RATS, DIRTY AIR, BROKEN FAUCETS: LAKEVIEW TERRACE RESIDENTS WONDER WHEN HELP WILL COME

IT WAS A SUMMER DAY in 2018 when a stolen bike almost cost Shauntya Ellis her life.

Her son, who she preferred to keep nameless, returned home after school to Ellis’ small apartment off Loop Dr., on the northern side of Lakeview Terrace, the public housing complex situated in the center of Whiskey Island, limestone mounds and the Great Lakes Shipyard. Neighborhood kids, her son said, had stolen his bike, and were after him.

Ellis ran outside. As she reached Loop, the group of kids started shooting at her. Ellis and her son ran in different directions, and managed to dodge, Ellis thought, any of the fire.

“I made it all the way back home before I realized it was blood running down my thigh,” Ellis, 35, said, standing across the street from her apartment in early May. With pup King in her left arm, she lifted her right leg, revealing a browned scar the size of a nickel. “See? It went right through.”

Months after the shooting, Ellis said she developed anxiety and symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Her son, who’s currently in the seventh grade, had seen longrunning breathing issues worsen. A doctor at Lutheran prescribed him albuterol sulfate, a common medicine used to treat pulmonary illnesses, but Ellis said it was mostly ineffective.

“He had to have, like, several breathing treatments,” she told Scene. “He [would] wake up in the middle of night sometime. He can’t stop coughing. Like he can’t catch his breath.” Ellis said she’s reported both her PTSD and her son’s asthma for emergency relief or transfer from her managers at the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority, but to no avail. “They never tried to do nothing about it. It’s like that they can do something, [but it must] get bad before anybody pays attention.”

Ellis’ seemingly endless rumination—Why’s the asthma so bad? What’s causing it?—represents an issue that’s plagued Lakeview, the oldest public housing complex in the U.S., for decades. Built in 1937, it is backed up against a melange of industrial sites, and its proximity to pollution has long ailed residents forced to breathe industry’s excess.

Lakeview’s air quality, a harangue for activists since the 1980s, is, a half dozen residents told Scene, a part of a list of complaints that have long gone unanswered by property managers or CMHA, a half dozen residents told Scene. Other complaints include hordes of rats screeching by at night, the coughing from cockroach dander, malfunctioning faucets, grimy bathtubs, broken doors— unanswered issues, residents said, that’s led to a shoulder-shrugging

In 2020, Long Jones collected 60 signatures—”complaints”— from residents blaming nearby Ontario Stone, or Cargill across Old River, for their worsening COPD, for their kids born with asthma. The following year, Ohio City Inc. sourced Temboo, a environmental data consultant, to help quantify Lakeview’s particulate matter, tiny droplets of pollutants that can harm the lungs.

Let’s Clear The Air’s initiative is somewhat working alongside Lakeview Connects, a $103,000 study hoping to identify transportation problems and possible solutions for Lakeview’s approximately 1,375 tenants.

“What we want to do is compare that data,” Long Jones. “The data we’re collecting to the data that’s collected regionally to show that it’s more concentrated based on the proximity that residents are to these industries.”

Back at Lakeview, Ellis, when told about the two monitors already installed, and the nine on the way, looked away in slight disgust. “We know the conditions are bad,” she said. “It’s pointless. You see it’s a problem. What’s the point of the monitors?”

Over at 1230 Mulberry Ave., where Steve Harrison, 63, has lived alone since 2010, the dust that blows off limestone trucks drifting by on River Rd. is one fact of life upon a pile of many.

For the past year, Harrison said his kitchen sink has lacked running water, and a gaping hole behind the pipes has been unfilled. Harrison