In its first four Healthy Homes grant rounds, HUD competitively funded a wide variety of projects ranging from technical studies and research in new technologies to education, outreach, and demonstration efforts. These projects produced a host of valuable tools, insights, lessons, and outcomes. In looking forward, maximizing the impact of these and future grants requires further clarifying the role of HUD's Healthy Homes grants.

The Alliance, along with many experts and practitioners, views HUD's Healthy Homes grants as fundamentally different in purpose from HUD's other housing production programs, such as lead hazard control grants, CDGB, and HOME, which measure success in the number of housing units newly constructed or rehabbed. Rather than attempting to create a new, separate program to control health hazards in hundreds or thousands of housing units, HUD's Healthy Homes grants serve to test, validate, and disseminate methods for cost-effectively integrating health considerations into all federal housing and weatherization programs, as well as the rest of the U.S. housing stock. The ultimate goal of HUD's Healthy Homes grants is to incorporate healthy homes principles and practices into how housing is maintained, operated, rehabbed, designed, and built.

Guided by this central purpose, HUD's Healthy Homes grants necessarily need to support a range of activities to develop practical ways to prevent and control health hazards in housing:

• Test and validate cost-effective tools and strategies for assessing housing-related health hazards, including low-cost screening tools, such as visual surveys to identify obvious signs of health hazards;
• Test and validate practical tools and strategies for both preventing and controlling housing-related health hazards;
• Identify low-cost changes in construction and rehab to avoid moisture problems;
• Describe modest changes in the work practices of building trades to incorporate healthy homes considerations into maintenance, repair, rehab, and construction activities;
• Develop, validate, and deliver training and educational materials and model specifications that embody healthy homes principles and work practices for code inpectors, home inspectors, building trades, and property maintenance staff;
• Integrate healthy homes principles, practices, and safeguards into other programs, such as rehab and weatherization; and
• Develop, validate, and disseminate tools and techniques to educate consumers how to take advantage of all opportunities to reduce and avoid health hazards in their homes.