2024 CHHC Annual Meeting
CHHC held its one in-person meeting of the year at the Sierra Health Foundation in Sacramento on March 21-22.
The event brought over fifty members together to learn, share, and collaborate on strategies to improve healthy housing in California. Day one included an update on the state policy landscape from Assemblymember Ward, presentations on lead poisoning prevention, social housing, and addressing illegal units without displacement, and breakout sessions for our workgroups (Habitability, Indoor Air Quality, and Lead Poisoning Prevention). On day two some of our members took a half-day training on healthy housing and code enforcement from our partners at 4Leaf, while others participated in an advocacy day at the capitol, educating our state representatives about healthy housing.
Overall, it was a great opportunity to learn and network. Find out more about our event here.
The California Healthy Housing Coalition’s mission is to provide leadership to ensure safe and healthy housing for all Californians, with a focus on low-income communities and communities of color.
The coalition’s diverse membership, including housing rights and social justice organizations, public health advocates, local, state, and federal government agencies, and other experts on housing, indoor air quality, and health, comes together to provide resources, expertise, and advocacy for statewide policies to promote and protect healthy housing for all.
Healthy Housing Resource
Principles for Equitable Smoke-Free Multi-Family Housing
While there is wide agreement that exposure to secondhand smoke in multifamily housing is a serious problem, how to protect residents of multifamily housing from drifting secondhand smoke has been challenging and divisive. Leveraging over a decade of collaboration between public health and tenants’ rights members, CHHC brought a small group of partners together to have a facilitated discussion that explored the impacts of a range of approaches to addressing secondhand smoke exposure in multi-family housing. The result was a set of consensus-based Principles for Equitable Smoke-Free Multifamily Housing that attempts to balance health protections with housing stability to aid future efforts to create equitable approaches to addressing this challenging issue.
Priorities
CHHC members address healthy housing from multiple perspectives. As a result, the coalition’s priorities represent a comprehensive approach towards achieving healthy housing for all. CHHC organizes itself into three workgroups focused on the following priorities:
Habitability
Combat substandard housing conditions affecting many low-income renters, such as pest infestations and mold.
Indoor Air Quality
Reduce exposure to contaminants in the home, including pesticides, tobacco smoke, and outdoor pollution.
Lead Poisoning Prevention
Eliminate exposure to lead hazards in the home and improve the identification of and support to lead poisoned children.
Healthy Housing Resource
IPM in Rental Housing
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is the most effective and least harmful way to address pests. By addressing the root causes of pest problems, IPM serves as a long term solution to pest problems that advoids the costly, routine pesticide applications commonly used in rental housing. To encourage more property owners to adopt IPM and a more effective and healthier alternative to routine spraying on their rental properties, CHHC members members developed a series of short videos to encourage landlords to transition to the use of Integrated Pest Management. Videos include:
