A few years ago, a gas leak from Sherry Frazier’s furnace forced her and her daughter out of Frazier’s Baltimore home.

“Oh, it was awful,” said Frazier, a retired educator who worked with students with disabilities in Baltimore public schools. ​“We had bad headaches and were kind of dizzy, wobbly on our feet.” Had they stayed any longer, she fears they would’ve ended up in the hospital.

Frazier’s house has become an all-electric haven with solar panels pumping out power, thanks to an extensive retrofit coordinated by Baltimore-based Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI), a public health nonprofit that directly serves Baltimore and Providence, Rhode Island, and advises about 50 cities and 12 states. 

“I feel a lot safer in the home [and] my utility bill for heat and air conditioning is much lower,” Frazier said.

Frazier’s abode is among the thousands that GHHI has worked on in its efforts to ensure healthier living conditions for those who can’t repair, weatherize, or decarbonize their homes themselves. Fossil-fueled water heaters, furnaces, clothes dryers, and stoves emit toxic pollutants that pose health risks, including asthma, cancer, heart attacks, and carbon monoxide poisoning — the symptoms of which Frazier and her daughter experienced. 

In addition to replacing these noxious appliances, GHHI first tackles any necessary underlying home repairs. S. housing stock is the oldest it’s ever been — with a median age of 44 years — and older homes are most likely to harbor health and safety hazards, such as rotten roofs, mold, lead, and asbestos.

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