FAIRVIEW TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- Multiple residents of The Fairmont apartment complex in Fairview Township, York County are ill, and they tell FOX43 that the York Housing Authority is to blame due to unclean living conditions.
Perhaps no one is more affected than Joyce Chadwell. She says she started to experience shortness of breath in May while living in her apartment unit. Later that month, the York Housing Authority tested multiple apartment rooms in the complex and found nine different types of mold.
Since then, Chadwell says, her condition has gotten worse. Despite being 62 years old, doctors diagnosed her with asthma in June. She's been prescribed five different types of medication, including multiple inhalers. She takes Singulair nightly before going to bed.
"I try not to be here very often. I just try and stay out as late as possible," Chadwell says. "When I come home, I have to open the windows in the hopes it will cut down the mold."
She says the York Housing Authority told her the mold found in August had since been removed. However, with her worsening health, she is convinced mold still exists within her walls and growing on her furniture.
"I just want to get out of here," Joyce says in tears. "I just want to breathe."
Others in The Fairmont are experiencing similar health concerns.
Phyllis Puorro lives two floors above Joyce Chadwell. Her apartment came up positive in the August mold test. She uses an oxygen tank daily because of a lung disease. However, in the decades she has been living at The Fairmont, she claims when the mold was found in her AC unit, it was the first time it had been cleaned by the apartment's maintenance crew in ten years.
"All they did was put in a new air conditioner and told me to keep my mouth shut," Phyllis says as she displays a sample of the mold she she took from inside the old unit. She stores it in a Petri dish. "This place is full of elderly, handicapped people. It's low income housing, but we still have rights. And he’s not seeing the work is not done."
He is Craig Zumbrun, the Director of the York Housing Authority, and the ire of Phyllis, Joyce, and many others who declined to speak with FOX43 out of fear of retribution.
When FOX43 visited The Fairmont in October and November, a wall on the fifth floor of the complex had been ripped down to the brick, which was rotting and crumbling. Above it, a damp spot on the roof. FOX43 took Zumbrun to the site on the fifth floor which residents say had been there for weeks. It was the first time Zumbrun had seen it.
"I'm guessing we have a pinhole leak that’s worked its way down to this point," he says, investigating the bare wall.
Zumbrun says he hears complaints from residents daily, and is doing everything he can to fix it. Quite simply, he adds, the problem is money, and the York Housing Authority is hemorrhaging. In the last five years, Zumbrun says the York Housing Authority's annual operating budget has been slashed from $23 million in 2010 to $18.5 in 2015. In the last 10 years, the YHA has added 39 properties, while slashing staff by 25 percent. Currently, only 75 people maintain the York Housing Authority's 55 properties.
"There's a level of reasonableness here that, yeah, if I had all the money in the world, we could do other things," Zumbrun says. "But we work with tight, tight, tight, budgets."
Is money an excuse to keep living conditions unsafe? Zumbrun adds the York Housing Authority has done plenty to protect its residents, including removing the mold found in multiple units in August.
"As soon as we had a the lab results back, we had that company abate," Zumbrun says. "Then, we took the next step and abated the units beside them so there couldn’t be any migration in the public areas and hallways."
However, Joyce Chadwell is still convinced mold exists. After the YHA's tests were completed, she performed her own test with Microbac Laboratories of Harrisburg. Those tests came back positive.
Currently, Joyce Chadwell still lives in Room 202 of The Fairmont, although she admits it likely won't be for much longer. The York Housing Authority has offered to move her to apartments closer to York City, but she's declined as it takes her further away from a Fairview Twp. church where she volunteers as a senior companion.
In December, she visited the doctor after hives broke out on her back, arms, and legs. She claims they told her it was an allergic reaction to the mold. She has not been back to see her doctor since.
"I have $7300 in unpaid medical bills," Joyce sobs as she sorts through stacks of bills and late notices. "My credit card is getting maxed out from paying the other co-pays."
Joyce is unable to work due to a degenerative disc disease and fibromyalgia. She plans on leaving her apartment in the York Housing Authority after her current rent expires March 1. After that, she doesn't know where she'll go.
"I don't know what to do," she says, now crying. "I just can't be sick like this."