BREATHLESS was the culmination of almost two years of original research and undercover investigation into the national children’s asthma crisis. Specifically we examined the interior environments in low-income public and private housing that are a major contributor to children’s asthma in New York. We followed numerous families for over a year but finally focused our story on two. Rossana de la Cuadra of Brownsville, Brooklyn has a 6-year old daughter, Amanda, who had just been diagnosed with asthma. Javier Sepuvelda, a military veteran, living in East Harlem also has a daughter suffering from asthma. Both were articulate and hard-working parents who gave us extraordinary access to their lives, the struggles of their asthmatic children, and their fight to make their apartments asthma-safe for them. What was most revealing was what happened in real time as we followed their journeys. Because they had allowed us to place undercover cameras in their homes, we observed some extraordinary and never-before-captured footage; work crew after work crew either unwilling or incapable of fixing the problem. All this might almost be expected from unscrupulous private landlords, but BREATHLESS exposed a surprising culprit: not a private slum lord, but the New York City Housing Authority, the largest public housing agency in North America.
