I have personal experience of trying to deal with inadequate housing, including having to put my then 5 month old daughter to bed in a house that was 10 degrees centigrade indoors, with mold on the walls and where the bathroom was so moldy I wouldn't take my baby in there at all and bathed in a bowl in front of the gas fire in the living room (the only heater in the house that actually worked, albeit not that well). I wish I was exaggerating but I'm not. And the council couldn't do much apart from putting me on a one year waiting list for a council house even though my GP and health visitor were writing saying the house was making my baby ill (eczema and asthma cough). I knew several other young families in the same situation. Inadequate housing for poor people... the not-so-new-anymore normal.
Sadly, substandard living arrangements have been common in the US for a long time, both in government funded housing projects and in private housing. Firetraps aren't a new problem over here. I remember hearing a story on the radio when I was very little, when my family lived in Chicago, about a tenement building that had burned. It lacked adequate heat, so tenants had to rely on space heaters, and one tipped over and started a fire. There were insufficient or absent fire escapes, poor access for firetrucks, and so on. I remember being very scared by the story, because there was an emphasis on how several children had died. My mom explained to me how our housing situation was very different, but she also used it as a teachable moment to explain to us kids what to do if we ever did have a fire.
In fact, regulations and inspections have probably made things better in recent years, with legal requirements for fire-safe materials, sprinkler systems, fire alarms, smoke detectors and so on. Still, state and local ordinances can vary greatly over here, and violators often go unpunished until a tragedy happens.
The sad thing I've read in some of the articles is that many tenants were complaining about fire safety issues in the building, but the management kept insisting everything was code and safe.
This feels rather like a type of homicide to me. I hope better laws and stricter enforcement come out of this in all our countries. No one should have to die like this.
