How do we make housing healthy for people with asthma?

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Anjali Nath, MPH, Breathe California, Golden Gate Public Health Partnership, 2171 Junipero Serra Blvd., Suite 720, Daly City, CA 94618, 650-994-5868, anjali@ggbreathe.org

The San Francisco Asthma Task Force (SFATF), the only legislative asthma task force in the country, began as a grassroots community coalition in one of San Francisco's neighborhoods most burdened by asthma. SFATF is part of the statewide CAFA Initiative which has provided funding for stable staffing support, strategic planning, and implementation. SFATF has focused on three main agendas toward improving housing conditions for people with asthma: Public Housing, Private Housing, and Affordable Housing Development.

SFATF has improved relationships and developed partnerships with the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA) to increase their technical capacity for detection of moisture intrusion, create public accountability, hold SFHA property managers accountable, promote tenant rights to repairs and connect tenants to resources.

SFATF brings community stakeholder organizations together to plan joint activities that address substandard housing by promoting healthy housing guidelines to private sector landlords and defining private housing developments at greatest risk of unhealthy housing conditions for asthma, including those developed with public subsidies and defining targeted interventions for home testing protocols for energy efficiency and IAQ, moisture intrusion, carpet- and smoke-free policies.

SFATF is advocating for affordable healthy housing development by using national protocols for healthy housing to set standards for public monies put out to bid; set asides in affordable housing development of carpet- and smoke-free units/floors/buildings; using state tax credits to promote healthy housing criteria (as done with smoke-free set asides).

The activities and lessons learned are being passed on to other asthma coalitions to guide and support their work.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this session participants will be able to

-Describe an effective form of policy change using a collab structrue
-Shape housing policy to reduce asthma triggers
-Integrating asthma priorities and concerns into existing housing protocols and practices
-Describe essential relationships that need to be built to change housing policies
-Describe strategies to advocate for healthy and affordable housing
-Describe strategies to address healthy public housing and healthy private housing

Keywords: Advocacy, Housing

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation

The Right to Breathe:Community Action to Fight Asthma Empowers Communities to Make Policy Change

The 134th Annual Meeting & Exposition (November 4-8, 2006) of APHA