> 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.
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