‘Shut this place down:’ Woman camps in front of apartment to protest mold

PITTSBURGH — Inshirah Shahid has spent the past week in front of her apartment building, sometimes in a tent, sometimes on a lawn chair, telling everyone she can about the conditions inside her unit.

“Would you put your dog in here? You wouldn’t,” she said. “You wouldn’t even put your own grandchildren in here.”

Shahid said for the past three years, she has dealt with an unstoppable mold problem at the Pittsburgh Housing Authority’s Cordell Place apartments in Arlington Heights.

While she kept a small patch of it for evidence and testing – and to show visiting news crews – she displayed videos showing dark spots all over her kitchen floor before she took a bucket of bleach to it.

Other videos showed patches on her bathroom ceiling near her HVAC vent, while more photos showed what appeared to be water damage to her walls and cabinets.

Shahid said she’s asked to be moved to another unit, but her request was ignored.

“Who’s to say she has money to keep on replacing and keep bleaching and trying to put a band-aid on a problem when the real problem is she needs to be gone,” her friend, Brandi Lowry, said. “She needs to be moved.”

Shahid went a step further, calling for the building to be torn down.

“Shut this place down,” she said.

WPXI reached out to the Pittsburgh Housing Authority to see if crews planned to clean the duct work in the building but did not get a response.

A spokesman for Allegheny County’s health department, which investigates mold, said the department couldn’t comment during an active investigation.

Shahid’s unit did not appear in a database of tenant complaints filed since 2025, though two others in the complex did with unspecified issues. Other tenants said they had mold problems in their units, but not to Shahid’s extent.

“Why couldn’t you just give people healthy housing?” Shahid asked.

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