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Oblena recommended Harper receive one more week; Katz granted her two. Although it was better than she had expected, somehow she didn't look relieved. "There's no way I can do this," she whispered.
A week later, numerous calls to Harper had gone unreturned. But Harper did receive a visit from an Adult Protective Services worker, Jordan-Michaels said, and it looked like the room would soon get the deep cleaning it required. Presuming that Harper agrees to the cleaning, it will have taken eight months, four inspections, two caseworkers, an abatement conference, and a director's hearing to get it done.
Mental health researchers have long recognized that hoarding is one tough problem to treat. It's tougher than schizophrenia. Tougher than OCD. Tougher than depression. Cleanings never stick. Medications haven't worked. The only treatment that has seen limited success is cognitive-behavioral therapy, a time-consuming attempt to change a person's thinking patterns through what essentially amounts to cheerleading and hand-holding, while gently challenging a person's beliefs about his or her stuff. Sometimes that involves taking hoarders on trips in which they are not allowed to take home any items. Some are encouraged to take pictures of things rather than acquiring them.
At least some hoarders, like Gloria Feliciano, have received frequent support visits from various city agencies and nonprofits. That doesn't mean anything will change.
Although nobody could say how Feliciano died, at a recent estate sale in her former home, everybody got to see how the thin Puerto Rican woman, famous among her Glen Park neighbors as a nightgowned wanderer at twilight, lived. It wasn't pretty.
As shoppers entered 142 Hearst Ave., an outwardly dignified town home painted red with cream trimming, eyes popped and hands instinctively covered mouths. Crap was everywhere. Literally.
An unvarying stench of rat excrement and tobacco permeated the living room, which was congested with enough dust-covered furniture to comfortably outfit five rooms of the same size. The tables, couches, and miscellaneous wooden pieces were hopelessly buried under rusting tools, old appliances, cheap porcelain figurines, and Catholic memorabilia.
A small pathway cut through to the dining room and kitchen, where the household items, arbitrarily stacked and scattered, seemed to suggest the big one had already hit and concentrated its power on these quarters alone.
Why Feliciano owned five broken refrigerators was a mystery. Why she used them to store hammers and toilet paper was another. Next door in the bedroom, the wallpaper was peeled and yellowing, and the bed was no longer a bed, but a repository for clothes, purses, and woven blankets. It had taken the appraiser six days to comb through the mess, assign value, and make a reasonable cleaning effort before the sale.
A neighbor, Jim Roe, had no idea how bad the place had gotten. For more than a decade, he had witnessed a steady stream of visits from nonprofit employees and city workers, providing Feliciano with meals, clean-ups, and basic living assistance. No doubt about it, he says: That woman was well taken care of.
