The Alliance and numerous community organizations and experts have worked together to explore the potential power of sampling high-risk housing for health hazards and using the results to seek policy solutions to address unhealthy housing. Some organizations have actually carried out limited sampling and leveraged the results into impressive victories. Why does environmental sampling to document health hazards hold such power?
First, combining sampling with advocacy can make a compelling case for primary prevention, as opposed to the reactive approach of using sick children to trigger corrective action. This is both because sampling provides a natural way to educate and involve affected families in advocacy, and because it focuses advocates and policy makers on the vector of disease - substandard housing - instead of on treating the patient.
Second, documenting hazards with hard numbers has inherent power. It's more difficult (both morally and legally) for policy makers and property owners to disregard actual data about hazards in specific properties than it is to ignore a generalized complaint about environmental health hazards. The power of hard data has been demonstrated by environmental organizations using data on air and water pollution to put muscle into their advocacy.
Third, there's something powerful about providing community members with the ability to investigate homes for health hazards. Knowledge about hidden health dangers related to substandard conditions in their homes can motivate people to become involved in healthy homes advocacy. Moreover, communities using science to obtain vital information about serious hazards that have been overlooked is interesting and newsworthy. Compelling press coverage can amplify advocacy efforts.
Finally, these tools are versatile enough to use in organizing and advocacy for a wide range of policy goals and other solutions. For example, advocates can use sampling results to work for better enforcement of existing laws, such as housing or building codes. Hazard data can be used to win new funding to address hazards in housing, or improve the targeting of existing funds. Address-specific lead hazard data can be the missing ingredient to leverage the federal lead disclosure rule. The tools are also versatile with regard to the wide range of types of organizations that can successfully use them - affordable housing and tenant groups, environmental health or environmental justice groups, health and child welfare advocacy organizations, public interest legal groups, faith-based organizations and multi-issue community organizations, to name a few.
More Information
- The Promise of Environmental Sampling and Right-To-Know Laws for At-Risk Communities is a paper by the Alliance for Healthy Homes (formerly the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning).
- The following are two articles about a project undertaken by the Environmental Health Coalition of San Diego, CA, utilizing the results of sampling in campaigns for improved housing code enforcement: