Should We Ban Smoking in Public Housing?

by Erin Durkin · 2010-06-25 08:37:00 UTC
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Should public housing complexes be added to offices, restaurants, and bars on the growing list of spots where smoking is not allowed? That's that the argument made in a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The health benefits for public housing residents are clear, the authors argue. “Smoke does not know to stop at a door," Jonathan P. Winickoff, one of the article's authors and an associate professor of pediatrics at MassGeneral Hospital for Children, told the New York Times. “If we’re going to protect bartenders in restaurants, if we’re going to protect healthy adults who go to work and enjoy a smoke-free workplace, we had better also protect infants, children, pregnant women and elderly people who may have just had a heart attack."

Since last year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has recommended that public housing authorities ban smoking in some or all of their properties, but the suggestion was purely voluntary and the authors find that only 4% of local authorities have done so. The essay urges the agency to take the next step and force authorities to ban smoking as a condition of keeping their federal funding.

The idea is sure to meet resistance. Individual rights-conscious Americans tend to be wary of rules that infringe on people's ability to do as they choose in the privacy of their own homes. The authors acknowledge that "private homes have long been considered spaces beyond the legitimate reach of regulation." And there's something troubling about the idea of imposing behavioral restrictions on low-income public housing residents that no one else has to follow. (A few private landlords have chosen to impose smoking bans in their buildings, but they're still very much the exception rather than the rule.)

The authors acknowledge these concerns, and don't discount them entirely, but argue that on balance, a ban is worth it: While it may not seem fair to ban people from smoking in their own homes when they can't afford to move somewhere they can do as they please, they say, it's also not fair to impose the harmful health effects of a smoky building on people who can't afford to escape them.

Photo credit: jphilipg

Erin Durkin is a journalist in Brooklyn, a Columbia University graduate, a Boston native and an uninsured American.
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