A consortium of federal agencies has pooled their resources to present ‘Advancing Healthy Housing – A Strategy for Action,’ a new initiative to demonstrate the connection between housing conditions and residents' health. The initiative is also designed to promote strategies and methods intended to reduce in-home health hazards in a cost-effective manner.
The new initiative's goals include establishing healthy home recommendations; encouraging adoption of healthy home recommendations; creating and supporting training and workforce development to address health hazards in housing; educating the public about healthy homes; and supporting research that informs and advances healthy housing in a cost-effective manner. The agencies cooperating in this effort are the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. Department of Energy.
‘It is clear that unhealthy and unsafe housing has an impact on the health of millions of people in the U.S., which is why we must do everything we can to ensure that individuals and families have a healthy place to call home,’ says HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. ‘Today's announcement will help the federal government unify action to controlling and preventing major housing-related exposures and hazards.’