The Alliance for Healthy Homes and numerous community organizations and experts from around the country have worked together to explore the potential power of investigating high risk housing for health hazards and using the results in organizing and advocacy campaigns to seek solutions to address unhealthy housing. Some organizations have already carried out limited investigations and leveraged the results into impressive victories, demonstrating the power of this approach to organizing and advocacy for healthy housing.

Integrating the technical tools of home hazard investigation with the techniques of community organizing and advocacy can be accomplished most effectively by understanding how these tools and techniques complement each other.

The Power of Data

In the summer of 1997, a group of young adult volunteers from The Point, a community-based organization in the Bronx set out to count the trees in their neighborhood. The results of their research were startling: Hunts Point had only one tree per acre. Just as startling was the powerful impact of this modest survey. By presenting “hard numbers” to the City Council and private foundations, Hunts Point advocates won the planting of 1,000 new trees, a visible first step toward revitalizing the community. Until conditions were documented, quantified, and presented to policy makers, no one was moved to act.

By research standards, the Hunts Point survey would have to be dismissed as exceedingly simple. But this example illustrates how members of distressed communities can document problems themselves and use limited data to bring about corrective action. Why does hard data hold such power, especially with regard to data about housing-related health hazards in a community?

First, it’s more difficult – morally, if not legally – for policy makers, government officials and property owners to disregard actual data about hazards in specific properties than it is to ignore generalized complaints about environmental health hazards. Address-specific hazard data can be a lever to turn the tables on bad landlords by increasing their concerns about increased liability. Address-specific data can also be used to help initiate enforcement of housing codes, the federal lead disclosure rule or other laws to bring about corrective action. For example, under federal law a landlord who is given property-specific reports about lead paint hazards must disclose this information to prospective tenants or correct the problem.

Second, documenting hazards in homes before children get sick can help advocates make a compelling case for primary prevention, as opposed to the reactive approach of using sick children to trigger corrective action. The documented hazards focus policy makers’ attention on the vector of disease – substandard housing – instead of on treating the patient.

Finally, organizations that develop the capacity to use science to document health hazards in housing can significantly increase their power to mobilize community residents and wage effective advocacy campaigns for solutions to the problem. How collecting hard data about health hazards in housing can enhance community organizing and advocacy is discussed in more detail on the Environmental Sampling page.