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.
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:
