Andrew Friedman

Health and Housing

Last week, in an appearance at a public health law conference in Atlanta that was sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mayor Bloomberg spoke out about the importance of using law and public policy to attack public health problems.

New threats result from, and are aggravated by, our forbearance, and even social and economic encouragement, of such behavior as tobacco addiction, unhealthy nutrition and excessively sedentary lifestyles

An effective public health strategy must therefore alter that calculus by changing how we live,

He makes a good point.

Yet it is hard to reconcile his rhetoric about aggressively using government to improve the public's health, and his housing policy here in New York City. It is not just how we live, but also where we live, that matters.

Tens of thousands of New Yorkers live in dangerous housing. Housing Code violations that are classified by the City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) as "immediately hazardous" can take months or years to get fixed. The sad reality is that, under Bloomberg, the City is soft on negligent landlords. HPD fails to create real accountability by following-up after violations have been placed on a building to ensure that repairs have been made. Also, HPD frequently fails to step in and make repairs to protect vulnerable tenants and their children, when landlords refuse to do so. Lack of heat, faulty wiring, open sewage in the basement of a building, or no locks on the front doors all endanger tenants' health.

Similarly, many common housing code violations, such as mold and cockroach and rodent infestation serve as triggers for childhood asthma. The disease disproportionately affects low-income New Yorkers, and New Yorkers of color. For example, asthma rates in Williamsburg and Bushwick, Brooklyn are four times the average for New York City as a whole. Nonetheless, these code violations are not categorized appropriately as being serious violations. Some violations, such as mold, have not been adjusted to reflect the newest science about how harmful they are to people's health.

Mayor Bloomberg should be applauded for using his power to promote the public health. If he's serious about doing so, though, he needs to turn his attention to HPD. The time has come to get to work on creating a housing code enforcement policy with teeth. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers' health would benefit.

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Posted at 10:11 AM, Jun 19, 2006 in Housing
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