Whose Home Is It Anyway?

I’m not a smoker; I’ve never even tried a cigarette. My grandfather died of lung cancer after spending his teenage and adult years chain-smoking all day long. I’m not a smokers advocate. However, I also believe that it’s none of the government’s business if people want to kill themselves with cigarettes. Unfortunately, some people just can’t live and let others live- in their own homes.

This year, two California cities passed laws restricting smoking inside multiunit residential buildings. In the last 14 months, two large residential real estate companies with apartment complexes in several states banned smoking inside units.

Thousands of smaller apartment complexes across the country have taken similar steps, said Jim Bergman, founder of the Smoke-Free Environments Law Project, which is based in Michigan.

And about 60 public housing authorities across the country have smoke-free policies, compared with less than 10 three years ago, Mr. Bergman said.

Health advocacy groups call housing one of the smoke-free movement’s final frontiers.

James Repace, a biophysicist who performs research on secondhand smoke in collaboration with the Tufts University School of Medicine, makes a good point when he says “there is a tremendous unmet demand for smoke-free housing in America, and it boggles my mind that the real estate industry has not recognized that and tried to profit from it.”

However, real estate investors are the only people who should be “fixing” the problem of smoke-free housing. If people want smoke-free housing, and can’t find it available, they’ve discovered a market niche, and should invest in housing themselves. If there are really that many people concerned about second-hand smoke from other apartments, they should have no difficulty in turning a tidy profit from the investment. The answer is NOT to turn to the government and convince them that law-abiding citizens need saving from themselves, and that their actions IN THEIR OWN HOMES, should be criminalized.

The power to enact such policies should remain with the property owners, said Mark Ingrao, vice president of government affairs for the National Apartment Association. Smoke-free housing laws are “an erosion of private property rights,” he said.

I couldn’t say it better myself.