Demand for smoke-free housing on the rise in Metro Vancouver

California’s Sonoma County is going to be the envy of Lower Mainland residents who have to put up with the secondhand smoke of their neighbours.

Starting on May 10 next year, all new multi-unit residences in the county will be smoke-free. Then, as of January 12, 2013, the ban will extend to all existing multiple-dwelling units like apartments and condos.

While Sonoma’s smoking prohibition may appear to be too ambitious for Canadian jurisdictions, a more modest approach could work.

Vision Vancouver’s Tim Stevenson is open to the idea that future multi-unit premises should be completely smoke-free.

“Even the people who smoke say if they try to live together, it’s so much smoke, they’re practically choking to death on each other’s smoke,” Stevenson said in a phone interview with the Georgia Straight.

However, the four-term councillor also noted that he’s concerned about how this measure would impact a certain sector of the city’s population. Having served on the board of the First United Church, he has seen how cigarettes are important to many Downtown Eastside residents dealing with addictions and mental illness.

“To ask them not to smoke or tell them they can’t smoke, they would be faced with the choice of not having living space or being out on the street—or trying to lie,” Stevenson said. “And the problem that that gets into is other residents in the building who don’t smoke report them, and then you get conflict.”

But, outside the Downtown Eastside, Stevenson sees no problem with having new smoke-free residential buildings. According to him, the city doesn’t have a smoking ban in its housing properties.

The proposal of putting in smoking bans in future buildings in Canadian municipalities was among the recommendations made by UBC endocrinologist Stuart Kreisman.

Writing in the October issue of the B.C. Medical Journal, the St. Paul’s Hospital doctor stated that this will help meet the demand for smoke-free homes.

When he was living on the top floor of a condo building in downtown Vancouver, Kreisman had to endure the secondhand smoke wafting up from units below him. He later asked to be transferred to the bottom floor.