Healthy Housing
With human beings spending roughly 70% of their lives in residential environments—amounting to approximately 55 years of an 80-year lifespan—the domestic built environment represents the primary vector of chronic environmental exposure. On this episode of Air Quality Matters, Amanda Reddy, Executive Director of the National Center for Healthy Housing (NCHH) , brings an epidemiological perspective to the intersection of housing conditions, building science, and public health policy.
Overseeing national research initiatives and advising federal agencies, she articulates why domestic hazards cannot be treated as isolated physical failures, but rather as compounding risks embedded within degraded structural assets. This discussion frames housing as essential preventative health infrastructure, challenging the built environment sector to move past fragmented, single-hazard interventions toward durable, holistic remediation architectures capable of operating at national scale.
Why Must the Built Environment Treat Domestic Health Hazards as Interconnected Systems Rather Than Isolated Risks?
Amanda Reddy explains that residential hazards share common physical mechanisms and structural pathways, meaning that remediating a single symptom in isolation fails if the root envelope deficiency remains unaddressed. A primary example is bulk moisture intrusion: water entry concurrently promotes mould sporulation, provides biological sustenance for pest vectors, degrades structural framing, and accelerates the mechanical breakdown of legacy lead-based paint into hazardous respirable and ingestible dust. Because these physical vectors compound within vulnerable housing stock, effective interventions require viewing the dwelling as an integrated thermodynamic and biological system where remediating one pathway yields compounding health dividends across multiple risk factors. To formalise this unified approach, Amanda examines the progression from historic seven-point housing frameworks to eleven operational principles that synthesize building physics, occupant health equity, and long-term climate resilience.
How Can Capital Financing and Policy Mechanisms Scale to Overcome the Decades-Long Deficit in Existing Housing Stock?
Reddy demonstrates that conventional, short-term grant allocations are structurally incapable of matching the degradation rate of legacy building stock, noting that current federal lead remediation programs would require over a millennium to treat existing at-risk residences. Solving this shortfall requires structural financial innovation, including revolving loan pools and whole-home repair appropriations where deployed capital continuously cycles back to fund subsequent municipal retrofits rather than expiring at the conclusion of arbitrary grant cycles. Bridging the gap between laboratory diagnostics and field deployment requires aligning public health insurance mechanisms with municipal building rehabilitation standards to institutionalise steady capital delivery.
Expert Perspectives
A central critique raised in the discussion targets the systemic inertia of "perpetual pilot projects" within public housing. In both the United States and Europe, regional bodies routinely fund isolated 100-home demonstration programs because small-scale trials minimise administrative risk and conserve political capital. We discuss how researchers frequently perpetuate this cycle by devoting ninety percent of their effort to restating well-established environmental problems to academic peers, rather than delivering concrete, modular operational pathways that public officials can implement without bureaucratic hazard.
Furthermore, Amanda directly challenges the assumption that housing affordability and environmental performance are mutually exclusive objectives. An energy-compromised, damp dwelling that induces severe paediatric asthma or cardiovascular morbidity cannot be characterised as affordable once the externalised societal costs of emergency medical intervention, educational absenteeism, and diminished lifetime earnings are accounted for. The physical realities of exposure reinforce this necessity: microscopic lead dust distributed at the volume of a single sugar packet across an entire football field exceeds toxic clearance criteria, demonstrating that superficial surface cleaning cannot substitute for structural abatement. Long-term empirical field data—such as the twenty-year post-Katrina monitoring of restored flood-damaged homes in New Orleans—proves that engineered, moisture-resilient rehabilitation protocols can preserve existing structural assets and maintain vital community cohesion far more effectively than demolition.
Part 2: One Take Podcast
In this episode of One Take, we review an empirical field study published in Building and Environment by Adam Collison, Miriam Byrne, and James McGrath of the University of Galway and Maynooth, titled "The Impact of Energy Retrofit on Indoor Air Quality in Classrooms and Offices." The researchers executed extensive pre- and post-retrofit field monitoring across more than 50 operational educational and commercial spaces in Ireland, tracking carbon dioxide, fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide, thermal metrics, and target volatile organic compounds. The investigation delivers vital physical evidence addressing the central anxiety of building designers: that tightening building envelopes to satisfy European decarbonization mandates inevitably degrades indoor air quality by sealing in moisture and metabolic pollutants.
Can Deep Energy Retrofits Deliver Thermal and Energy Efficiency Without Degrading Indoor Air Quality?
The field data confirms that deep energy retrofits do not inherently compromise indoor air quality, provided that envelope airtightness is combined with balanced mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR). Post-retrofit classrooms achieved an average 28% reduction in carbon dioxide concentrations—consistently maintaining levels below the Irish Department of Education’s 1,000 ppm design threshold—while indoor PM2.5 levels dropped by 27% to 30%, cutting the frequency of World Health Organisation guideline exceedance days nearly in half through efficient intake filtration. However, the study recorded significant, short-term surges in volatile organic compounds (VOCs) post-intervention, driven by off-gassing from newly introduced synthetic insulation, sealants, paints, and internal finishes. The authors highlight that brief monitoring windows cannot capture seasonal envelope dynamics or shifting occupant loads, establishing why building physics professionals must combine mechanical fresh air delivery with rigorous material source control and extended commissioning purge cycles.
The Impact of Energy Retrofit on Indoor Air Quality in Classrooms and Offices.
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0:00 - back to air quality matters.
0:01 - I'm Simon Jones and coming up a conversation with Amanda Reddy, Executive Director at the National Centre for Healthy Housing.
0:10 - With over a decade of experience leading national efforts to improve housing quality and advance health equity, she oversees a multi-million dollar portfolio of research programs and policy initiatives in public health, housing and equity.
0:27 - Amanda is a nationally recognized voice in the intersection of housing and health.
0:32 - and has served as a strategic advisor to numerous federal agencies philanthropic initiatives and community-based coalitions healthy housing is a broad church and as such an important vector for outcomes across society
0:48 - We talked about the origins of the National Centre and LEAD, how housing affects communities and not always equally, in fact, rarely, and how her organisation is structured to help research, impact policy and support communities.
1:07 - If we live to 80 years of age, we're likely to spend 55 years of our life in homes.
1:14 - Math alone drives this space as one of the most important in our lifetime.
1:20 - Amanda and her colleagues are at the intersection of so much that shapes our community's future health and well-being.
1:27 - A fascinating conversation and not one to miss.
1:32 - This podcast is brought to you in partnership with Man Hummel, Particles Plus, ECO, Eurovent, Lindab and S&P Ventilation, along with our charity partners, The Safer Air Project.
1:45 - These podcasts simply would not be possible without them.
1:48 - Please do check them out in the show notes and at airqualitymatters.net.
1:52 - This is a conversation with Amanda Reddy.
2:10 - Explain the history of the organisation, because I think that's fascinating.
2:13 - It was lead, wasn't it, originally?
2:15 - Absolutely.
2:16 - Yeah, NCHH was founded just over 34 years ago.
2:20 - We actually just had our 34th anniversary.
2:22 - And we were jointly founded by two different organisations, an affordable housing organisation and an organisation focused on environmental justice.
2:32 - And our original charge was, as you said, to tackle the issue of childhood lead poisoning.
2:37 - Yeah.
2:38 - And lead remains really central to our mission.
2:41 - But, you know, what that early work really elevated, I think, for our organization and many others was that there was an opportunity to really address housing quality more holistically.
2:53 - And so pretty early in our mission, our focus broadened to address the wider range of ways that people's homes and the quality and condition of their homes can either support or undermine their health and well-being.
3:06 - That's really interesting.
3:07 - And you say lead still remains a central part of the work that you do.
3:11 - Absolutely.
3:11 - Yeah.
3:12 - Our expansion did not mean that we had solved lead or that lead was no longer a problem worth addressing.
3:19 - It simply became, I think, as I said, a vehicle for, you know, really expanding sort of the understanding of the potential role of some of these solutions.
3:28 - You know, in healthy housing, we say a lot of times,
3:31 - The problems are related, but so are the solutions.
3:34 - And an example of that that you'll hear if you take an intro healthy housing course, one of the classic examples you'll hear is about water or moisture coming into a home.
3:45 - And if we ask people if that's a problem and why.
3:49 - right, you'll immediately get answers like, well, it's bad because it can cause mold to grow, right?
3:54 - Everybody knows that that's a problem, and it is a problem.
3:58 - But as you ask people, and you sort of let a room full of people start to unpack this, what you'll also see surface, and it's what's playing out there in the real world, is that water is also a source of
4:10 - Drinking, right, a water source for pests, for cockroaches or mice or other pests that might be in the home.
4:17 - Water can degrade the structural integrity of a home.
4:21 - And maybe that causes a fall or a trip hazard if we have a floor or a staircase that is now a little bit unstable.
4:29 - It can also degrade the lead based paint that's on a wall.
4:32 - And so lead based paint that was intact on a wall and not posing a significant risk now becomes a big risk.
4:38 - Right.
4:38 - If it's crumbling into dust that's on the ground that your kids are crawling through or your pets are dragging all over the house.
4:45 - So that's what we mean when we say the problems are related.
4:48 - But that means the solutions are, too.
4:50 - And that's really the underpinning of the healthy homes movement.
4:54 - And it's really interesting you mentioned about the lead dust.
4:56 - I know that that was a big outcome of a lot of the dust studies that were done in France, I think it was.
5:05 - They had an observatory of indoor air quality in France and they did a lot of studies around particularly schools and schools were old buildings that would have had historically lead paint and lead paint on furniture.
5:20 - And
5:21 - they would find lead residue on the ground.
5:24 - Obviously, with kids, particularly, they're much more prone to consuming dust.
5:28 - You know, everything that lands on their hands ends up in their mouth and you would eat grams of dust a day as a child, you know, so it represents a real risk.
5:37 - But I'm surprised to hear it's still an exposure issue in houses, you know.
5:42 - Yeah, I mean, lead is, you know, simultaneously, I think in the United States, one of our greatest success stories from public health and how far we've come in addressing the risk.
5:54 - But the problem is far from over.
5:55 - Still in the United States, about a half a million children every year are exposed to levels of lead that threaten their ability to
6:05 - arrive at school ready to learn and thrive.
6:08 - And it's not just an issue of children, right?
6:10 - I think a lot of us, we focus on children.
6:13 - It's really important.
6:13 - It's our role to protect children.
6:16 - But I think what's also been compelling in the past decade is the emerging body of research about how lead affects us over the lifespan during pregnancy and influencing outcomes, not just for the developing baby, but for the
6:28 - mother as well, both during pregnancy and years later, and also just adults in general.
6:34 - There was a really, really important study that came out a few years ago conducted by the World Bank that estimated that lead was accountable for, I think it was about five and a half million deaths globally every year, which made it a bigger killer than it was like AIDS and malaria and road traffic deaths combined.
6:53 - I don't know.
6:54 - Don't quote me on those exact conditions, but it was it was a pretty bombshell.
6:57 - Just really big.
6:59 - Yeah, exactly.
7:00 - And that's because of its effect on the cardiovascular system and hypertension.
7:03 - Right.
7:03 - Which if you say to people like, oh, heart disease is a killer.
7:07 - Everybody knows that.
7:07 - Right.
7:08 - That's pretty common knowledge.
7:10 - But we don't always think about some of these underlying environmental health contributors.
7:14 - Right.
7:14 - It's not just about diet and exercise and genetics.
7:17 - There are some of these other factors driving those outcomes as well.
7:22 - I can't say, I mean, because you assume it's a historical problem that was kind of buried away years ago.
7:28 - Certainly from a plumbing perspective, the assumption is that it was dealt with a long time ago.
7:34 - So I'm not that familiar with the actual kind of acute and chronic effects of lead, to be honest.
7:39 - I mean, everybody's heard of lead poisoning, obviously, but I think...
7:43 - few people would be able to articulate what that actually was and how it manifests.
7:48 - So you mentioned it impacts hypertension.
7:52 - What are the kind of effects of exposure to lead for children?
7:56 - Yeah, well, for children, I think the thing that we hear most about, especially at the levels that kids are commonly exposed to in the United States, are those neurodevelopmental effects, the way that it can affect.
8:08 - It can actually change your IQ points.
8:11 - You can lose IQ points.
8:13 - It can affect some executive function, right?
8:16 - So that's where we see children who may have more impulse control and other kind of conduct disorders that can affect their ability to thrive in school, right?
8:27 - I mean, sometimes we focus a lot in the field or in the media.
8:30 - around, you know, the sort of one end of the bell curve of the kids who are, you know, winding up in the criminal justice system because of lead exposure.
8:39 - And that's important to talk about.
8:40 - Those children deserve better.
8:42 - But it affects kids all along the spectrum, right?
8:45 - Even just a little bit of...
8:47 - that extra burden on your body, if that makes it harder to go to school or succeed in school, think about the cumulative impact of that for a family over a child's lifetime, over that individual's lifetime, and how that may affect their earnings, their relationships, as well as then starting to have some of these other systemic effects, like I mentioned, on the cardiovascular system.
9:07 - And I know your audience is primarily interested in air quality.
9:11 - And I think it's
9:14 - There too, because like some of the air quality challenges, the indoor air quality challenges that we have to tackle, lead is not very visible.
9:23 - Like, yes, you can see lead based paint on the walls if you know it has, you know, lead in it.
9:30 - But the amount of lead that it takes to poison a child is minimal.
9:34 - Like, you can't clean your way out of that problem.
9:36 - Even when before the EPA and the United States lowered their standards recently.
9:42 - So when the standards were even higher than they are now, we used to use an exercise where we would say to people, imagine a sugar packet that you might use to sweeten your coffee or your tea and imagine that filled with lead contaminated dust.
9:55 - And then imagine that spread evenly over the surface of an American football field, not soccer.
10:01 - Unfortunately, I'm using the American term football here.
10:05 - That was still enough, even by our old standards, to be considered a lead contaminated surface capable of poisoning a child.
10:12 - Right.
10:12 - It doesn't take a lot.
10:14 - And the child isn't going to necessarily appear sick right away.
10:17 - Right.
10:17 - And so that becomes.
10:19 - part of, I think, the challenge of moving people into action, whether we're talking about individual families or more importantly, you know, decision makers and others along that sort of continuum of a chain of responsibility in the housing system.
10:33 - And I think it's analogous to a lot of the challenges we see with indoor air quality problems like, you know, radon, for instance, that sort of invisibility problem.
10:42 - Yeah, and I guess like a lot of things in life, this stuff keeps bad company.
10:48 - And if it's a socioeconomic problem, it's a product of poor housing or old housing or deteriorating housing or old schools and old buildings.
11:02 - This is something that doesn't affect all people equally.
11:05 - That's exactly right.
11:06 - And the problems do tend to co-occur within housing and then within the neighborhoods that may be sited next to other point sources, or as you point out, where school buildings where, you know, kids maybe leave their home, but then go to a building where they continue to be exposed to other environmental and social injustices.
11:23 - And they absolutely compound.
11:26 - And so that's, again, you know, another, I think, angle on that.
11:30 - the problems are related, but so are the solutions.
11:32 - I think a community advocate once told me that
11:37 - you know, people and families don't organize their thinking in their lives around siloed government funding streams and programs.
11:44 - Right.
11:45 - This was sort of a response to like, oh, it's nice that you have your radon program and your asthma program and your energy assistance program that's helping us with our heating bills.
11:53 - Right.
11:53 - All of these different programs.
11:55 - But people aren't living in those silos.
11:57 - They are experiencing the system as a whole.
12:02 - So it's no surprising once you start kind of pulling at the string here of lead exposure in housing and then you creep into water damage, like very quickly, this becomes a holistic issue for you as an organization.
12:19 - You're starting to look at homes.
12:22 - as a vector for both risk and well-being.
12:26 - And you're taking, I'm guessing, quite a broad spectrum now of everything from lead to radon to poor air quality to damper mould, like all of the things that we associate with housing and particularly poor housing.
12:40 - That's now within your remit.
12:42 - Absolutely.
12:43 - And there is, you know, helpful for any listeners who want to sort of get their head around, like, what does healthy housing mean or what could it mean?
12:51 - If you ask 10 people in our field to define healthy housing, you're going to get probably 10 nuanced definitions.
12:57 - But there are a set of what are called principles of healthy housing that the field organized around several decades ago.
13:04 - They started off with seven principles.
13:06 - Our federal government now recognizes eight principles.
13:10 - They added one over the course of the years.
13:13 - And then other organizations like my organization recognizes 11 principles of healthy housing.
13:19 - And some of those newer principles reflect some of these other intersections about affordability, about accessibility, about climate readiness, things like that that may not have been
13:31 - at the forefront when those core principles were established.
13:36 - So yeah, we have quite a broad remit in terms of the range of ways that we think about how housing quality can affect people's health and well-being.
13:45 - But I think what you said was really important, that houses are not just a
13:54 - instill fear into people or make people fearful of their homes.
13:59 - That's not our goal.
14:00 - And I don't think that's going to get us very far, right?
14:03 - I think we do a lot better and get a lot farther when we think about homes as a really important and powerful opportunity for improving people's health and well-being and really focusing on the solutions that are available to us.
14:19 - Yeah, you raise a really interesting point there, and it's something that I've come across a couple of times, particularly if you're trying to change habits and culture and behaviours around homes and to get people to understand risk and benefits.
14:42 - is that the home is a very, very unusual place psychologically.
14:48 - It's a place that often, in your best hope, has memories that are positive reinforcements.
14:58 - You know, it's where your family is.
15:00 - It's where you should feel safe and secure and warm.
15:03 - And many of these kind of ideals around what a home should be, and rightly so,
15:09 - make it very difficult to penetrate through the risk barrier.
15:13 - There's like a firewall.
15:14 - And, you know, we see this in the air quality community.
15:16 - It's very difficult to tell people that a fireplace is a source of air pollution.
15:23 - Because mentally, a fireplace is the place that keeps you warm.
15:27 - It's where your family gather.
15:29 - It's memories of Christmas, winter, whatever the trope is of that memory of the fireplace, which means people are not going to view that as a risk to their health.
15:41 - Or if they do, that is counterbalanced very dramatically with positive images.
15:48 - And that's the challenge.
15:49 - Homes are very personal places.
15:52 - So in that world, we really have to balance how we describe risk to people and how we try and create these images of health and well-being.
16:01 - Absolutely.
16:02 - And I think, you know, that's, you're right, housing is different than other types of infrastructure.
16:07 - And that psychology, you know, has a lot of other roots as well, right?
16:12 - As you mentioned, sometimes there are cultural practices that may be important to take into consideration.
16:19 - And sometimes I think some of the resistance can be
16:23 - a rational response to limited choices that families may be facing in the system.
16:31 - You know, can they even afford the solution?
16:33 - You know, if they're a renter, you know, how's my landlord going to respond?
16:37 - Is this going to, you know, am I going to get kicked out of my housing if I raise a raise a complaint?
16:43 - You know, maybe it's a concern about what's going to happen to my family during the
16:47 - you know, the repairs, we don't have anywhere to go.
16:49 - Is it safe for us to be there?
16:51 - You know, what happens if I, you know, test for something?
16:54 - Because there's a big emphasis on testing all the time and I find something, but I can't fix it, right?
16:59 - And that's a problem for families.
17:01 - But also, you know, if you think about places like family-based child care, right, we work a lot with that audience.
17:07 - Think about what it means to test something, find something, but not be sure that you have the money to fix it.
17:12 - And so I think,
17:14 - You're right.
17:15 - And we have to be respectful of understanding how personal housing is also, but not not use that as an excuse or a crutch to not make sure that the systems aren't designed to make it easy for people to take action, if that makes sense.
17:33 - Right.
17:33 - To be able to be there to help.
17:36 - help educate people, equip people, provide that agency.
17:40 - But in providing that agency, I guess what I'm saying is let's not shift responsibility onto the individual households either.
17:46 - Yeah.
17:47 - And isn't that always the case with risk is the risk is putting it at the individual's feet rather than at the system's feet or the government's feet.
17:55 - And, you know, we kind of assume that, well, I mean, it's buried in there in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right?
18:05 - fundamental social contract with our built environment, that it's there to protect us, keep the rain off, keep us warm, and protect us from the beasts, you know, protect us.
18:17 - And we know we're breaking that social contract, you know, in many, many cases.
18:22 - So we can't excuse that.
18:25 - But it was funny when you were saying about the data and not wanting to know.
18:28 - I mean, that extends right the way up through landlords and often states and governments, right?
18:33 - Absolutely.
18:34 - Yeah.
18:35 - the fear of looking too closely and finding something that you can't afford to fix.
18:41 - When you know it's there anyway, it's just you don't want it presented in a black and white report in front of you, frankly.
18:48 - That's right.
18:48 - Yeah, I used to it another lifetime before I came to the National Center for Healthy Housing.
18:52 - I used to work on indoor and outdoor air quality with a wider range of sectors, including schools.
18:58 - And I remember having a number of conversations with school superintendents and principals about this, you know, but if we find something, we're going to have to fix it.
19:05 - And they never had enough money in the capital budget.
19:07 - Right.
19:08 - And you'd have the conversation would sort of eventually gently turn to.
19:11 - But like, but can you afford it if something goes wrong?
19:15 - Right.
19:16 - Can you afford it if a child shows up with their lawyer because, you know, of the way that the school building is sort of compromising their health and well-being also.
19:25 - So there are it's it's easy, I think, for from individuals all the way up through government decision makers to focus on what it's going to take, the cost of testing, the cost of remediation, but.
19:38 - So I think part of our job is to also help articulate the costs of inaction as well, right?
19:44 - That there are costs there that we are going to bear as societies, as communities, as individuals.
19:53 - Did I remember the last time we spoke, you're an epidemiologist by background, is that right?
19:57 - I am.
19:58 - And yeah, and that's not obvious.
19:59 - This healthy housing is a discipline that is very, very multidisciplinary.
20:05 - I don't think I've ever met anybody who has said, oh, I grew up wanting to be a healthy housing practitioner, right?
20:11 - That's just not...
20:12 - not a thing, at least not here.
20:14 - So we all have found our way to this through some some of our colleagues in NCHH are from housing or environmental science or industrial hygiene or biostatistics, you know, all different kinds of backgrounds, political science.
20:30 - But I do come to it by way of public health.
20:33 - And so that gives me, I think, a really particular lens on these issues that would be different if you were interviewing our deputy director or our chief scientist.
20:42 - Yeah, particularly accounting for the downstream costs at a society level of inaction here.
20:51 - Like you say, very few organisations can genuinely afford to fix housing.
21:00 - but what part of an epidemiologist's job is to show the costs of not doing it to society some of these costs aren't you know balance sheet costs these are costs to society health you know absenteeism education this stuff comes back around to bite us one way or the other
21:17 - That's right.
21:18 - Exactly right.
21:19 - And taking that societal perspective, right, instead of maybe just like a narrower payer perspective or perspective of a specific sector.
21:28 - And yeah, I think the epidemiology and that background also has me personally.
21:32 - programs to really spot patterns and sort of ask questions of not just like, why is this happening to this one individual in front of me?
21:41 - But, you know, why does this keep happening?
21:43 - What other patterns are we seeing?
21:46 - What factors are contributing to this over time?
21:49 - What solutions are available and are those solutions durable?
21:53 - Right.
21:53 - Again, with that societal perspective,
21:57 - And that sort of public health perspective, I think, really helps to question and sort of pressure test like that gap between technical knowledge of this is something that can fix the problem.
22:08 - And is this actually a durable solution on the ground out there in the real world with real people implementing these solutions?
22:17 - So do you as an organization, are you directly at the coalface or are you working through intermediaries?
22:23 - What's your kind of as a role as an entity?
22:26 - How do you exist in the world of the building environment?
22:30 - Yeah, that's a great question.
22:31 - So we are not a direct service organization.
22:34 - Sometimes when I start talking to people, people imagine I've got an army full of staff with people.
22:39 - tool belts and power tools.
22:41 - And that is not our role in this space.
22:44 - You probably don't want any of us coming to replace a window at your home or hang a new door.
22:52 - Instead, our role in this space is really through a combination of research that helps us to identify not just the problems we face, but really importantly focused on
23:05 - identifying evidence and surfacing that evidence about what works.
23:08 - What are the effective policies and practices?
23:11 - And not only are they effective, but are they equitable?
23:14 - And then another arm of our work is about advocacy and advancing policies and practices and systems that support healthier housing.
23:25 - And here in the United States, that means working at the federal, state and then local levels.
23:32 - But also, importantly, understanding that those policy changes are often not the end.
23:39 - They're often the start of the journey.
23:42 - And so a third leg of that stool for us is really about coming alongside the communities, the people who are trying to implement those solutions on campus.
23:53 - the ground, making sure that they are equipped with the best information and tools and funding and support that they need, right?
24:01 - And helping them sort of navigate that if they run into a barrier, helping think creatively about ways to overcome the barriers of implementation.
24:10 - So those are sort of three different ways that we work together, that work together for us, three pillars.
24:17 - of identifying what works through the evidence base, advancing what we know works through policy changes at the federal, state and local levels, and then helping to ensure that the communities have the capacity to implement and act on that.
24:33 - Although, let me just actually put a footnote on that last one, because I think it's also important to note that oftentimes the solution and the evidence about what's work is also coming from the communities, right?
24:43 - So there's just this
24:48 - levels.
24:48 - And, you know, I think part of NCHH's unique role, because no single organization controls the healthy housing ecosystem.
24:56 - It's too broad.
24:58 - It's too diverse.
24:59 - But one of our special roles is to help connect those pieces that are often separated from each other, the research, the policy, the implementation, the experience that communities are bringing to the forefront and help those different pieces work together more effectively.
25:16 - That's really interesting.
25:17 - Yeah.
25:17 - So kind of a gravitational force, because I was I was thinking when you were talking through there, you know, research.
25:25 - You mentioned seven to eight to eleven areas, you know, of healthy homes.
25:29 - Right.
25:30 - Which I'm I'm not going to ask you to rattle all of them off.
25:33 - But, you know, I'm guessing it's fairly broad.
25:37 - So research under that.
25:40 - It is going to be very broad indeed.
25:43 - Advocacy at a federal, state and local level.
25:46 - I mean, wow, there must be 10,000 of you in NCHH to cover federal, state and local, right?
25:56 - And then the many, many organisations in each of those areas all over the country.
26:03 - I mean, it's a huge umbrella that you're looking at at a very high level.
26:09 - How does that work strategically?
26:11 - Are you sitting down on kind of a, do you have like five-year programs or annual program?
26:17 - How do you decide the direction of travel and where to focus?
26:21 - Yeah, I mean, I think like many nonprofit organizations, we engage in strategic planning.
26:25 - We actually just recently wrapped up a five-year strategic plan that really evaluates where can we add the most value into this ecosystem, right?
26:39 - those ideas and that vision against like, well, why NCHH, right?
26:43 - Like, why does the world need NCHH specifically to do that?
26:47 - Or is there somebody else already picking up that piece?
26:49 - Because you're right.
26:50 - I mean, what I described is incredibly broad and it does take thousands and thousands.
26:55 - I think what's kind of special about the healthy housing field and other fields like ours is that it doesn't have to all sit within one organization.
27:03 - It's done through this really, really,
27:07 - dense sort of web and network of organizations and people all across the country and even the world who are all bringing their specific set of expertise or experience, their tools, their resources, their networks to bear on this.
27:22 - And so part of our job, let me be clear, and I want to diminish the work of my staff, we are generating our own evidence and bringing a lot to the table too.
27:31 - But one of our roles is to help sort of be a hub and a connector for
27:36 - all of those different voices and perspectives so that nobody, no one organization has to shoulder it alone.
27:42 - And an example of that, if I can put in a shameless plug here, is we have, we are the backbone organization for the National Safe and Healthy Housing Coalition, which is a broad voluntary coalition that has members in all 50 U.S. states,
27:58 - two U.S. territories, the District of Columbia, and folks from all of those different sectors we talked about earlier, right?
28:06 - So we've got governmental folks and academics and healthcare providers and contractors and inspectors, all the different types of folks who may be involved in parts of this ecosystem who have a space to come together and exchange their ideas and disagree with each other, right?
28:25 - And help to
28:27 - expand each other's understanding about the role of housing in promoting health and well-being and to bring new ideas to the table about what might be possible in using housing as a platform to improve health.
28:43 - Do you guys all come together for conferences and things at all?
28:46 - Because I imagine there's that there's it's an awfully big network.
28:49 - There's a lot of really good stuff to be talking about.
28:52 - I mean, it would make one hell of a three or four days altogether sharing ideas and stuff.
28:57 - Does that does that happen?
28:58 - Has it ever happened?
28:59 - It would.
29:00 - So the coalition is completely unfunded work, right?
29:03 - If we wanted to sort of unpack the challenges of doing this work in the real world, that is not work that is supported by a government or a foundation.
29:12 - So that is work that is largely done in kind.
29:16 - And, you know, with just the not just at NCHH, but the in kind time of all of the coalition steering committee members and coalition members who raise their hand and say, yeah, I'll host a webinar on that or
29:27 - I'll help you guys do a listening session.
29:30 - So for the coalition specifically, we've gotten really good at virtual convenings and also finding opportunities to co-locate with other meetings.
29:41 - If we think a lot of coalition members may be going to another conference, we will contact the conference organizers and ask for an opportunity to have a room for
29:50 - a few hours and bring folks together or even sometimes just a general session with the other conference attendees.
29:55 - Right.
29:56 - That's an opportunity to bring more people into into the coalition and hear from them.
30:01 - And then the field as a whole does have conferences where that are specifically focused on healthy housing.
30:07 - In my career tenure, that's typically happened in three different ways.
30:12 - During different administrations, the federal government has actually taken the lead on holding a healthy housing conference.
30:19 - It was on a cadence of every other year.
30:21 - That's not been the case in recent years.
30:25 - But that was really, really important.
30:27 - And to show the cross-agency collaboration of our Department of Housing and Urban Development with the Environmental Protection Agency, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, having leadership from those three organizations.
30:39 - federal agencies and then sort of seeing that integration mirrored all the way down to the local level.
30:45 - There are some private conferences.
30:47 - There's a series of conferences called the Lead in Healthy Homes Conferences that are organized by some great folks in the field that have become incredibly important always, but especially in the absence of those federal convenings.
31:02 - And then sometimes through other types of conferences, there's been an opportunity to
31:09 - healthy housing track.
31:11 - So the National Environmental Health Association had a few conferences where they had a healthy housing track.
31:16 - I think Building Performance Association is another one who's added at times a healthy housing track.
31:23 - So we are always looking for opportunities to come together.
31:25 - The field is hungry for more, no matter how you can imagine, Simon, no matter how many opportunities we provide people, people want more of them.
31:33 - So yeah, it's certainly a critical process.
31:35 - critical function.
31:36 - And particularly for multidisciplinary, interdepartmental, national movements like this coming together is so important, you know, because it's, I was talking to one of the founders of the green building movement there a few weeks ago on the show.
31:54 - And, you know, he was making the point that often these endeavors are actually quite lonely affairs as well.
32:00 - Like, you know, it's quite good to get together and form a base camp.
32:05 - you know, to share ideas and tools and equipment and try and summit this stuff together because you realise that you can be ploughing a lonely furrow for 12 months, 18 months at a time.
32:17 - And, you know, you have these kind of online meetings and you have, you know, you go about your business, but you realise you don't come together, you know, to understand why this stuff's important.
32:29 - Absolutely.
32:30 - No, I agree.
32:31 - One of the themes that came out of our recent strategic planning reflection, I mentioned we just concluded a strategic plan, was that
32:41 - relationships just aren't just foundational to the work that we do.
32:46 - In many cases, they are the work themselves, right?
32:49 - The relationships we have with communities, with federal agencies, with other colleagues in the field, and the trust that has to be built over time to have some of these conversations and navigate, you know, some of these waters is
33:02 - really so essential.
33:04 - And I think everybody, you know, in any sector, everybody's getting smarter about virtual convenings, but I don't know that anybody is perfectly replicated what happens, you know, just at the coffee table, you know, this coffee stand where you're going to grab a cup of coffee in between sessions and you strike up a conversation with somebody or what's happening over lunch is somebody says, hey, tell me more about that, that thing you were saying on the panel.
33:27 - And yeah, I think it would be interesting if we could
33:32 - sum up all of the major progress and ideas and events that have transpired in our movement over the last 30 years, how many of them started in those kind of informal, organic moments?
33:43 - My guess is a lot.
33:45 - And to pull in some of that international experience as well, because, you know, one thing you can be sure of as night follows day is that
33:53 - other countries are struggling with housing, right?
33:59 - So there's a lot of learning worldwide on this.
34:03 - I think it'd be, yeah, it'd be really interesting to get, no.
34:06 - Paint a picture of some of that strategic direction there.
34:09 - What are kind of some of the things you're thinking about over the next period as a organisation to focus on or concentrate on?
34:17 - Yeah, that's a great question.
34:19 - You know, in some ways, you know, a key message there is that, you know, we haven't finished our work, right?
34:25 - And so I think when we publish our refreshed framework, you'll see a lot of the same thing, that there's still a real need.
34:34 - to advance evidence and innovation.
34:37 - There are a lot of things.
34:38 - Sometimes people will be like, aren't we done researching?
34:40 - And there are a number of things where we have enough research to act.
34:44 - But there is always new technologies.
34:47 - We have a changing climate.
34:48 - There's still a lot of opportunity, I think, to continuously
34:56 - generate and interpret and mobilize that credible evidence.
35:00 - And certainly even more important to make sure that that evidence base is credible in the age of AI, that we are making decisions and policy based on sound science.
35:12 - So we still are going to see that, I think, as an important pillar.
35:16 - Definitely a need to shape, continue shaping those policies and those systems for housing, working across all of those levels from the federal, state and local level.
35:26 - And as you point out, bringing in, you know, more intentionally some of their perspectives internationally, maybe we don't have it all figured out.
35:33 - We don't have all of the ideas and solutions here.
35:35 - You know, turning to our colleagues across the globe for ideas about how to tackle some of these challenges.
35:43 - There's certainly...
35:44 - a lot of work left to do in the healthy housing ecosystem here in the United States and undoing decades of
35:53 - of systemic problems and systemic racism, if we want to speak quite candidly about it, where the outcomes that we are addressing today are the obvious byproduct of a very, a system that was set up very intentionally to cause harm.
36:10 - So we definitely still see a need to act there.
36:13 - Communities still need, you know, not just good policy, but the ability, the capacity to act on it, you know, to have,
36:22 - all of the, you know, the workforce and the funding and, you know, all of the infrastructure at the local level to implement solutions and to bring their own ideas to the table.
36:32 - So I think you'll see all of that.
36:34 - And then I think what you'll see is just a little bit more intentionality about our specific role in building the field as well through all of these pillars, but also, you know,
36:43 - Looking forward to the future of healthy housing, what is the pipeline of young talent?
36:50 - Who are the next generation of healthy housing leaders that we are helping to cultivate and make sure that they're having opportunities to shape these decisions right now?
37:00 - How are we adapting to climate change, to AI, to some of these
37:06 - things where that maybe the healthy housing problems haven't changed, but some of the landscape around us is changing in notable ways.
37:12 - So, yeah, I think there's you'll see a lot that looks very familiar and very core National Center for Healthy Housing.
37:21 - But I think, you know, along with many, many others in the field, we're also have a really sort of keen eye on.
37:30 - all of these other factors that are changing around us and wanting to make sure that we are keeping up with them to maximize the opportunities for improving housing quality and to be there to really speak up for communities and mitigate any risks that some of these emerging factors may introduce.
37:48 - I'll have you back to the podcast in just a moment.
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39:44 - Now, back to the show.
39:46 - And how are you as an organisation funded then?
39:48 - Is this a kind of a federally funded organisation?
39:51 - Are you funded at local levels?
39:52 - Is it philanthropic?
39:54 - How does it work for non-profits in your kind of field?
39:59 - I mean, if you asked different nonprofits working in our space, you again, if you ask 10 of us, we'd all probably 10 of us have a slightly different mix.
40:06 - For the National Center for Healthy Housing, we have traditionally been funded through a combination of governmental grants and contracts and mostly federal grants from the agencies I mentioned already, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Energy.
40:27 - sometimes, but then also their counterparts at the state and local level, combined with private foundations, so that philanthropic support that you mentioned, and, you know, too many foundation partners to acknowledge here, but who have provided really critical support to fund, you know, projects and activities and work that, you know,
40:52 - you know, can't or that our federal government can't or won't fund.
40:56 - And so they have been critical.
40:58 - For instance, the coalition that I mentioned that was initiated with the help of a private foundation grant is unfunded now, but the catalyst for it was supported by an initial private foundation grant.
41:12 - So that's how we have moved through this work.
41:17 - is through a combination of those types of funding sources.
41:19 - And of course, there's not enough for it, right?
41:21 - I mean, not for us, not for anybody.
41:24 - This is an issue where...
41:27 - And there's no mystery in how we actually solve these problems.
41:31 - It's part of what attracted me to this field of healthy housing.
41:33 - Like, we know how to find these hazards.
41:35 - We know how to fix them.
41:37 - It really is just a matter of scaling up, right?
41:40 - How do we actually do this work at scale?
41:42 - And so that's, I think, also another big challenge of the next five-year strategic period is, what are those new models, not just for the interventions themselves, but how are we financing them?
41:54 - How are we...
41:55 - financing them in a way that's sustainable over time.
41:59 - So there's been a lot of effort put in, not just from our organization, from many others around the country, into identifying new financing mechanisms that not only address the home holistically, but allow some money to revolve back into the system.
42:14 - So it's not just a grant program where we have a fixed number of dollars, and once we run out of money, we have to go get a new grant, but how can we actually
42:23 - start creating a system where money is flowing back into the system to help fix the next hundred homes and then the next hundred homes, because that's really
42:32 - what is needed here.
42:32 - And I will just share one little back of the envelope calculation I did with your listeners.
42:38 - We're turning back to lead for a minute.
42:41 - Folks may have been following over the last decade since the Flint water crisis here in the U.S., the significant investment that the United States has put into replacing lead service lines across the country.
42:52 - And, you know, we've had many, many different politicians on both sides of the aisle,
42:58 - talking about this 10-year goal of replacing lead service lines in 10 years and whether that'll happen or not is a separate question.
43:05 - But even having that as a goal, I went and looked at the number of homes that we expect have just lead-based paint hazards, not talking about all these other housing risks that you and I have been mentioning, but just lead-based paint hazards and looking at the number of homes that we typically get into per year through our
43:25 - Department of Housing and Urban Development's lead-based paint program to remediate the lead hazards.
43:31 - And if we kept at that pace for lead-based paint hazards, it would take us over a thousand years to get to all those homes.
43:37 - So obviously, we need to do a lot better than that.
43:41 - And we can.
43:41 - We just got to summon the will.
43:45 - Yes.
43:45 - Yeah.
43:46 - And it's interesting, isn't it?
43:47 - Because the scale is so big.
43:49 - I mean, it's interesting that your aspirations is to scale here.
43:52 - Yeah.
43:54 - And I think it's one of the advantages, particularly in many, many of the homes that you're working in, that this is really low hanging fruit stuff.
44:06 - This is not crossing T's and dotting I's and getting small fractions of a percentage of benefit to users.
44:14 - fundamentally changing people's outcomes with a lot of this work.
44:19 - So as a force for good, the downside is there's a lot of work to do, but the good side with a lot of this kind of social work is that the impacts can be really profound.
44:32 - It's not just that they can be profound, they are profound.
44:35 - And, you know, there's a tremendous amount of evidence base cataloging the return, significant return on investments of these kinds of interventions, even when they're done in silos.
44:48 - They have tremendous opportunity and co-benefits and efficiencies if we move towards more of a whole home or holistic approach.
44:56 - approach.
44:56 - So we know that's not even a theoretical for us.
44:59 - We know that that is the case here.
45:02 - It really is just about building the political will to get it done at scale.
45:08 - Yeah, it's a really interesting one that I've had two conversations in the last week on podcasts, one with an advocate for Safer Air and the other one with a politician, actually, to talk to them about translating this stuff into political will.
45:22 - And
45:24 - The interesting thing is the friction between these really obvious slam dunk impacts to society and the seeming inability to move that across into political will.
45:41 - And the difference between research, science and policy and regulation.
45:47 - And it's just such a chasm.
45:49 - And, you know, the guy that I was speaking to, who's an ex-environment and energy minister, you know, very technical department.
45:58 - was saying that the challenge with politics is that you have political capital and you use capital up in three ways as a politician.
46:10 - The first one is with your colleagues in presenting ideas and you lose capital pretty quickly if you just keep coming up with unworkable ideas, right?
46:21 - So the first goal of any politician is to get it across the line
46:26 - with colleagues, depending on where you are in the world, across your house, your aisle, whatever the scenario is.
46:32 - The second problem then is you've then got to get it through the house.
46:36 - So if you can convince your colleagues, you've then got to present that idea.
46:40 - And if it's a poorly constructed idea, then everybody has mud on their face and you affect everybody's political capital, right?
46:48 - And then the third one is if you actually get it through, sometimes you can get civil revolt from work as well.
46:55 - So you can put through what you think is a good idea.
46:57 - And then there are unintended consequences that that's the most dangerous of all, you know, that an entire political system put something forward.
47:06 - And then everybody goes, no, thank you very much.
47:09 - You know, you didn't think about this, this and this.
47:12 - So it's a really odd game to bring these huge numbers, often billions, trillions of dollars of benefit, seemingly.
47:22 - And all of a sudden, it hits this political machine, which it has to.
47:26 - And all of a sudden, people's individual political capital is on the line.
47:30 - And it's a different game completely.
47:33 - Absolutely.
47:34 - And I think we've talked about it already.
47:36 - I think part of this is it's so fragmented, right?
47:38 - So if somebody's
47:40 - you know, specific portfolio where maybe they have a leadership position in housing, but they view this as a public health issue or a public health benefit, right?
47:48 - That fragmentation, I think, can cause a problem.
47:50 - You know, I think people's own sort of paradigm.
47:54 - There was an interesting social science study back maybe a decade ago here by the Frameworks Institute.
48:02 - that looked at what the lay public, but that includes our decision makers, understand about healthy housing.
48:08 - And one of the really interesting findings out of that report for me was people generally understand the connection between housing and health.
48:15 - Right.
48:15 - They get it.
48:16 - But they
48:18 - also believe that it's this big, complicated, broken, unfixable system, right?
48:24 - It's bad tenants and greedy landlords and just, you know, it's just all of this.
48:29 - You know, people's own choices that are making their they chose to live there.
48:33 - They're choosing not to maintain their homes.
48:36 - So it's just this big, messy problem in their head.
48:38 - And of course, what do a lot?
48:39 - A lot of us are scientists by training.
48:41 - And what does our training teach us to do, right?
48:43 - We spend 90% of our airtime talking about the problem.
48:46 - And we think we're convincing people there's a problem.
48:48 - They already know there's a problem, right?
48:51 - And so what we're really doing is actually reinforcing, unintentionally reinforcing that paradigm for them that, oh, this is a big unsolvable problem instead of using that airtime more strategically to help,
49:03 - Find the way ahead and navigate what I think are some natural tensions out there that need to be resolved.
49:09 - You know, for instance, in the United States, I think probably in other countries as well.
49:14 - It feels like every conversation right now is either about climate or affordability, affordability of homes in particular and.
49:24 - it can feel like there's a natural tension, right?
49:26 - That insisting on homes that are safer and healthier is going to make them more expensive, right?
49:33 - It makes the development process longer and more cumbersome.
49:37 - And so I think that that, you know, can become also where you talked about political capital, right?
49:43 - If I start to insist on that, am I going to be seen as somebody who's out of tune or not aware of potential unintended consequences to, you know,
49:51 - affordability.
49:52 - And I want to be clear at NCHH, we reject the idea that affordability and quality are in opposition to each other, right?
50:00 - There's nothing affordable about a home that makes you sick.
50:04 - And there's nothing healthy about worrying whether you can pay your rent or mortgage on time, right?
50:08 - Again, it's just those are not separate concepts.
50:10 - And we can provide both.
50:12 - We have a
50:16 - But acknowledging that, right, and focusing on some sort of those real issues, I think, is important.
50:22 - Because right now in the United States, a lot of the emphasis is really on that affordability question and new supply and building new homes without pausing, you know, to always to understand, oh, well, what are the opportunities?
50:37 - Because our own government projections suggest that in 2050, right?
50:42 - which is less than 25 years away, 70% of the homes that we are going to be living in in 2050 are already constructed today.
50:50 - So yes, let's build those new homes
50:52 - Let's not make the process too cumbersome.
50:54 - Let's make sure they're safe and sound, but without being overly burdensome.
50:57 - But what are we going to do about the places where the majority of us are still going to be living?
51:01 - And how are we going to make sure that those are safe and healthy places to be every day, but then also during some of these increasing events, wildfires and floods and hurricanes, all of these other types of events, extreme heat that are increasing in frequency and duration.
51:19 - So, yeah, I think it's...
51:21 - it's a complicated question.
51:24 - I'm not a political science major, so I'm not the right person to ask about what the solution is to sort of navigating and overcoming that.
51:34 - I think there are plenty of people far brighter and more
51:42 - politically astute than us that still haven't figured this one out either.
51:47 - Like, you know, this is a very complex thing to solve.
51:51 - But one of the things he said that I thought was really interesting was that often from a, particularly from an academic background, which is where a lot of this knowledge surfaces through research, through academic groups, through health groups and so on.
52:09 - is that we're often trained that the whole premise particularly scientifically is to present information to peers that's repeatable that's kind of our upbringing right is that we've been we've been trained to to articulate and communicate to peers and that's completely not what
52:33 - the real world does.
52:34 - That's right.
52:35 - And this is why we're often left just wondering why we've got this fabulous paper that just lays it all out and explains it.
52:44 - Nobody seems to be listening.
52:45 - Right.
52:46 - It's because we're just talking a completely different language.
52:50 - And, you know, as this guy was saying to me last week, he was saying, you know, the reality is that I don't see those things.
52:58 - that knowledge.
53:00 - What I get are proposals on my desk where several layers before me look at this and present something in summary form that needs a clear action, that needs a next step.
53:18 - And he said so many times, and we saw this particularly with sustainability and the environment, is that...
53:24 - There's 101 problems and not a solution for any of them.
53:28 - And actually what politicians need is the problem clearly articulated, but very clear and clearly articulatable next steps.
53:39 - Because without that, they've got nothing to work with.
53:42 - And he said, and I kind of sighed, he said, one of the best ways that politicians have to do this stuff is with pilots, because they put less capital into a pilot than a national pilot.
53:53 - change of direction or a regional change of direction.
53:57 - And I was like going, oh, housing, you know, there's a joke in the UK that there's more pilots in social housing than British Airways.
54:07 - And that it's just because it's such a big sector.
54:10 - Yeah.
54:12 - And you probably see this as well.
54:14 - You can survive on pilots for your entire career, frankly, because there's always another region that can swallow up another hundred-house pilot or a thousand-house pilot, and that runs for three or five years.
54:28 - And you do five or six of those, and you've done a career of pilots, but you've never actually moved the needle.
54:35 - you've just in this perpetual cycle of demonstration and politician moves on and the civil servants move on and the government structures move on.
54:44 - And then you're starting again from scratch five years later and you've actually moved no further forward.
54:49 - And because you have done those hundred homes.
54:52 - Yeah.
54:52 - Yeah.
54:52 - Yeah.
54:52 - Except for those hundred homes.
54:54 - But, you know, I bet you can cast your mind back to pilot after pilot after pilot over years and years and years going, oh,
55:02 - well, we've done this.
55:03 - Like, why am I having to show this again?
55:05 - We've done this over and over and over again.
55:08 - Yeah, but we'll just run another pilot.
55:10 - We just, we're different.
55:11 - Make sure it works in this type of housing or with this population.
55:14 - Yeah, I would be lying if I didn't say there were times I was standing in the back of a conference being like, are we still talking about this, right?
55:21 - 20 years later, are we still talking about this?
55:23 - But here's the hopeful part of that.
55:25 - I think for me, Simon, what I have seen work here over the decades of my career
55:31 - is that it's not just the individual sort of pilots that are 100 homes, is that in the U.S., we'll often see sort of lots of layers of laboratories.
55:42 - An individual municipality tries something, right?
55:45 - An individual set of child care centers tries something.
55:49 - A state tries something.
55:51 - And those experiments that are just constantly running, and so there's a lot of opportunity there to do,
55:56 - find the communities that are willing to try something out or find a state that is, you know, just primed and ready to innovate a new strategy.
56:05 - And so for national organizations like ours, I think part of our job is to collect as many of those stories and examples as we can.
56:14 - And importantly, not just the ones that worked, but the ones that didn't, right?
56:17 - And get the stories of like, oh, it was such a good idea.
56:19 - What happened?
56:20 - Right?
56:20 - Why did
56:21 - Why wasn't there uptake once you had the money in place?
56:24 - What happened?
56:24 - Why didn't landlords want that support so that when we're running the next experiment, we can benefit from those lessons learned.
56:30 - But those sort of scaling up from those hundred homes to the local level.
56:35 - Now a state wants to take it on or a managed care plan wants to take it on.
56:38 - And now Medicaid or a public insurance program is willing to pay for it at the state level.
56:44 - That kind of glide path is something that we have seen actually move the needle, not as fast as it needs to be moving, but actually start to create some momentum and progress for scaling up some of these efforts across the United States.
56:58 - And I'm guessing that's the importance of an organisation like yours is to connect those dots, to say to a group that's doing something with K through 12 schools here.
57:10 - Did you know there's another group over here doing something similar?
57:13 - You should be talking or, you know, actually this this policy at this point.
57:20 - regional government level worked have you tried talking to this regional government with your pilot here to see so you you get this top-down view where you're seeing both the research being carried out and funding it at times but you're also seeing how all of these gears are stitching together
57:39 - That's exactly right.
57:39 - And I mean, it's not frequently physically putting these groups in conversation with each other or highlighting, you know, actively highlighting these strategies so others can benefit.
57:49 - Because sometimes somebody might, you know, attend a webinar and hear an idea and their community isn't ready for it.
57:55 - But we've planted a seed.
57:56 - You know, maybe they're ready for it two or three years down the line, but then they remember and they might not remember the specific idea.
58:03 - state or community that was highlighted, but they know to come back to us and we can connect them back, you know, to the information they need to get started in their own community.
58:11 - Or importantly, and honestly, you know, this is not something I ever took a course on in graduate school.
58:17 - Sometimes it's reflecting back with my national perspective to that local leader or that, you know, state leader who's really struggling with it, thinking, oh man, I've been trying to get this passed for three years.
58:29 - It feels like we're having the same conversation to reflect back to them.
58:31 - Hey, no, this is how it happens.
58:33 - Here is how I have seen this journey you're on play out in 10 other communities.
58:37 - Keep going.
58:38 - You're on the right track and I see the progress that you're making and I have seen it work.
58:43 - Keep going.
58:44 - And that is, I think, you know, something that we don't talk about as often, but is a really essential role here.
58:49 - Also, as you mentioned earlier, but you know, you're not alone and that that this work is worth struggling and staying staying the course on.
59:00 - What are some of the kind of hot button topics that you're finding yourself pulled into?
59:07 - Because I guess, you know, regardless of what your strategy, the world happens around you often, you know, particularly here in Europe, we've got fuel security and energy crises looming this winter.
59:18 - You know, that's...
59:20 - cyclical, you know, both every few years, but also every couple of decades, you know, all the way back to the 70s fuel crisis.
59:29 - Damp and mould seems to come round and round, you know, water damaged buildings, radon, you know, even though all of these things are ever present, they seem to morph and cycle and you find yourself in one storm or another.
59:43 - Yeah.
59:45 - Do you find yourself in that position?
59:47 - Are there things at the moment that are riding high in the consciousness of healthy housing?
59:53 - Yeah, absolutely.
59:54 - And I think we've mentioned some of them already.
59:56 - Some of them that are more proximate or more like just uncertain.
59:59 - AI is one example of one that's uncertain.
1:00:01 - I think there's a lot of, first of all, many of the communities that are worried about housing are also fighting data centers and worried about the harms of environmental harms and social harms of AI.
1:00:14 - Is that coming on your horizon, is it?
1:00:15 - Sorry to interject there.
1:00:18 - Every call that we are on with the community, it comes up in some respect and communities kind of wrestling, even just like morally or ethically with like, you know, we're worried about the harms, but at the same time, is it okay if I use these tools?
1:00:30 - Because shouldn't I also benefit from them?
1:00:32 - Or like, I mean, it just is really fascinating conversations that again, we don't have the answers to.
1:00:37 - We're struggling through them with everybody else, but it comes up in almost every conversation with every person.
1:00:43 - But there's some environmental impacts here from some of them as well.
1:00:45 - You know, you're getting impacts on water sources, vibration, noise.
1:00:49 - You know, there are real implications at a local level.
1:00:52 - And so the groups that may be, you know, on the forefront of healthy housing at the local level,
1:00:59 - you know, they are often the ones that get called on for whatever is happening, whether it's related to housing or not, right?
1:01:04 - Because they just have the trust of the community as an organization that's responsive and that really cares about the residents.
1:01:11 - So, you know, whether it's a tornado that's happened or, you know, data center that's being pulled in, they're being pulled into these discussions and being asked to help lead on them and help residents sort of navigate these concerns.
1:01:25 - So AI comes up.
1:01:27 - And they're not going into the nice neighbourhoods either, I imagine.
1:01:31 - They're like most industrialisation.
1:01:34 - We can guess the areas of cities and urban areas that we find big industrial buildings popping up.
1:01:42 - That's right.
1:01:43 - And yeah, and I think just a lot of and, you know, a lot of these communities are not even saying, hey, let's have an outright ban, but like we slow it down and maybe just sort of understand what the trade like you're saying, there's jobs, you're saying this, can we actually just like, take a minute to unpack and make sure that we understand what the trade offs are and that they're acceptable for our community or that we're.
1:02:04 - have decommissioning plans in place for when you're about to abandon this infrastructure in 10 years when it becomes outdated, right?
1:02:10 - So we're not just gonna be left with a bunch of super fun sites scattered all over the country.
1:02:14 - So yeah, it's, it's not, a lot of times we are in conversations with communities and I'll have organizations call me up, you know, who we've never even worked with before and say, I know this isn't a housing issue, but we, you know, we've heard we can trust you.
1:02:30 - Right.
1:02:30 - So that again, going back to the sort of that theme of relationships,
1:02:34 - With something, I think, where there's as much uncertainty as AI, we see a lot of frontline healthy housing organizations being asked by their communities to, you know, be responsible for helping the community figure out how to respond.
1:02:46 - So that's a huge one.
1:02:48 - Yeah, but you made a really good point there about the life cycle of these as well.
1:02:53 - You know, what communities don't need is another dead industrial complex down the road from them, right, that never happens.
1:03:01 - never manifested the jobs it promised anyway, but now it's just another area of dilapidation.
1:03:06 - And we know data centers have a very short life cycle on them, or it seems to be that that's the case at the minute.
1:03:12 - So that's a very real problem is a risk to a community that a lot of infrastructure and a lot of resources go into something that could quite frankly not be there in a decade.
1:03:22 - Yeah, and driving up people's energy bills.
1:03:24 - I mean, just the cascade of impacts is really quite massive to even get your head around.
1:03:31 - So yeah, that's certainly a question.
1:03:34 - I mean, and again, it also comes up in just even terms of like, well, how are people or communities even going to get credible information in the age of AI, right?
1:03:43 - How do we make sure that AI is being fed the right information?
1:03:46 - And yeah, and some of the other ones I would say that we've mentioned already, climate
1:03:52 - is just huge and climate change and how communities, because housing is central to our response to a change in climate.
1:03:59 - Where do we expect people, most people to weather
1:04:03 - extreme weather events, whether it's extreme heat, extreme cold, a hurricane, a wildfire.
1:04:10 - Housing is really central to that response.
1:04:12 - If you don't have a home or a place to go, that's a problem too.
1:04:15 - And a lot of our housing stock in this country, and I think around the
1:04:23 - help people weather that both in terms of the threat itself, but also if it's already, if they've already got a bunch of legacy hazards like lead and all this other stuff, radon, all this other stuff we've been talking about, as people spend more time indoors, they're going to be exposed to those things more and more.
1:04:40 - So certainly climate comes up in almost every conversation.
1:04:43 - Mold is directly related to that conversation.
1:04:45 - We are being called on
1:04:47 - more and more by communities saying we need to figure out a better response to mold in our U.S. housing codes, most U.S. housing codes at the local level don't address mold directly.
1:04:59 - It's addressed indirectly through water intrusion, which is just an impossible thing for a tenant to navigate, right, to know that they have to use the magic words water intrusion when talking to code enforcement or they're going to say we don't deal with mold.
1:05:13 - Click and
1:05:15 - get hung up on.
1:05:16 - So yeah, that is something that we're seeing a number of states and communities grappling with is what is the right response to mold.
1:05:23 - We mentioned affordability.
1:05:25 - That is a
1:05:30 - I think there are conversations to be had about, you know, environmental reviews and that process and are there ways to streamline it so that we're not, you know, unintentionally slowing the development of new homes, but not so that we're sacrificing people's health and well-being.
1:05:45 - Right.
1:05:46 - We still have to ensure that those protections are in place.
1:05:49 - So that's, I think, just an ongoing conversation and one that has a lot of airtime costs.
1:05:56 - Right now, that affordability conversation, we had a major piece of housing legislation passed this summer called the Road to Housing.
1:06:02 - And, you know, excitingly for us in the field, although most of this bill was about increasing the supply of new housing and development of new housing, it also quietly incorporated in its passage the passage of the Whole Home Repair Act, which authorizes housing.
1:06:18 - one of our federal agencies to develop a pilot.
1:06:20 - There's that word again, pilot, to go beyond some of the siloed funding stream that we've been talking about into
1:06:29 - address homes more holistically, give communities, you know, a single pot of money to be able to address homes more holistically.
1:06:36 - So I think there are some bright spots in that conversation and some increasing acknowledgement that repair has to be part of this conversation too, not just development of new homes, but actually repair and rehab of existing homes.
1:06:49 - So yeah, and I think all of that tied to that financing conversation we had earlier.
1:06:53 - We just need to finance this at scale
1:06:58 - We're not just coming back in five years saying, what's the new grant program, but actually setting a chain in motion where we can keep up with the maintenance of homes over time.
1:07:10 - Yeah, you just need to figure out how to make homes data centers and you'll have all the money you could want in the world, it seems.
1:07:15 - That's right.
1:07:16 - Yeah, there you go.
1:07:17 - There you go.
1:07:18 - The interesting thing you mentioned there about the climate, I thought was interesting.
1:07:21 - I was talking to somebody today about the difference between this kind of
1:07:25 - new build theoretical designing for resilience, which is something I think, you know, we have to grapple when we're trying to imagine what our stock looks like in a changing climate.
1:07:36 - But for many, and this is much more the case in Europe than it is the US, I think something like 90% of the buildings that exist today will exist in 2050, right?
1:07:45 - And so this is a this is an environment where the climate is changing around buildings that have already been built.
1:07:53 - So a lot of this is about adaptation and changes.
1:07:55 - And one of the things I'm guessing you're finding yourself, particularly at the scale of the United States, is that.
1:08:04 - a repository for knowledge for what happens when a climate disaster happens of one nature or another, you know, moisture damage through storms and typhoons or floods or fires or, you know, pick any one you want, really, overheating events, you know.
1:08:23 - That's right.
1:08:25 - All these different things.
1:08:26 - And as a kind of a centre for healthy homes,
1:08:31 - you become quite an interesting knowledge base for that.
1:08:35 - And you mentioned that, was it Katrina was a good example of that, how you approached housing in that sector and what's been learned all these years later about dealing with homes post a big flood in that example.
1:08:50 - Yeah.
1:08:50 - Yeah, absolutely.
1:08:51 - You know, we're 20 years past the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in this country.
1:08:57 - And I wasn't at the National Center at the time that that happened.
1:09:02 - But the center mobilized with a lot of other national and local partners on the ground after Katrina.
1:09:09 - And there were
1:09:10 - you know, there were a lot of problems, but one of the problems was what to do with all of these severely flood damaged homes, because in many cases, the standard guidance was you got to just knock them down, right?
1:09:20 - And the effect of raising entire neighborhoods to the ground is devastating, right?
1:09:26 - Not just to the individual families, but to the social cohesion that can grow up in a neighborhood, in a community where, you know, families may have been there for generations and
1:09:36 - had deep connections to their community and their neighbors.
1:09:39 - And so part of NCHH's response on the ground after Katrina, in partnership with many others, was to pilot test a new set of protocols to see if you could safely clean up these severely flood damaged homes.
1:09:54 - And to document those protocols in field guide.
1:09:57 - And over the years, it's now available in English and Spanish.
1:10:00 - And it's not just a field guide.
1:10:02 - There are e-learning modules.
1:10:03 - And we have mobilized those resources every hurricane and flooding season every year for the past 20 years.
1:10:11 - And
1:10:13 - It's become a really so so we were both generating that knowledge, but to your point, then also helping to spread it to other communities and adapt the tools for use in other places.
1:10:23 - And, you know, something really special happened this spring.
1:10:26 - Our deputy director, Jonathan Wilson, happened to be on vacation near New Orleans, and he thought, well, let me just go back and drive by three of these homes that we built.
1:10:36 - You know, I wonder I wonder what's there today.
1:10:38 - And would you know that all three homes are still standing and still occupied by the same families that were there 20 years ago?
1:10:47 - And if you just stop and think about that for a minute of all the birthdays and retirements and graduations and new births, all of the moments, you have a kid learning to ride their bicycle in the driveway.
1:10:59 - that happened and that those families were able to experience in their homes, in their communities because of a choice not to just tear them to the ground, but to find a new way forward that helped to preserve life.
1:11:12 - not just the home for the family, but for the community itself.
1:11:15 - So I think that that's a great example of creating that repository, generating that new information, helping to spread it across the country.
1:11:27 - So that's, I think, a really, really powerful, also endorsement of this idea of investing in existing housing, right?
1:11:33 - Not just building our way out of housing.
1:11:36 - out of this problem.
1:11:37 - But certainly, you know, as we as we are building and rebuilding, taking that resilience into account is really essential to and understanding to your point, you know, I think a challenge of being a central repository, whether nationally or globally is, I think the goal has to be ensuring like health, the same health protection for everyone.
1:11:59 - But that means
1:12:01 - the solutions aren't going to look identical to each other and really grappling with that.
1:12:06 - If you take extreme heat as an example, my organization for a long time was a World Health Organization collaborating center for healthy housing training and research and participated in the development of
1:12:19 - World Health Organization's guidelines on healthy housing.
1:12:22 - And I know the discussions around setting standards for something like extreme heat are incredibly challenging because the impulse is to want a single threshold, right?
1:12:31 - Like this is how we define extreme heat.
1:12:34 - But that's not even appropriate within a national context like the U.S. What constitutes extreme heat in Alaska based on what the people are used in their bodies are used to experiencing, what their housing stock is capable of protecting them from is going to look wildly different than how we define extreme heat in Texas.
1:12:53 - Right.
1:12:53 - And that is just here within Alaska.
1:12:55 - one country as we start to think about that nationally and all of the variations.
1:13:00 - You know, it's it's really challenging, but but worth, I think, figuring out how do we articulate those standards that ensure that same level of health protection, but also know that the solutions are not going to look exactly identical.
1:13:14 - Yeah, of course.
1:13:15 - And beyond geographical, there's the social and economical strata within that as well.
1:13:20 - You know, a home on one side of the street can be a very different risk vector to a home on the other side of the street.
1:13:26 - Just by the nature.
1:13:28 - Who's living in the home?
1:13:29 - Is it an older resident?
1:13:30 - Is it a newborn?
1:13:31 - You know, is it somebody that's healthy and in their prime?
1:13:33 - Right.
1:13:33 - All of all of that matters.
1:13:37 - And yeah, it absolutely is a really, I think, important conversation that needs to happen.
1:13:43 - Yeah, like a lot of this stuff, there's a kind of a global strategic level to this, you know, and there are some homes in the line of fire that, you know, it doesn't make any sense to keep.
1:13:52 - And, you know, we see this with flooding is a really good example of that.
1:13:55 - You know, we've we've planned poorly.
1:13:58 - We've often built societies poorly and.
1:14:02 - The climate is changing around us.
1:14:03 - The stuff that might have worked 20, 30 years ago just isn't going to work now.
1:14:08 - And there are only so many times you can rebuild before it becomes economically unviable or socially unviable.
1:14:17 - Societies will break down if they're disrupted regularly enough.
1:14:21 - Communities certainly will.
1:14:24 - But there's an enormous amount of knowledge to be learned in the technicalities of this as well.
1:14:30 - You know, learning how to dry buildings out, learning how to remediate, learning the timings of things.
1:14:37 - All of this stuff is really important and very different from home to home and community to community.
1:14:43 - So it's an enormously complex picture.
1:14:46 - It is.
1:14:47 - And I, you know, would say, I think, you know, in terms of the...
1:14:51 - point about, you know, that where it makes the decision or that sends to stop rebuilding, you know, I think, again, that's where, you know, one of our values is about listening to communities.
1:15:01 - And I know around the world, certainly here in the U.S., there have been some really important developments of coastal communities who are taking the lead themselves and trying to identify, you know, sister communities that might be located in a different area.
1:15:16 - Yeah.
1:15:17 - engaging residents in a thoughtful process, right, rather than a top-down solution that just says you can't live here anymore, about what does that look like?
1:15:24 - How do we find someplace that's culturally going to feel like home to us and sort of be in control of our own transition?
1:15:32 - And so I think that, you know, those are great models to to follow as well.
1:15:37 - And, you know, extreme heat, I think, is one that we've been spending a lot of time on here in the United States.
1:15:43 - It's the climate issue that affects the most number of people.
1:15:47 - I think it's something like 70 percent of Americans have been affected by extreme heat in the last few years now.
1:15:53 - And that number is only going to increase.
1:15:57 - So that is one.
1:15:58 - And where the solutions aren't going to look the same everywhere.
1:16:01 - And it's not necessarily just a single solution, but a set of solutions of how are we reducing temperatures?
1:16:08 - You know, what kind of community level interventions can we put in place to reduce heat island effects that are going to then have that'll have a beneficial impact on keeping indoor temperatures cool?
1:16:19 - Yeah.
1:16:20 - But then also having to navigate interesting conversations.
1:16:23 - Many of the climate solutions that NCHH and other organizations like ours are involved in.
1:16:31 - We spend a lot of time talking about the co-benefits of healthy housing for a climate agenda, right?
1:16:35 - Like if we replace your old windows that are full of lead with more energy efficient windows, right?
1:16:40 - We get rid of lead, but we also reduce emissions and lower energy bills, right?
1:16:45 - We feel like Oprah, right?
1:16:46 - You get a benefit and you get a benefit and you get a benefit.
1:16:50 - But then there are times when that's not true.
1:16:52 - And I think extreme heat is a good example of that for us here in the United States, where an increasing number of us are calling for a right to have access to cooled air to be seen as an essential part of habitability, right?
1:17:07 - A century ago, less than a century ago, we saw movements, you know, in a lot of places to say it's not OK for people to freeze in their apartments.
1:17:15 - We're going to require landlords.
1:17:16 - If you're renting a unit, you have to keep it at a minimum temperature during the heating season.
1:17:21 - And that is your responsibility.
1:17:24 - That there is a need, I think, on the other end to protect people from these extreme temperatures.
1:17:30 - And that's going to bump up against this climate agenda of reducing emissions.
1:17:34 - That's going to have a bigger demand on energy.
1:17:40 - But again, as one of those places where I just think this bigger conversation of how can we pursue our climate agenda, but not on the backs of low income residents is something we have to grapple with as a field.
1:17:51 - Yeah, the overheating one is really complex, and I think it's been really brought to bear starkly over the last half a decade.
1:17:59 - You know, construction and the built environment moves very slowly, generationally, really, and we have the buildings we have because of the generations that have built them based on the climate they're used to experiencing, and we've seen such a rapid shift that those buildings are just failing.
1:18:17 - And we've also seen this modernisation of the building
1:18:20 - Particularly, as you said, for keeping the heat in, which has had very big unintended consequences with these heat waves where they've just become uninhabitable.
1:18:28 - Many of these spaces where we strived for energy efficiency and built nice big glass boxes that were super efficient and they've turned into ovens for a lot of people.
1:18:39 - And it's a real problem.
1:18:40 - But at the same breath, we can't air condition our way out of this problem necessarily.
1:18:47 - I always feel for the areas of the world are in that gray area where it's not frequent enough that every home, you know, if you're building a home in Abu Dhabi, right, or Texas or places where you know you're going to get.
1:19:05 - High temperatures for sustained periods of time, it's an engineering problem.
1:19:09 - It's just how big are the air conditioning units you need to keep a whole house warm or even a refuge.
1:19:15 - You know, there's a lot of this talk of refuge now in homes.
1:19:18 - If we can't afford to condition a whole space, is there a bedroom and a living room that we can keep at a temperature?
1:19:24 - That's right.
1:19:25 - But there are many parts that aren't like that.
1:19:28 - It's just not frequent enough to invest in all of that infrastructure.
1:19:33 - And they're now coming under pressure.
1:19:35 - And we've seen it very much in Europe.
1:19:37 - You know, whole parts of the southeast of England, you know, are temperatures that are causing mortality rates, you know, that are extraordinary.
1:19:46 - And so it's a real problem.
1:19:48 - Do you air condition every new build that's going to be built in the southeast of England?
1:19:53 - Probably not.
1:19:56 - so it's a real architectural engineering conundrum all of a sudden you know that's what yeah and I think I mean I would say even more so for the existing infrastructure than the new one but I do think that as you point out there are this is where the sort of community level interventions can come in about how do we reduce the overall heat island or can we create a refuge in individual apartments or even within a building itself right so people aren't necessarily having to leave their
1:20:24 - home building to go to a centralized cooling center?
1:20:27 - Where do their pets go?
1:20:29 - All of these other things that affect people's ability to access some of those more centralized interventions.
1:20:35 - And I would say for the communities for whom it's not that frequent, to be looking at projecting, is it going to stay infrequent or do you just actually have a runway to figure this out?
1:20:48 - Yeah, a friend of mine who designs or not designs, he was responsible for a lot of social housing up in Scotland.
1:20:54 - He was doing a retrofit program up there, a renovation program of a bunch of social houses, and he was trying to convince...
1:21:02 - the organizations involved to put groundings behind the insulation of the external insulation they were putting on for shutters, for solar shutters.
1:21:13 - And people are going, this is Scotland.
1:21:15 - What on earth would we need Mediterranean style external shutters for?
1:21:19 - And he went, yeah,
1:21:20 - well, you just need to do the climate modeling and see.
1:21:23 - And he says, within 10 years, you're going to be very thankful that we invested in putting those, because it costs us nothing now to stick the groundings in for shutters in 10 years' time.
1:21:33 - I'm telling you, you're going to need them.
1:21:35 - That's right.
1:21:36 - And it'll cost a lot more to retrofit and it'll be a much bigger hassle and disturbance.
1:21:40 - So, yeah.
1:21:41 - But again, that's, and some of this goes back to that earlier conversation we had even about like politicians and decision makers of,
1:21:47 - you know, thinking on these longer term scales, like I think it's natural that as individuals and families, like people aren't thinking on 20, 50 year scales, like we're trying to figure out, like, how am I going to afford dinner tonight or rent next week, right?
1:21:59 - Like that's, I can't fault them.
1:22:02 - But even politicians and decision makers, you know, they're thinking in a political sort of political cycle type of scale, where I think sometimes part of the reason it can be hard to advance some of the solutions is if the benefits are accruing over a generation.
1:22:18 - Yeah, they can't take credit for that now, necessarily in the same way.
1:22:22 - And so that's, you know, just a, yeah, something I think we have to figure out how we do better, equip them with better storytelling or talking points so that they can, it fits into that political life cycle a little more easily.
1:22:34 - Yeah, I'll butcher the saying, but it's something like society goes strong when it plants trees under which they know they'll never see the shade of.
1:22:44 - Yeah, yeah.
1:22:45 - You know, that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.
1:22:49 - The second best time is now.
1:22:50 - Yeah, right.
1:22:52 - Exactly.
1:22:52 - Exactly.
1:22:53 - Do you find yourself as an organization?
1:22:55 - I know you're not directly at the coalface necessarily.
1:23:01 - But nonetheless, you have to be sensitive to the habits and cultures of certain groups as well at the same breath.
1:23:11 - So, you know, one solution for one group of people isn't necessarily going to resonate or there might be deeply baked in ways of understanding.
1:23:20 - raising complaints or how you respond to failures.
1:23:24 - A good example of that would be military housing, for example, you know, housing like the rest of us, but in a very structured organisation where it can be very difficult to raise concerns in a structure like a military organisation, right?
1:23:38 - Absolutely.
1:23:38 - And it's interesting you raise military housing because over the last decade, we have seen a sharp uptick in inquiries related to military housing, whether from the media, you know, people investigating or from military families themselves who are, you know, concerned about conditions.
1:23:55 - And I want to acknowledge there are a lot of really great existing organizations out there.
1:24:01 - I think one of them is the Safe Military Housing Initiative.
1:24:03 - Sorry if I got your name wrong.
1:24:05 - There are a couple of organizations that are being led by military families who are trying to call attention to this issue.
1:24:13 - And so, yeah, I think, you know, whether we're talking about military housing or really any community, you know, one of our really deeply held values at the National Center for Healthy Housing is,
1:24:24 - is to listen to communities and that communities are always in charge.
1:24:29 - And so we don't come in with a predetermined solution for a community.
1:24:36 - You know, and one of the ways we've used a lot of analogies to describe our approach over the years is,
1:24:42 - Sometimes when we're talking to a community, an analogy we'll use is that we're all on a bus together.
1:24:47 - And that community, that group, they own the bus.
1:24:50 - They're in charge of where we're going, how fast, what route we're taking to get there.
1:24:56 - All of that.
1:24:56 - They are in charge of all of that.
1:24:58 - But we may be, but we're on the bus with them.
1:25:00 - And maybe we've got a fancy GPS system that can give us some warning about traffic up ahead or construction up ahead.
1:25:06 - Or maybe the bus breaks down and we happen to know how to change a tire, right?
1:25:10 - So that we are just coming alongside communities instead of telling them.
1:25:15 - what problems to care about or which solutions are best for them.
1:25:18 - We really focus on just bringing our expertise into the room.
1:25:24 - Also learning from them because every community we work with helps to shape our understanding of what the possible solution sets are or what the challenges are.
1:25:35 - And so that becomes, I think, really important in our.
1:25:38 - gaining the trust of a community like military families that you mentioned, because there can be really significant cultural pressures about, you know, not reporting or fearing repercussions for a family member.
1:25:56 - But also, again, this goes back to the cost of no action.
1:25:58 - What's the cost of no action if you have a service member who's worried about his or her family back at home and whether they're safe in that situation?
1:26:07 - That home.
1:26:07 - That's that's a fundamental issue of military readiness right there.
1:26:11 - So it's something that is.
1:26:13 - really important to, again, gain the trust, come alongside these communities, figure out how can we add value?
1:26:19 - They already know the problems.
1:26:21 - They don't need us to educate them on the problems.
1:26:23 - They know these systems, and this much better than we do.
1:26:27 - But how can our expertise add value?
1:26:30 - And in doing that, we often learn in the past several years, one of the things that's become really clear to us that's been a helpful entry point for us is
1:26:41 - around a lot of US military installments, the proportion of families that aren't even living on base in military controlled housing, they're living in the surrounding communities, right?
1:26:51 - So, okay, well now we have two different ecosystems that need interventions, right?
1:26:56 - And they may need different solutions from each other.
1:26:59 - And so that step of just really listening to the wisdom and the expertise of the folks that are living through these experiences has never failed us as a strategy.
1:27:12 - No, and it's...
1:27:16 - It's a shame in a way because I think the military experience is an interesting one because at a very core level, the military industrial complex has understood for many, many decades the importance of readiness, right?
1:27:32 - And you've seen this in the early development of sanitization techniques, field hospital techniques, right?
1:27:39 - you know, a whole range of things that because they understand at a very core level, if you don't have a healthy soldier, you're screwed, right?
1:27:48 - You're the sum of the value of all of the boots you can put on the ground.
1:27:54 - So at some level, they really understand this deeply.
1:27:58 - But yet I think.
1:28:01 - in many parts of it's not uniquely a US problem.
1:28:03 - There's an understanding that military housing has been one of these areas that they've taken their eye off the ball and you've got deep levels of underinvestment, lots of issues with water damage, mold, exposure to all sorts of pollutants.
1:28:16 - It's not great.
1:28:17 - And like you say, these are family members that aren't rich either.
1:28:22 - So they find themselves in the private ecosystem of rented accommodation and homes the same as social tenants do.
1:28:30 - So is it any wonder that they're experiencing the same kind of areas of deprivation that other people are as well?
1:28:38 - But I think there'd be a lot of lessons if they could get it right, because they fundamentally understand it and they have a unique way of approaching problems.
1:28:46 - Sometimes I think military do that perhaps other sectors could learn from it if they could do it well, because they understand if they could do it right, because they understand the value of a healthy system.
1:28:59 - group of people.
1:29:00 - And I think we miss that in society.
1:29:02 - We don't count the cost of poor housing at a community level on its impact on education and jobs.
1:29:12 - There's some fabulous work being done in Bradford, which is a great thing.
1:29:16 - It's called the born in Bradford study.
1:29:20 - And it was a group of mothers who signed up many years ago, probably 15 years ago at this stage for all of their children to be for all of their personal data to be held together by this cohort.
1:29:36 - So they have access to social data, um, education, um, uh,
1:29:44 - jail or penitentiary type data, you know, the legal system, workforce data, social data, everything really.
1:29:52 - They really have got a full picture of what's going on.
1:29:56 - And because Bradford's a very multicultural society, it's a really interesting picture across all sorts of different culture groups of how things like housing impact the life course of children.
1:30:14 - all through their life course.
1:30:16 - And you can see the impact of even two or three kilometers.
1:30:19 - The guy that talks about it very passionately, he says, on my drive into work or my train journey into work, which is about 10 miles from one station to the next, there's a difference in five years of life outcome just in that 10-mile train journey.
1:30:40 - He says it's astonishing.
1:30:42 - Yeah.
1:30:43 - how this stuff's all interconnected.
1:30:46 - Absolutely.
1:30:46 - And we see those same patterns here in the US.
1:30:50 - I mean, but then if you stop to think about it, I think all of us hear that statistic about how we spend 90% of our time in indoor environments, probably many of your listeners have heard that before, at least in the US, that's a statistic that's repeated just constantly.
1:31:05 - But the study that comes from here in the US, the National Human Activity Pattern Survey, if you look deeper at the data,
1:31:11 - We spend 70% of our times in and around residential environments.
1:31:16 - So it's not just that we're spending time indoors.
1:31:18 - We are spending time in homes.
1:31:20 - And if you are, you know, very old, if you're very young, if you have certain types of disabilities, if you work from home, some of us are spending time.
1:31:29 - Significantly more than 70% of the time.
1:31:31 - So it makes sense that these disparities in housing quality are driving and exacerbating these disparities that we see in health and life outcomes as well, right?
1:31:44 - That shouldn't be
1:31:45 - a mystery to us at all.
1:31:47 - No, and you get that triple jeopardy effect where, you know, the people that can at least afford it are the people that are the biologically least capable of dealing with these problems are then socially in a position where they're least likely to be able to do something about it.
1:32:01 - So it's this compounding impact that we drive these inequities
1:32:06 - in certain areas of society where the people that contribute least to a lot of these environmental drivers of poor outcomes are the ones that are at the butt end of it.
1:32:18 - Absolutely.
1:32:19 - And I think our job is to figure out how do we like flip that on its head and transform compounding problems into compounding solutions for these same communities.
1:32:29 - And I want to acknowledge on the military housing points, you know, that within recent years, there have been some policy reforms driven by these same families I mentioned that have been really calling attention to it.
1:32:41 - Yeah.
1:32:43 - where there's an actual tenant bill of rights that have been introduced to give, you know, to really explicitly lay out for military families that they have, you know, a right to inspections and to have well-maintained and safe and habitable
1:32:59 - homes that they have, you know, access to, you know, tenant advocates and other types of supports.
1:33:04 - And I think that this is also really important to highlight that, you know, passing a tenant protection or another type of policy is essential.
1:33:14 - And I don't want to diminish all the work that goes into getting something that important passed, but it's not self-executing, right?
1:33:24 - Families have to know that that exists.
1:33:27 - They have to understand how to use it.
1:33:29 - It has to actually be usable.
1:33:31 - They have to have trust, right?
1:33:32 - The system has to be accountable to actually following through on the promises that it creates.
1:33:39 - And all of that takes a lot of extra time and effort and care, right?
1:33:45 - And so as...
1:33:47 - We're talking to governmental officials and decision makers across the globe about not just it's not just about funding the intervention.
1:33:54 - Right.
1:33:54 - It's also about funding the capacity to access those solutions and to build the trust.
1:34:01 - I think that is really needed on behalf of community members who have, in many cases, very little reason to trust that these.
1:34:09 - that we really have their best interests at heart.
1:34:11 - So that there, I just want to acknowledge, I think on that specific issue, we've seen some very important progress here.
1:34:19 - And yet in many ways, we're really, really at the start of that journey and seeing the potential impact.
1:34:25 - Yeah, you're absolutely right.
1:34:26 - And, you know, and that's reflected all over the world as well.
1:34:29 - You know, in the UK, we had something called Aweb's Law came into pass.
1:34:33 - There was a young two year old boy that died in social housing from exposure to dampened mould, which caused a political uproar at the time, and they managed to force through some pretty...
1:34:45 - strong regulation for the providers of social housing to respond in a much more, much stronger way to dampen mould.
1:34:57 - But the challenge, like you say, with all of these things is it doesn't fix the fundamental thing that got us there in the first place.
1:35:03 - And there are decades of entrenched systems and underinvestments and just ways of thinking and
1:35:14 - You know, so I think it's really important that this is not just and I think that's why I quite like your three legged stool approach here that this is about research.
1:35:24 - This is about policy and regulations, but this is also about communities and building up that knowledge on the ground.
1:35:31 - Yeah, that's exactly right.
1:35:34 - Amanda, it's been really great talking to you this afternoon.
1:35:37 - Where can people go to find out more information about your work?
1:35:40 - Because there must be a ton of stuff there, I guess, at this stage for people to crawl through.
1:35:46 - Sure, probably an overwhelming amount of stuff you can imagine with nearly 35 years of work.
1:35:52 - There's there's quite a bit of evidence and lessons learned.
1:35:56 - People are welcome to visit our website at WWW dot NCHH dot ORG.
1:36:02 - That's National Center for Healthy Housing.
1:36:05 - So NCHH dot ORG.
1:36:08 - People are also welcome to get in contact with any member of my team.
1:36:12 - We love meeting new people.
1:36:13 - So if you want to just get on the phone with us and talk to us about healthy housing in your local context, we love to talk to folks all over the country, all over the world, exchange ideas, look for potential opportunities for collaboration, for synergy, for exchange of ideas.
1:36:33 - As we're at conferences, feel free to look us up, come up and introduce yourself.
1:36:37 - We do everything, as we mentioned earlier, in partnership with each other.
1:36:41 - And of course, we're on all the socials as well.
1:36:45 - You'd be able to find us there.
1:36:47 - And yeah, I do hope that we hear from some of you.
1:36:50 - Simon, we could talk about this all day, as you might imagine.
1:36:54 - It's been a real pleasure to be able to explore some of these topics with you.
1:36:58 - Yeah, you're very welcome.
1:36:59 - And, you know, as you've been talking today, I've been furiously writing the names down of various organisations.
1:37:04 - I must introduce them to them and I must get them to go.
1:37:07 - This is one big network.
1:37:08 - And the more we talk, the more we find out what's working and what isn't.
1:37:12 - And often it's the what isn't you learn as much from as the what does work.
1:37:17 - So, Amanda, thanks so much for your time this afternoon.
1:37:19 - It's been brilliant talking to you.
1:37:21 - And I encourage everybody to look at the website and keep in touch with you.
1:37:24 - Thanks a million.
1:37:26 - Thank you so much.
1:37:28 - Thanks for listening.
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1:37:46 - See you again next week.