Sheila Thompson never leaves her apartment empty handed. The resident of the Ruth Barkley Apartments, a Boston Housing Authority (BHA) complex located in the city’s South End, pushes a cart filled with prescription medicine, water and a chair.
Thompson told us she brings a chair because she never knows when the elevator will stop working and she might be stuck in the lobby for hours waiting for help to arrive. Because of health issues, Thompson is not able to climb the stairs to her seventh-floor apartment.
“We’re not just laying around doing nothing,” Thompson said. “We have things to do. We have families. We go in and out.”
When we visited Thompson, one of the building’s elevators had been out of service for an extended period of time. Thompson demonstrated how the other working elevator could be a bit unreliable. After it stopped on one floor, she had to physically pull the doors shut before it continued on its journey…