Targeting distressed areas
"Healthy homes" initiative takes aim at housing hazards

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor

One of Buffalo's most distressed and physically degraded inner-city neighborhoods is the target of a new "healthy homes" demonstration project to be administered and operated by UB.

The project, the Buffalo Community-based Healthy Homes Initiative (BCHHI), will be funded by a $700,000 Healthy Homes Demonstration and Education Grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

The project is designed to increase awareness of housing hazards in one of Buffalo's poorest inner-city neighborhoods, as well as develop and implement intervention strategies to remediate its dangerous and unhealthy housing.

The project's target area is in the Buffalo Federal Enterprise Community, where 47 percent of the children live in poverty, most in single-family households. It includes portions of the Masten, Ellicott and Fillmore council districts.

The neighborhood is marked by the highest levels of asthma, lead poisoning, carbon monoxide poisoning and death by fire in the City of Buffalo, problems that planners say can be attributed to unsafe and unhealthy housing.

The project will be directed by Beverly McLean, research associate and policy analyst in the Center for Urban Studies in the School of Architecture and Planning. The idea for the initiative was developed in a UB class taught by McLean in which James Pitts, president of the Buffalo Common Council, was a member.

It was triggered by concerns expressed during a youth town hall meeting sponsored by the youth committee of Buffalo Weed and Seed Initiative, a U.S. Department of Justice community crime-prevention and empowerment program

The project will be operated by the Center for Urban Studies and the Urban Design Project—both of which have long track records of solving community-development and urban-revitalization problems.

"In large part," says McLean, "the housing is unhealthy in the target area because 99 percent of the housing units were built before 1939. In fact, the neighborhood has the greatest density of older housing stock in the city. Twenty-nine percent of the area's property parcels are vacant and the City of Buffalo master plan calls for the demolition of another one-quarter of the structures by 2010."

She notes that absentee landlords own more than a quarter of the properties and much of the housing is decaying and full of lead paint, cockroaches and other irritants associated with asthma, a major public-health problem in the neighborhood.

Community school data from 1998 indicated that the three-year average asthma rates for children ages 5-14 years in the target area was three times the city-wide average. New York State Health Department data indicate that 34 percent of all hospitalizations in Erie County due to asthma are from the project's target neighborhood.

In addition, 95 percent of lead-poisoning cases in Erie County are from the City of Buffalo, with the target neighborhood falling within the top 10 zip codes for lead poisoning in the State of New York.

The BCHHI is a multi-party effort involving a broad range of community resources and agencies. Its efforts will complement those of the Erie County Health Department's Healthy Homes Initiative (ECHHI), another HUD project.

Participants will include ECHHI; the Buffalo Weed and Seed network; United Neighborhoods, a project funded by the United Way of Buffalo and Erie County; the Coalition for the Redevelopment of Unified Community Involvement and Leadership; neighborhood block clubs; schools, and the Mayor's Office of Strategic Planning.

Among the strategies the project will use to attack the neighborhood's housing problems are a comprehensive community-education program involving neighborhood block clubs, housing contractors, property owners, landlords, children and their parents.

Those who will advise work on the project include Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., director of the Center for Urban Studies and professor of planning; Oswaldo Mestre, Jr., director of the Buffalo Weed and Seed Initiative; Robert Shibley, a nationally recognized urban designer, director of the Urban Design Project and professor of architecture and planning, and Shakoor Aljuwani, executive director of United Neighborhoods, and the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation.

Several liaisons in the Mayor's Office of Strategic Planning will assist and advise the program. Scott Gehl, director of Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME), will help develop and present landlord and property-owner training workshops.