A new federal rule will ban smoking in public housing nationwide. The notice was released Wednesday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and will take effect in 18 months. But Alaska is looking to do that a lot sooner.
Cathy Stone is the Director of the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, which runs public housing throughout the state.
“(In) April or May, when it’s a little warmer and people can adjust to the requirement that they have to go outside to smoke,” Stone said.
The federal ban applies to lit tobacco products like cigarettes, pipes and cigars. It doesn’t apply to electronic cigarettes, but the state is leaning towards eliminating those as well. Smoking marijuana in public housing is a federal offense regardless of state law.
Stone said that the reason Alaska’s ban would come early is because the state’s public housing has already been developing its own non-smoking policy.
“So it was just very ironic,” Stone said, “That this announcement came out on the same day we were having a board meeting and advising our board that in January we would come out with our own policy.”
Here’s how the state’s draft policy works: residents receive mailed notice of the change and are allowed to submit comments. Next, residents sign a lease agreement regarding the new rule, and if residents are caught smoking they receive several warnings before an eviction process begins. Stone said the intent is not to kick people out, but to encourage compliance. And residents are on board.
“It’s actually been requested by multiple residents,” Stone said. “We’ve done two surveys of residents, and the majority did not want to have smoking in units. The majority of the smokers even said they thought we shouldn’t allow smoking in the units.”
Bethel has 117 single-family public housing units. Over 500 people live in the units and over half are children. Stone says that the ban would prevent staff and non-smokers from being exposed to secondhand smoke within the housing and would save the department money.
“It’s very expensive to turn a unit once someone’s been smoking in it. Sometimes you have to replace the carpet. You have to paint the wall multiple times,” Stone said.
All that work can cost an extra 30 to 50 percent and tack an extra two to three days onto the time required to flip a non-smoker’s unit.
Once the transition begins, Alaska’s public housing wants to offer resources like hotlines and classes to help people quit smoking for when the ban takes effect. Those resources would vary by area and interest.
Anna Rose MacArthur is a reporter at KYUK in Bethel.
