2026 CHHC Annual Meeting A Success
We’d like to thank CHHC members and our event sponsors for another successful annual meeting!
CHHC members gathered in Sacramento on March 4-5 for its 2026 Annual Meeting. As our only in-person meeting of the year, it is always energizing to reunite with long-time partners and meet new members.
Day one (see agenda here) included a presentation from Puente de la Costa Sur and Urban Habitat highlighting their work on farmworker housing in San Mateo County. We then received a federal policy update from the National Center for Healthy Housing in Washington, DC who laid the groundwork for small group discussions on how healthy housing programs have adapted to a changing environment. We then concluded the day with some coalition updates – including an overview of CHHC’s new Communications Team – and breakout sessions for each of our workgroups to share and discuss priorities for the year.
We gathered again on day two (see agenda here) to learn about indoor air monitoring projects from Tracking California and models of community-driven change from the Altadena Tenants Union, CRE Pathways, and the Nehemiah Emerging Leaders Program. We concluded with small groups visiting state legislators to educate local representatives about the healthy housing work members are leading in their communities.
As always, our one in-person meeting of the year generates a lot of energy, builds and strengthens relationships, and sets the stage for our work together throughout the year.
Title Sponsors:
4Leaf Inc.
Green and Healthy Homes Initiative
Inquilinos Unidos
Regional Asthma Management and Prevention
Health Housing Champions:
California Breathing (CDPH)
Civica Law Group
Tenants Together
Healthy Housing Partner:
Smokefree Air for Everyone
The California Healthy Housing Coalition’s mission is to provide leadership to ensure safe and healthy housing for all Californians, with a focus on low-income communities and communities of color.
The coalition’s diverse membership, including housing rights and social justice organizations, public health advocates, local, state, and federal government agencies, and other experts on housing, indoor air quality, and health, comes together to provide resources, expertise, and advocacy for statewide policies to promote and protect healthy housing for all.
IAQ Webinar Series
CHHC’s Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) workgroup began hosting a webinar series for tenant-serving organizations in 2023. These webinars serve to provide information about common indoor air quality issues (such as pests, mold, lead, and wildfire smoke) with practical advice on what tenants can do to address and prevent them. You can find recordings of all past sessions here.
The workgroup kicked off their series for 2026 with a session on California’s new Equitable Building Decarbonization (EBD) program (see recording here). In this session, Fatima Abdul-Khabir with the Association for Energy Affordability provided an overview of the health benefits of replacing gas appliances with electric models and outlined what the EBD program does and who is eligible. That was followed by an in-depth webinar building off of our introduction to mold session in 2023. Anya Cross-James and John Beckman from the California Department of Public Health provided concrete strategies for identifying, preventing, and remediating mold. You can see a recording of that webinar below. For information about future session, become a member here.
Healthy Housing Resource
Principles for Equitable Smoke-Free Multi-Family Housing
While there is wide agreement that exposure to secondhand smoke in multifamily housing is a serious problem, how to protect residents of multifamily housing from drifting secondhand smoke has been challenging and divisive. Leveraging over a decade of collaboration between public health and tenants’ rights members, CHHC brought a small group of partners together to have a facilitated discussion that explored the impacts of a range of approaches to addressing secondhand smoke exposure in multi-family housing. The result was a set of consensus-based Principles for Equitable Smoke-Free Multifamily Housing that attempts to balance health protections with housing stability to aid future efforts to create equitable approaches to addressing this challenging issue.
Priorities
CHHC members address healthy housing from multiple perspectives. As a result, the coalition’s priorities represent a comprehensive approach towards achieving healthy housing for all. CHHC organizes itself into three workgroups focused on the following priorities:
Habitability
Combat substandard housing conditions affecting many low-income renters, such as pest infestations and mold.
Indoor Air Quality
Reduce exposure to contaminants in the home, including pesticides, tobacco smoke, and outdoor pollution.
Lead Poisoning Prevention
Eliminate exposure to lead hazards in the home and improve the identification of and support to lead poisoned children.
Healthy Housing Resource
IPM in Rental Housing
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is the most effective and least harmful way to address pests. By addressing the root causes of pest problems, IPM serves as a long term solution to pest problems that advoids the costly, routine pesticide applications commonly used in rental housing. To encourage more property owners to adopt IPM and a more effective and healthier alternative to routine spraying on their rental properties, CHHC members members developed a series of short videos to encourage landlords to transition to the use of Integrated Pest Management. Videos include:
