More Americans than you might think live with unhealthy housing conditions. (Photo: iStockphoto)
The National Center for Healthy Housing, a non-profit organization that focuses on safe, sustainable and healthy homes, recently released the nation’s first comprehensive study of U.S. housing conditions.
It found that nearly 6 million American families are living in substandard housing, and a third of homes in metropolitan areas are hazardous to their occupants’ health. Those are staggering numbers.
Using information gathered from the bi-annual American Housing Survey, the center found that the most common problems are water leaks from inside and outside the home and roofing problems, damaged interior walls that and signs of mice. Water intrusion promotes the growth of mildew and mold. Peeling paint and damaged walls in older houses carry the risk of lead poisoning. Mice are linked to the development and aggravation of asthma. Other serious health issues cited included toilet and sewage breakdowns, heating equipment breakdowns, exposed wiring, and holes in walls and floors.
The data comes from a survey of about 55,000 homes in 45 metropolitan areas across the U.S. It broke the data into segments for owner-occupied and rental properties, and houses inside and outside the city core. You can check the rankings by location to see how your area fared.
For many years, I was actively involved with Habitat for Humanity, both in a local affiliate and as a writer with Habitat World, its magazine. The evidence about the impact of substandard housing on people’s health – and how it improves when they move into decent housing – is overwhelming. I’ll never forget going to Pikeville in eastern Kentucky – hard scrabble, coal-mining country – to cover the Jimmy Carter Work Project. We were driving between building sites one morning and hidden among the trees along a rural road were decrepit trailers that looked like they’d been abandoned – only they weren’t. Families were living in them.
You don’t have to go to Appalachia to find poverty housing, though. Chances are, you have it around the corner from you. I recently moved to Augusta, Ga., which is the second largest city in the state. Most of the world only knows about the city as it relates to the Masters Golf Tournament. They think the whole place must look like Augusta National, where the tournament is played. There are sections of town not far from that golf course that look like Third World slums.
We also visited Savannah -- beautiful, gracious Savannah -- recently on vacation. We were craving pizza one night and went looking for a place that had great reviews online. Just outside the historic district, we drove past blocks and blocks of houses in extremely poor condition.
That's just in my little corner of the world. Readers: How is the housing in yours? —Pat Curry