HUD proposes smoking ban in public housing

WASHINGTON - The government is seeking to ban smoking in all of the nation's 1.2 million public housing units, the latest step in a decades-long crackdown on tobacco products that help kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year.

In its proposed rule, announced Thursday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development would require more than 3,100 public housing agencies to go smoke-free within several years. The agencies must design policies prohibiting lit tobacco products in all living units, indoor common areas, administrative offices and in all outdoor areas near housing and administrative office buildings, HUD officials said.

'We have a responsibility to protect public housing residents from the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, especially the elderly and children who suffer from asthma and other respiratory diseases,” HUD Secretary Julian Castro said in a statement. 'This proposed rule will help improve the health of more than 760,000 children and help public housing agencies save $153 million every year in health care, repairs and preventable fires.”

While the impact of a such a rule would be significant in cities like New York with large stocks of public housing, its effect in the Corridor would be small.

The Iowa City Housing Authority has 81 public housing units, with 33 of those single family, 36 duplexes, four townhomes and eight in two multifamily buildings.

Administrator Steve Rackis said he believes only a handful of the residents smoke.

'Of all our tenants, I don't think we have a large number who actually smoke, so I don't think it will be much of an impact,” he said.

Ultimately, a potential rule change would require the Housing Authority to add an addendum to the unit leases to prohibit smoking.

Though HUD will not design a final rule until after it hears public comments over the next two months, there seems little doubt that the government is headed toward the ban, since the Obama administration is already moving there.

Since HUD strongly encouraged public housing agencies to design anti-smoking policies in 2009, more than 600 have done so. That means that more than 228,000 of the nation's public housing units are already smoke-free.

The latest move escalates even further the anti-smoking crackdown that has unfolded in the five decades since the U.S. surgeon general first linked cigarette smoking to deadly diseases such as lung cancer and heart disease. The campaign has seen some successes: cigarette smoking among adults has been cut more than in half from its 42 percent rate in 1965, and the United States now has more former smokers than current ones.

But cigarette smoking still kills 480,000 Americans each year, making it the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mitchell Schmidt of The Gazette contributed to this report.