WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16 (Health.com) — Between puffs of his cigarette, Aristo Lizica explains why he’s all for a smoking ban in public housing—including his own housing project on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “When you smoke indoors, it hurts everybody,” the 59-year-old says, leaning against an iron fence outside his building. “It’s better for me to just make myself sick.”
Lizica would prefer to avoid making himself sick too, of course. “I want to quit,” he adds. “I know cigarettes are bad for my health.” Yet he remains unable to kick the habit.
Federal housing officials are trying to help people like Lizica—and his neighbors—by making public housing smoke-free. Full or partial smoking bans would reduce secondhand smoke drifting between apartments, prevent cigarette-related fires, and even help smokers quit, they argue.
“We see it as a win-win for both residents and housing authorities,” says Donna White, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the federal agency that oversees public housing.
In a 2009 memo, the department highlighted the dangers that indoor smoking poses to the nation’s 2.1 million public housing residents, and “strongly encouraged” local housing authorities to implement smoking restrictions. But doing so remains voluntary, and so far only about 4% of local authorities have taken the step. “Change is hard,” White says.
Public health experts are hoping to light a fire under the cause. In a paper published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, a team of researchers and attorneys from Harvard University argue that the health and safety gains of a smoking ban in housing projects would far outweigh the losses, which some say would include the privacy rights of smokers.
Yet smokers like Lizica could prove to be the biggest winners, the authors suggest. “If federal officials and public housing authorities take this cue, we can expect to have large numbers of people quit smoking,” says the lead author of the article, Jonathan Winickoff, MD, a pediatrician and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, in Boston. “That could be the single greatest health benefit.”
Although the exact numbers of smokers in housing projects are unknown, about 30% of Americans living below the poverty line smoke tobacco, more than 1.5 times the rate of those who live above it.
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