Story and photos developed by University Communications.

A t a meeting on what concerns residents—a gentleman from Oconee Heights, Milledgeville, once asked Dr. Damian Francis if he’d be like all the others—doing one thing to help the community, then disappearing.

“I said, ‘No, we’re here for the long haul.’ That was 2½ years ago, and we’re still here. We’re showing some benefit now, and residents are really appreciative,” said Francis, an epidemiologist and director of Georgia College & State University’s Center for Health & Social Issues (CHSI).

Francis moved to Georgia from Jamaica in 2018, when his wife got a nursing job in Dublin. Previously, he taught at the University of West Indies in Jamaica and did sickle cell research at the Caribbean Institute for Health Research. In between jobs in the United States, he consulted for the World Health Organization.

When a job opened in public health at Georgia College, Francis applied. He didn’t want to be a “cookie-cutter” professor. So, he took a Center for Teaching & Learning workshop with Dr. Cynthia Alby to become transformative when teaching.

One way to engage students, he learned, is to involve them in research. Francis’ interest is helping people live healthier lives—especially those in low income areas who are known to have higher rates of heart disease, hypertension and diabetes. He wanted to get students involved in health outreach.

To do that, he had them conduct a survey to learn what quality-of-life issues concern Baldwin County residents most.

It wasn’t health.

It was blight—dysfunctional housing and property.

“During our assessment,” Francis said, “we found the needs that residents wanted addressed were things like housing, crime and physical infrastructure in their community.”

“It goes back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs,” he said. “If your house is leaking and you can’t sleep comfortably during the rainy period, that’s going to be more important to you than managing your blood pressure, which you cannot see. People prioritize these needs, because if I can’t sleep well at night, that’s going to affect my blood pressure. If my house is falling apart, that’s going to affect my blood pressure. Without money to fix it, that’s real stress.”

Residents in the Coopers neighborhood in southwest Baldwin County, the Hardwick neighborhood around Central State Hospital and Oconee Heights neighborhood just south of downtown Milledgeville all identified damaged housing as a top concern.

In 2020—prior to the COVID-19 lockdowns—a public health student started assessing the problem in Oconee Heights. Kaitlin Gauthier was a senior at the time. She went door-to-door to map and assess more than 100 houses, checking for things like fire damage, sunken roofs, foundational cracks and fallen trees.

Gauthier helped Francis write a grant application to fund the housing infrastructure assessment. She collaborated with Geography Professor Dr. Doug Oetter to use Geographic Information System (GIS) to create, analyze and map data. Later, another public health student, Kristina Taylor, helped present those findings to county officials in 2021.

Results showed nearly two-thirds of Oconee Heights houses had some level of blight.

At least one-third were deemed uninhabitable.

“One of the amazing things was—quite a bit of houses deemed unlivable by the survey were still occupied,” Francis said. “That represents a public health hazard.”

Once county officials were onboard, the data students collected provided support for Baldwin County's designation as a Georgia Initiative for Community Housing community. Then, with letters of support from the university and organizations like Overview Inc. and Habitat for Humanity, the county applied for and was awarded a $400,000 federal Community HOME Investment Program (CHIP) grant this summer.

The money will pay to rehabilitate up to eight blighted homes.

Francis is helping county officials select the first round of houses to fix. The elderly and disabled are being given priority. Work will begin at the end of the semester. Progress from this round of improvement can be cited when applying for more CHIP grants in the future.

It’s Francis’ hope that as many as 66 houses can be saved.

“This was a really big success story for the university, the county and residents,” Francis said. “Some people live in houses where, every time it rains, they might as well be living outside. Clearly, some residents were ecstatic to hear the news.”

Still, there were setbacks.

Some dilapidated homes needed to be torn down. Demolition, excavation and removal costs anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000. When residents are experiencing poverty or a catastrophe like a house fire that kind of money is hard to obtain.

The county provides funding for trucks to collect and remove debris. So, Francis used CHSI donations to help some residents “push down” houses that were beyond repair. Many only had to pay $10 for the application to demolish.

Another “bottleneck” occurred when Francis realized many residents don’t legally own their homes. Some families pass homes down through generations without updating title deeds. To help those residents, CHSI held a recent property title seminar in conjunction with Dr. Veronica Womack at Georgia College’s Rural Studies Institute and Habitat for Humanity of Milledgeville Baldwin County.

An attorney and financial advisor were on hand to give free legal advice and answer residents’ questions about deeds and inheriting property. Francis is looking into ways to help residents pay for title updates. With that done, they’ll qualify for CHIP money to rehabilitate their homes.

“This was the entry point for getting deeds updated,” Francis said. “To be helping people in such a concrete way–it just gives you this feeling of joy. It’s one of our strategic goals to remove or mitigate some of the obstacles that keep people from living healthy lives, and housing is definitely part of that.”