Updated Impact Maps Show Over 15,000 Units of Smoke-Free Housing
This year marked an historic milestone for public health in New York City: the 15th Anniversary of the implementation of the NYC Smoke-Free Air Act of 2002, when comprehensive tobacco control became a priority in New York City. To celebrate the milestone, NYC Smoke-Free set a goal of bringing 15,000 housing units smoke-free in 2018, and after taking tally of those buildings we have helped since 2009, we are happy to report that we’ve far surpassed our goal with almost 17,000 smoke-free units by November 2018! When we first published our Impact Maps in November of 2017, we tallied 14,086 units in buildings that have worked with us to adopt smoke-free policies. We have now updated our maps to show all 16,721 units that we’ve helped to go smoke-free – that’s an increase of 2,635 units over the course of a year! Now over 44,000 New Yorkers have had a direct positive impact as a result of our efforts. We’ve tracked our work for almost 10 years since we launched our Smoke-Free Housing campaign and this success is not by accident. We work with a wide range of property types, including affordable housing, market rate buildings, supportive housing, and condos/co-ops, to assist buildings in adopting smoke-free protections for tenants throughout the boroughs. We have also been instrumental in working with the New York City Housing Authority since 2017 as they made strides to implement their HUD mandated Smoke-Free Housing Rule. As demonstrated in the results of our 2018 Local Level Evaluation, in which we surveyed managers and landlords of buildings that had been smoke-free for at least one year, 80% of surveyed properties reported positive feedback from tenants about the smoke-free policy.
Smoke-Free Housing is a growing trend and we are excited to be leading the charge and making a positive impact on so many tenants and families throughout the city! Potential residents can search for apartments at www.smokefreehousingny.org.
