoke Exposure of Children. He has drafted key tobacco control policy for the AMA, AAP, and the APA. He serves as a scientific advisor to the Massachusetts Tobacco Control Program. The program he developed out of his research known as CEASE, the Clinical Effort Against Secondhand Smoke Exposure, is being used in North Carolina, being evaluated in a Legacy funded project in New York and Massachusetts, and is available nationally at ceasetobacco.org.

    ———–
    The man runs his own anti-smoker program but noooo, he’s no activist. His research isn’t motivated by an agenda. Heavens no.

  • petercow

    Audrey,
    An apt where smoking takes place, -stinks-. The landlord doesn’t need to prove it “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

  • David on Middagh

    “Okay, I’m riffraff.”

    Not riffraff. *Disqus* riffraff. It seems you haven’t lived in the neighborhood now or in the past or intend to in the future; you don’t live in the building under discussion. Your Disqus account is dedicated to seagulling into others’ discussions and plopping down. You must have some alert set, because you were the first to respond to this posting, where you took it upon yourself to polarize the discussion from the get-go. You have replied here multiple times in various subthreads, and haven’t made a lot of sense—which would have gone some way toward drawing out sympathy for your plight as someone with a habit or addiction that currently is on the wrong side of a social movement.

  • csharp

    i live in a very well built fireproof high rise building and can easily smell smoke from neighbors both downstairs and upstairs. Unless you have an air tight apartment, which doesn’t exist as far as I know… then smoke will get in just like any other air.

  • Jazz

    Cancer is not funny

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