From the Editor's Desk

Why Is My Apartment So Dusty All the Time?

Walking into my apartment, you might think no one had been there for months. There is a thick layer of dust on nearly every surface — the dresser, the bookshelves, the mirrors. It gathers in the corners of my room, in long strings and fat clumps. Dusting doesn’t seem to help much, either: A surface I wipe down in the morning will be at least a little dusty by afternoon. In comparison, my parents’ house upstate is almost never dusty. I stayed there after they were away for months on a recent trip and marveled at how pristine the piano and coffee table were. It seemed unfair somehow. Was it me? My apartment? Is New York City just dustier than other places?

But Bostick did have some theories about why I felt so plagued by the stuff. He guessed (correctly) that I lived on the first or second floor of my building, and pointed out that most of the fine particle dust in the city comes from pollutants like combustion from cars. While we may not have as many cars per capita as other cities that are more suburban and spread out, we do live closer to them. (In certain neighborhoods, like the South Bronx, proximity to truck pollution is especially bad, driving high rates of asthma.) “In New York, your house is right on the street and the windows are one sidewalk away from traffic,” Bostick said. All those particles just waft right in. There are other possible factors at play: The buildings in New York are relatively old — the median age of buildings is around 90 years — and many of them lack new air-filtration systems. A lot of indoor air pollution also comes from cooking, which, again, settles differently in a tiny apartment compared to a huge suburban kitchen. “Think of how many people essentially live in their kitchens in New York,” Bostick said.

Continued here

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