There is a young woman who lives diagonally above me who is developmentally disabled. She makes a great deal of noise, beginning early in the morning and running into late at night - moving around in her apartment, slamming doors and cabinet, playing with her cat. I've had to put up with it for years.
In recent months, she's begun making a banging sound that begins early in the morning and occurs sporadically throughout the day. It's disturbing and annoying at all times, but she's been doing it earlier and earlier, and she's been waking me up. I'm in dreadful state to begin with since the violent phone confrontation with Rhonda several weeks ago - I've been having trouble eating and sleeping, I've lost a great deal of weight, I'm in a constant state of agitated exhaustion. I'm obviously in a state of post-traumatic stress. I'm going back into therapy because of this woman and her staff. I'll probably be going on medication. I have been taking medication to help me to get some sleep.
Two days ago, I was woken up at 5:56 by the banging. I told Jill, the Director of Community Life, that if she didn't make this young woman stop, I would call in the police as I was forced to do with H., the man who used to run up and down the hall. She told me that the young woman had been spoken to by Andrea, one of the social workers, and that she would ask her to speak to her again. Andrea was ineffectual when she was head of the Social Services Dept., and I can't imagine she's become any more effective now that she's working part-time.
Yesterday morning, there was no banging, so I assumed she'd been spoken to. This morning, it occurred again at 5:22. I immediately emailed Jill to tell her I'd be calling the police, then left a voice message for one of the Community Service Officers for the Town of Brookline, to whom I've been speaking in recent months. Hopefully, he'll be able to handle it. If he can't, I'll have to begin calling the desk and asking them to send over uniformed officers. I don't relish the idea of calling the police on a developmentally disabled woman, but as per usual, they're leaving me no choice.
As I said in an earlier post, whenever an issue like this arises, if I can get the management to involve themselves themselves at all, the most that gets said is, "Won't you stop, pretty please?" By contrast, when they address me, they have no problem being threatening and abusive. Rhonda sent me that vile letter I described earlier, and Carolyn, the previous Property Manager who has since been terminated (not for abuse, about which Hebrew SeniorLife doesn't give a damn, but for stealing) threatened me with eviction. If one were to rank every resident numerically according to the management's willingness to address and solve problems, I'd be at rock bottom.
The management of Hebrew SeniorLife, in its hiring practices, couldn't care less about any level of competence. This organization is a haven for career social service bureaucrats, and they're all being paid handsomely for doing virtually no work. I'm convinced there's a good deal of nepotism going on as well; people here hire their friends. Again, it's time for the Jewish community of Boston to wake up and realize what's going on. They're being suckered out of millions of dollars per year, while the weakest and most defenseless members of the Jewish community are being ignored at best, abused at worst.
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Monday, June 1, 2015
History of my attempts to to get Hebrew SeniorLife to comply with the law - Part 5
> I then approached Dorothy and asked if this was, in fact, the only offer she was going to make me. She replied, “Of course not; I would never tell you that!” She then suggested I look at the apartment again with Jim, the Maintenance Director, who has been my only friend in the administration over the past seven and a half years. He and I went the next day, and my previous experience was confirmed; the elevator was horrendously loud. The unit shared two walls with one of the elevator shafts, and as the elevator car rose, the entire apartment shook. Furthermore, while I was there, a man who was friendly with the previous tenant, who had been moved to Hebrew Rehab, came in to collect some of her belongings. She was an elderly woman who was hard of hearing, and he told me she used to complain to him about the elevator noise.
> I told Sue that regretfully, I’d have to decline the apartment. I then went to Dorothy to thank her for her consideration and to keep open the lines of communication. Her reply was, “Well, at least you tried – but I don’t see anything coming along in the foreseeable future, so you’ll just have to do the best you can” - then she dismissed me with a wave of her hand. She had told me this wasn’t the only offer she’d make me, but was now telling me, essentially, that it was. Again, this was Dorothy’s pattern – black one moment and white the next.
> I am now convinced the offer of an apartment was a calculated move on Dorothy’s part. For years, each mention of the promised apartment was deflected with rationalizations or ignored outright. When I involved the Fair Housing Officer and consulted my friend the Disability Commissioner and informed Dorothy that Center Communities was in violation of the law, an apartment suddenly materialized - however, it was in their other building, which houses a significantly younger population. I would imagine the apartments next to the elevators are more difficult to rent, as those who apply for residency in that building are far less hearing-impaired than are most of the residents in the building in which I currently reside. Furthermore, the apartment was on one of the top floors, directly below the machinery that ran the elevators, which added to the noise and vibration.
> I believe the unit was one that was difficult to rent, and that Dorothy’s rationale was that either I would take the apartment and they would have dispensed with the problem of renting it, or that I would refuse it and she would appear to have offered me a reasonable accommodation, thereby sparing her government involvement. As soon as I turned it down, she went back to her position of claiming an apartment would not become available for years.
> I had only one further conversation with Dorothy, which took place in January 2013. For nearly seven years, I have experienced an ongoing problem with both residents and caretakers removing my laundry from the washing machines and dryers, in violation of building regulations. As with everything else, this has been an issue with which various people in the management have refused to become involved, so I approached Dorothy about it. She told me it was unacceptable, that she’d investigate and put a stop to it. Of course, none of this was done, and the problem persists to this day.
> In the summer of 2013, Dorothy took a leave of absence to attend to her husband, who was dying. As soon as she left, her two right-hand employees, Carolyn and a fellow named Ron who was the head of Accounting, were terminated for fiscal malfeasance. They were sending Dorothy a clear message - don't come back. She resigned formally soon afterward. Hebrew SeniorLife pulled Rhonda from one of their other properties to be the "Interim Director", and as soon as Dorothy was officially gone, they made her the Director. As I've been describing in previous posts, I've fared no better under Rhonda. In fact, dealing with her has been a nightmare, and she has destroyed my health.
> In June of 2014, I had a conversation with another tenant, a woman of approximately my age, who had been living in the building for about three years. She informed me that she was in a studio apartment and was shortly being moved to a one-bedroom (which subsequently transpired). I asked her how long she had been waiting for the move; she told me it had been three years. As of the compiling of this document, I have been waiting for nearly seven.
> I now have proof of what I have suspected all along - that everything Dorothy Gay and her staff told me:
- that transfers are against Center Communities’ policies,
- that according to Mass Housing’s regulations, they’ve had too many non-elderly people in one-bedroom units and couldn’t accommodate me,
- that a waiting list for one-bedroom units for non-elderly people had been established specifically to accommodate me, and that I was first in line,
was a deliberate and premeditated falsehood.
The behavior I have described in this series of five posts is typical of the manner in which Hebrew SeniorLife operates. These people are representative of the sort of career social service bureaucrats they hire. They care little-to-nothing for the health or comfort of the residents. Their main concern lies in preserving this cash cow.
> I told Sue that regretfully, I’d have to decline the apartment. I then went to Dorothy to thank her for her consideration and to keep open the lines of communication. Her reply was, “Well, at least you tried – but I don’t see anything coming along in the foreseeable future, so you’ll just have to do the best you can” - then she dismissed me with a wave of her hand. She had told me this wasn’t the only offer she’d make me, but was now telling me, essentially, that it was. Again, this was Dorothy’s pattern – black one moment and white the next.
> I am now convinced the offer of an apartment was a calculated move on Dorothy’s part. For years, each mention of the promised apartment was deflected with rationalizations or ignored outright. When I involved the Fair Housing Officer and consulted my friend the Disability Commissioner and informed Dorothy that Center Communities was in violation of the law, an apartment suddenly materialized - however, it was in their other building, which houses a significantly younger population. I would imagine the apartments next to the elevators are more difficult to rent, as those who apply for residency in that building are far less hearing-impaired than are most of the residents in the building in which I currently reside. Furthermore, the apartment was on one of the top floors, directly below the machinery that ran the elevators, which added to the noise and vibration.
> I believe the unit was one that was difficult to rent, and that Dorothy’s rationale was that either I would take the apartment and they would have dispensed with the problem of renting it, or that I would refuse it and she would appear to have offered me a reasonable accommodation, thereby sparing her government involvement. As soon as I turned it down, she went back to her position of claiming an apartment would not become available for years.
> I had only one further conversation with Dorothy, which took place in January 2013. For nearly seven years, I have experienced an ongoing problem with both residents and caretakers removing my laundry from the washing machines and dryers, in violation of building regulations. As with everything else, this has been an issue with which various people in the management have refused to become involved, so I approached Dorothy about it. She told me it was unacceptable, that she’d investigate and put a stop to it. Of course, none of this was done, and the problem persists to this day.
> In the summer of 2013, Dorothy took a leave of absence to attend to her husband, who was dying. As soon as she left, her two right-hand employees, Carolyn and a fellow named Ron who was the head of Accounting, were terminated for fiscal malfeasance. They were sending Dorothy a clear message - don't come back. She resigned formally soon afterward. Hebrew SeniorLife pulled Rhonda from one of their other properties to be the "Interim Director", and as soon as Dorothy was officially gone, they made her the Director. As I've been describing in previous posts, I've fared no better under Rhonda. In fact, dealing with her has been a nightmare, and she has destroyed my health.
> In June of 2014, I had a conversation with another tenant, a woman of approximately my age, who had been living in the building for about three years. She informed me that she was in a studio apartment and was shortly being moved to a one-bedroom (which subsequently transpired). I asked her how long she had been waiting for the move; she told me it had been three years. As of the compiling of this document, I have been waiting for nearly seven.
> I now have proof of what I have suspected all along - that everything Dorothy Gay and her staff told me:
- that transfers are against Center Communities’ policies,
- that according to Mass Housing’s regulations, they’ve had too many non-elderly people in one-bedroom units and couldn’t accommodate me,
- that a waiting list for one-bedroom units for non-elderly people had been established specifically to accommodate me, and that I was first in line,
was a deliberate and premeditated falsehood.
The behavior I have described in this series of five posts is typical of the manner in which Hebrew SeniorLife operates. These people are representative of the sort of career social service bureaucrats they hire. They care little-to-nothing for the health or comfort of the residents. Their main concern lies in preserving this cash cow.
History of my attempts to to get Hebrew SeniorLife to comply with the law - Part 4
In September and October 2012, I had two meetings with Dorothy Gay pertaining to the matter of moving me to a one-bedroom apartment, summarized below.
> Dorothy refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing on her part or on the parts of her employees. She attempted to frame everything that had gone on to that point, including Carolyn’s attempt to force me to pay $5,000 and her threat of eviction, as a series of misunderstandings. The most to which she would admit was that she hadn’t been as “on top” of the situation as she should have been.
>I had consulted a friend who had formerly been a Disability Commissioner for the Town of Somerville, of which Dorothy had been mayor for one term. This woman sat on the committee that drafted the Commonwealth’s guidelines for reasonable accommodation, and told me that Center Communities was clearly in violation of the law. I informed Dorothy of this; she was disinterested and claimed the offer of another studio two years prior had been a reasonable accommodation, which it obviously was not. This was one of Dorothy’s many attempts to deflect and to avoid dealing with the matter.
> She told me in the first meeting that she would be retiring in the spring and that she was making me a “promise” that she would have the matter resolved before then. In the second meeting, she was less certain she’d be retiring, but told me that if she did, she’d leave her successor a letter describing the situation so that I wouldn’t have to “start from scratch”. She did neither.
>Dorothy told me they were beginning a separate waiting list for one-bedrooms for non-elderly disabled people and that I was first on the list. Nothing was said about the fact that I was supposed to be placed on a waiting list two years prior, or that I should have been placed on a list four years prior after the meeting with Carolyn and Andrea. From my perspective, I’d been on a “waiting list”, whether real or not, for four years.
> She informed me that she wouldn’t be able to give me a one-bedroom apartment for the foreseeable future, as she was responsible to Mass Housing regarding quotas of people of various categories, and that they were already over the quota for non-elderly disabled people in one-bedroom units. Later in that conversation, I asked her, “As I’ve given you two doctor’s letters mandating a move to a one-bedroom apartment as a medical necessity, can you use those to justify the move to Mass Housing?” She replied, “Oh, I don’t have to answer to Mass Housing; I can do whatever I like!” This encouraged me; however, in the following meeting, she told me again that she couldn’t give me a one-bedroom unit because of Mass Housing and quotas. This was always the way with Dorothy – it would be black, then white, then black again.
> However, in spite of the conversations described in the previous paragraph, she also told me, in the first meeting, that they were preparing to offer another apartment to an elderly woman who had been complaining about her unit. They had already offered her two, which she’d declined, and were about to offer her a third, and Dorothy told me that if she accepted it, she would give me the apartment being vacated. Although the offer never materialized, this was illustrative of three things: that there was no substance to Dorothy’s excuses involving Mass Housing or to Sue Carlsen’s claim that they never allowed transfers, and of the fact that they have always been far more willing to accommodate others than to accommodate me.
> I asked Dorothy if, in the meantime, something could be done about the various noise issues. She replied, “There really isn't any way we can go to someone and tell them they can't do what they need to do", which was nonsense, as no one needs to be running up and down the halls at night or moving furniture and slamming drawers and cabinets at 5:00 AM or at midnight - certainly no one at the advanced age of most of the residents.
> These issues all remained unaddressed until late November 2012. At that time, the elderly woman above me had been going through a period of many months during which she was making a sharp, metallic sound over my head repeatedly during the course of a day, beginning early in the morning and continuing until late at night (which she denied doing). I had spoken to the management about this on numerous occasions, but they were unwilling to approach her or to become involved. At one point, it became especially egregious, so I approached Tammy, another social worker to whom Andrea had turned me over a few weeks prior (and who has since become the head of the Social Services Dept.), and who had been similarly disinterested in becoming involved in resolving any of these problems. I told her my mother had just died, I was in a depleted state and that something had to be done about it. Suddenly, a one-bedroom apartment materialized. I believe this was in response to what I had said to Dorothy earlier about reasonable accommodation, and the fact that I had involved the Fair Housing Officer. There were two caveats – it was in their other building at 1550 Beacon Street and it was next to the elevator.
> On the following day, I went to look at the apartment with Susan, the Leasing Manager. The elevators were extremely noisy; furthermore, Sue approached me in a manner that presented a number of problems:
1. On the way there, she informed me that my monthly parking fee was being raised from $160 to $200. This complicated the matter further, as I wasn’t certain I could afford it, and if I had to give up my car, 1550 Beacon was too far removed from Coolidge Corner to be a readily accessible location for me.
2. She told me, “I had to fight to get you this apartment!” which was, of course, untrue, because as I’ve described earlier, she had been resistant to moving me all along.
3. She insisted upon an immediate answer. I was incredulous; they’d made me wait for five years and she was now insisting upon an answer in five minutes. My mother had just died, I wasn’t in a frame of mind to be making important decisions, they were offering me a unit with very real problems attached – and she wanted an answer right away (I’ve since learned that this is illegal; they are required to allow at least 24 hours for a decision to be made).
4. She also told me, “This is the only offer they are going to make you! If you don’t take it, there will never be another!” At the end, she reluctantly agreed to give me 24 hours to make the decision.
> Dorothy refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing on her part or on the parts of her employees. She attempted to frame everything that had gone on to that point, including Carolyn’s attempt to force me to pay $5,000 and her threat of eviction, as a series of misunderstandings. The most to which she would admit was that she hadn’t been as “on top” of the situation as she should have been.
>I had consulted a friend who had formerly been a Disability Commissioner for the Town of Somerville, of which Dorothy had been mayor for one term. This woman sat on the committee that drafted the Commonwealth’s guidelines for reasonable accommodation, and told me that Center Communities was clearly in violation of the law. I informed Dorothy of this; she was disinterested and claimed the offer of another studio two years prior had been a reasonable accommodation, which it obviously was not. This was one of Dorothy’s many attempts to deflect and to avoid dealing with the matter.
> She told me in the first meeting that she would be retiring in the spring and that she was making me a “promise” that she would have the matter resolved before then. In the second meeting, she was less certain she’d be retiring, but told me that if she did, she’d leave her successor a letter describing the situation so that I wouldn’t have to “start from scratch”. She did neither.
>Dorothy told me they were beginning a separate waiting list for one-bedrooms for non-elderly disabled people and that I was first on the list. Nothing was said about the fact that I was supposed to be placed on a waiting list two years prior, or that I should have been placed on a list four years prior after the meeting with Carolyn and Andrea. From my perspective, I’d been on a “waiting list”, whether real or not, for four years.
> She informed me that she wouldn’t be able to give me a one-bedroom apartment for the foreseeable future, as she was responsible to Mass Housing regarding quotas of people of various categories, and that they were already over the quota for non-elderly disabled people in one-bedroom units. Later in that conversation, I asked her, “As I’ve given you two doctor’s letters mandating a move to a one-bedroom apartment as a medical necessity, can you use those to justify the move to Mass Housing?” She replied, “Oh, I don’t have to answer to Mass Housing; I can do whatever I like!” This encouraged me; however, in the following meeting, she told me again that she couldn’t give me a one-bedroom unit because of Mass Housing and quotas. This was always the way with Dorothy – it would be black, then white, then black again.
> However, in spite of the conversations described in the previous paragraph, she also told me, in the first meeting, that they were preparing to offer another apartment to an elderly woman who had been complaining about her unit. They had already offered her two, which she’d declined, and were about to offer her a third, and Dorothy told me that if she accepted it, she would give me the apartment being vacated. Although the offer never materialized, this was illustrative of three things: that there was no substance to Dorothy’s excuses involving Mass Housing or to Sue Carlsen’s claim that they never allowed transfers, and of the fact that they have always been far more willing to accommodate others than to accommodate me.
> I asked Dorothy if, in the meantime, something could be done about the various noise issues. She replied, “There really isn't any way we can go to someone and tell them they can't do what they need to do", which was nonsense, as no one needs to be running up and down the halls at night or moving furniture and slamming drawers and cabinets at 5:00 AM or at midnight - certainly no one at the advanced age of most of the residents.
> These issues all remained unaddressed until late November 2012. At that time, the elderly woman above me had been going through a period of many months during which she was making a sharp, metallic sound over my head repeatedly during the course of a day, beginning early in the morning and continuing until late at night (which she denied doing). I had spoken to the management about this on numerous occasions, but they were unwilling to approach her or to become involved. At one point, it became especially egregious, so I approached Tammy, another social worker to whom Andrea had turned me over a few weeks prior (and who has since become the head of the Social Services Dept.), and who had been similarly disinterested in becoming involved in resolving any of these problems. I told her my mother had just died, I was in a depleted state and that something had to be done about it. Suddenly, a one-bedroom apartment materialized. I believe this was in response to what I had said to Dorothy earlier about reasonable accommodation, and the fact that I had involved the Fair Housing Officer. There were two caveats – it was in their other building at 1550 Beacon Street and it was next to the elevator.
> On the following day, I went to look at the apartment with Susan, the Leasing Manager. The elevators were extremely noisy; furthermore, Sue approached me in a manner that presented a number of problems:
1. On the way there, she informed me that my monthly parking fee was being raised from $160 to $200. This complicated the matter further, as I wasn’t certain I could afford it, and if I had to give up my car, 1550 Beacon was too far removed from Coolidge Corner to be a readily accessible location for me.
2. She told me, “I had to fight to get you this apartment!” which was, of course, untrue, because as I’ve described earlier, she had been resistant to moving me all along.
3. She insisted upon an immediate answer. I was incredulous; they’d made me wait for five years and she was now insisting upon an answer in five minutes. My mother had just died, I wasn’t in a frame of mind to be making important decisions, they were offering me a unit with very real problems attached – and she wanted an answer right away (I’ve since learned that this is illegal; they are required to allow at least 24 hours for a decision to be made).
4. She also told me, “This is the only offer they are going to make you! If you don’t take it, there will never be another!” At the end, she reluctantly agreed to give me 24 hours to make the decision.
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