# Mold Policy Intervention in New York City Public Housing and Asthma Morbidity

> **NIH NIH R01** · COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · 2021 · $657,375

## Abstract

SUMMARY
Fungal contamination is common in urban homes and disproportionately affects lower-income families who
have less control over conditions that cause mold growth. The Institute of Medicine, the World Health
Organization and several meta-analyses have established that fungi and home dampness are associated with
asthma symptoms. These findings and those of some successful intervention studies have led to the
conclusion that there is sufficient evidence to recommend dampness and mold remediation to reduce asthma
symptoms. However, the root causes of mold growth, especially in lower-income urban homes are often costly
to fix and, therefore, go unaddressed. New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has 302 public housing
developments with 2,252 buildings and more than 365,000 residents. Children and adults living in NYCHA
housing have a high burden of asthma morbidity, and complaints of mold and water damage in NYCHA homes
have been common. In 2019, NYCHA implemented ‘Mold Busters’, an innovative new program to effectively
remediate mold in NYC’s public housing using better tools of assessment, enhanced staff training, new
accountability procedures for quality assurance and a streamlined prioritization response system. The
expectation is that this will substantially reduce mold exposure and decrease asthma exacerbations for
NYCHA residents, specifically mold-allergic individuals. Demonstrating improved asthma outcomes resulting
from this policy intervention would have a substantial public health impact. This project will bring together
NYCHA, the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), a community organization that
provides asthma interventions in low-income housing and academic researchers to demonstrate improved
resident health associated with this large-scale intervention by linking NYCHA data on mold work orders (which
result from resident complaints), NYC DOHMH data on NYC emergency department (ED) visits for asthma,
public school data on asthma prevalence, and additional data collected by academic and community
researchers on a subset of children living in NYCHA housing. It will also address limitations of previous
studies that lacked adequate measurement of fungi growing in homes and indicators of current fungal
growth/activity, both of which can now be assessed with contemporary gene sequencing methods that may
provide new insight into the spectrum of fungal bioaerosols that asthmatic children and adults are exposed to
indoors. This proposal will test the hypotheses that this large-scale intervention will lead to a decrease in
pediatric and adult asthma morbidity for residents and decreases in allergic fungal species in NYCHA homes
using administrative data on pediatric and adult asthma ED visits and mold work orders in NYCHA homes and
by assessing fungal exposure, allergic sensitization, and asthma morbidity in a sample of asthmatic children
living in NYCHA housing. If successful, this project will demonstrate the utility of ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10280294
- **Project number:** 1R01ES033267-01
- **Recipient organization:** COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** MATTHEW S PERZANOWSKI
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $657,375
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-09-10 → 2026-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10280294

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10280294, Mold Policy Intervention in New York City Public Housing and Asthma Morbidity (1R01ES033267-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-21 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10280294. Licensed CC0.

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