Dispatches from the Roach Motel: A New Yorker’s Tale of Public Health - Voices #18
A New York City–based public health professional recounts her long battle with a cockroach infestation, revealing systemic failures in housing, accountability, and public health infrastructure.
We continue our series Voices from the Field: Meeting This Moment in Public Health in which we lift the voices of public health professionals reflecting on the realities we’re facing today - and the lessons learned across the arc of their careers.
Public health professional Maya Nussenzweig shares a vivid personal account of battling a roach infestation that exposes the deep cracks in New York City’s housing and public health systems. Her experience highlights how everyday living conditions can quickly escalate into public health crises, reminding us that the work of public health is inseparable from the places we call home.
If you’d like to follow Maya’s lead and share your own perspective on public health in these times, I’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch!
Dispatches from the Roach Motel: A New Yorker’s Tale of Public Health
By Maya Nussenzweig, MPH
There’s an unofficial tax that comes with living in New York City that the glossy real estate ads don’t talk about: vermin infestations. If you’re lucky, you might encounter one or two roaches a year, usually only during seasonal changes, a move, or nearby construction. But for some residents, the problem runs much deeper.
I’m a born-and-raised New Yorker and a public health professional. For the last 3 months, I’ve been battling a roach infestation that has exposed just how broken our city’s housing and public health systems are. In ten weeks, I’ve counted 31 roaches in my apartment — a number too high to dismiss as “normal,” especially in a so-called luxury condominium.
Under the NYC Housing Maintenance Code, a roach infestation is defined by the presence and persistence of roaches that indicate active breeding and a failure to eradicate them. Landlords are required to prevent infestations. Buildings that fail to act can be cited for a Class C (immediately hazardous) violation by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).
The source of the problem is clear: standing water outside my unit, created by the neighboring building, an ambulatory care center. Their air conditioning units relies on a sprinkler setup that has led to pooling water. One neighbor has already had to hire pest control due to mosquitoes. As someone with asthma and severe allergies — and with the recent Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Central Harlem on my mind — the situation feels not just disgusting but actively hazardous!
Before I saw any roaches, I experienced persistent sneezing and unexpected skin sensitivity. In hindsight, this may have been the early effects of cockroach allergens, known to trigger asthma and spread bacteria. Even unseen, roaches can cause gastrointestinal illness and food contamination. In just over two months, I’ve endured seven professional exterminations and four “search and seal” visits to close off possible points of entry, and my own daily DIY campaign. Still, the roaches keep coming, because the underlying issue of the standing water has not been addressed.
My public health training has shaped how I’ve handled this. I have approached it like an outbreak: documenting patterns, tracing causes, seeking upstream solutions, and mobilizing the appropriate agencies to seek a coordinated response focused on systemic and preventive solutions. That’s why it’s been infuriating to see how poorly my building has handled the structural root of the problem. My landlord, who lives abroad, keeps saying his “hands are tied” - a convenient excuse for inaction. It’s clear that he is uninformed or disengaged from the obligations of NYC property ownership.
Moving is not a guaranteed solution - roaches are everywhere and the housing market is a mess. So, I’ve been left to coordinate exterminations, wrangle city agencies, and essentially to project-manage my own crisis. I’ve even taken to sending regular voice-notes dispatches to my friends and family, like I’m reporting from the scene of an ongoing disaster. The building’s superintendent once tried to call emergency services to shut off the sprinkler system next door.. He has remarked that I have more sticky traps than furniture in my apartment - it’s too accurate to be funny. Adding to the surrealism: I recently learned that my building was allegedly run as a mob-owned casino by mafioso John Gotti in the 1990s. The drama now is not criminal - it’s bureaucratic. I’ve always admired Erin Brockovich for showing how one person’s persistence can expose systemic failure. Lately, I’ve felt like a modern-day Erin, documenting every violation and refusing to accept that “nothing can be done.”
I began reporting the issues to the city’s 311 helpline in May. It took weeks for an HPD inspector to visit. When they finally conducted an inspection, my apartment was cited for multiple violations, including Class C hazards: no gas, no hot water, buckling floors, and, yes, the infestation. The gas and hot water issues have persisted since early June.
Given the severity of the situation, I went in-person to HPD to file a rent abatement request. Meanwhile, I’ve been navigating a bureaucratic maze - reaching out to the Department of Health and Department of Buildings while also contending with a property management company so dysfunctional that there was recently a coup to remove them. It turns out that the company’s leadership had been fired from other buildings for corruption and mismanagement.
What’s happening in my unit goes beyond a pest problem — it’s a public health issue, an accountability crisis, and a symptom of systemic failure. And here’s the thing: I’m lucky. I’m well-educated, fluent in English, have access to the internet, and can lean on friends in the legal field for guidance. I know how to advocate for myself. But even with all of these advantages and my training in public health, I have found this system exhausting and ineffective. So what happens to the people without the same access, resources, or knowledge? My experiences have only affirmed that when systems fail, it is often the most vulnerable who are left to fend for themselves or fall through the cracks.
We need to talk about this hidden cost of living in New York. We need systems that work before small problems become public health emergencies. Because when a public health worker becomes the case study, the gaps in infrastructure, accountability, and response become impossible to ignore.
My ordeal reveals just how hard it is - even for someone who knows the system and is equipped to navigate it - to access timely help when health risks emerge in the home. This goes beyond vermin and faulty plumbing. It’s about how public health breaks down in the places we live. And it’s a vivid reminder that public health is more than something we work on - it’s something we live through, every day.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of any organization, employer, or institution with which they are affiliated.
Maya Nussenzweig is a born-and-raised New Yorker, a marathoner, and a public health professional with a decade of experience leading programs and managing clinical study operations. A natural connector, she is deeply engaged in her community through volunteer work with organizations like Girls on the Run, No Patient Left Behind, and Global Biotech Revolution. Maya is passionate about expanding access to behavioral health and healthcare more broadly, with a focus on strengthening existing systems and launching impactful new initiatives.
If you would like to follow Maya’s example by sharing your perspective on public health right now in our series Voices from the Field: Meeting This Moment in Public Health, please get in touch!
Action steps - a note from Katie
Thank you for reading this newsletter for and about the public health workforce. At this tumultuous time, I’m still really not sure where we go from here. But each time that I publish this newsletter and receive positive feedback from readers, my list of ideas for action steps continues to grow. I will start to compile these suggestions here. As we learn more, let’s keep adding to this list:
Do Maya’s words above inspire you? Would you also like to share your perspective on public health right now? Or write a love letter to public health? Got something to say to or about the public health workforce? Got big feelings about the RIFs or the RTO or the EOs or the BS? I would love to publish your words here as a step towards advocacy and support. Get in touch.
🆕☀️Thank a public health hero today! It could be a mentor, a colleague who had your back, or just appreciation for the protections we all rely on, like vaccines, clean water, and safe food. The more voices, the more powerful it becomes. Let’s fill this board with thanks and encouragement for our public health heroes. https://thankyoucdc.kudoboard.com/boards/VcgUPZZL
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I close by emphasising what I said in a previous newsletter:
“At this time of uncertainty for the public health workforce, let’s remember our commitment to science and evidence and data. We know that validating emotions and baggage has a place too, but we need to be able to identify them and distinguish opinion from fact.
Let’s recommit to kindness and mutual support for the public health workforce and beyond. If leaders are trying to sow divisions among us, the best we can do is to respond with empathy, and by strengthening, connecting, and lifting up one another.
Right now, the best I can offer my fellow public health professionals is a place* to gather and reflect and share and vent and organize and ask questions and offer support to one another. We’re going to need that now more than ever.”
*This is a plug for the Public Health Connections Lounge on LinkedIn, where we seek to build community and conversation among public health professionals. Join us.
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