After multiple past attempts, the condo boards at Harbor Towers have succeeded in passing a provision to ban smoking inside the buildings, including both common areas and individual units. Harbor Towers is Boston’s largest condominium complex with 624 units and nearly 1,500 residents.
In order to obtain the 75% vote needed, the provision “grandfathers” existing owners that may continue to smoke inside their unit. Thus, the new policy only applies to new owners.
Harbor Towers follows the residences at the Ritz-Carlton Towers on Boston Common where the North Tower went completely smoke-free without a grandfather clause. Penalties for smoking include $500 fines and the right to take offenders to court.
According to a Boston Globe article, there are 23 condo associations in Suffolk County that have passed anti-smoking amendments to their bylaws.
Thank god the world is smartening up and realizing how much smoking is intrusive to people who dont smoke yet have to deal with it in their own homes!! It comes in through the floors, walls, doorways and especially god forbid if we want to open our windows when the weather is nice for fresh air!! Except all you get is a house full of second hand smoke from all your smoking neighbors!!!!! I spent a whole summer once deciding when i went to bed at night whether i wanted to swelter in the heat all night and not sleep or turn on the air conditioner and be woke up to a bedroom full of cigarette smoke every morning because the tenants below me smoked with their windows open. I hope i live to see the day…even if its when i’m 90… that all the tabacoo companies are shut down and cigarettes are banished!!!!
Also “Smoking is the number one cause of home fire deaths in the United States. Every year, men, women and children lose everything and/or are killed in home fires caused by cigarettes and other smoking materials. About 1,000 people are killed every year from smoking material home fires. These fires can affect not only the smoker, but others living in or next to the home at the time of the fire. Of the fatal victims who were not the smokers: Thirty-four percent were children of the smokers. Twenty-five percent were neighbors or friends of the smokers. One in four people killed in home fires is NOT the smoker whose cigarettes caused the fire.” (this also applies moreso to apartment homes where neighbors are in closer proximity)
If your AC is sucking in smoke you must live on the ground floor and people must be standing right in front of it. You should change the filter in the AC unit. Otherwise you should not be getting smoke through the AC.
There are lots of rental buildings in the North End and the CIty of Boston that are smoke free. You should consider moving to one of them if smoking is such an issue for you. I am a former smoker and I live in a building where smoking is permitted. In the winter time it can get to me so…I open the window. I choose to continue living here. Smoking is legal and probably will be when you are 90.
Personally… I hate walking past all the men who stand around in packs on Hanover St and puff out stinky nasty cigar smoke. Then there is the dog poop everywhere, the pigs who throw trash on the sidewalk or put it out improperly and/or on the wrong night, and the drunks who pee everywhere and puke everywhere and yell and scream and blast loud music at 2AM