Our houses should keep us healthy
Tags: Housing, Aotearoa New Zealand, Activism, Health, Community

From the 100% housing series: Ten things we should know about the housing crisis. In this post we find out all about how our houses affect our health.

Condensation on a window

So my first question is — what’s my house got to do with my health?

That’s a great question, and the short answer is — our houses are killing us. Poor quality housing is devastating to health.

On the other hand, it’s shown that improving housing conditions will promote good health.

Oh — how’s that?

New Zealand houses are famous for being traditionally cold, wooden, uninsulated shells no matter how far south we live in the country. 33 percent of rental properties didn’t have insulation in 2018. Cold houses mean more people getting sick.

A big part of our housing stock (I mean, all the houses together) need work and investment to be retrofitted so they are healthy for the people living in them.

This can mean reducing draughts, putting in insulation and curtains to keep warm, providing heating. It could also be simply removing hazards to prevent injury.

What does it mean for us all living in these houses?

People are dying and getting sick from illnesses like asthma, pneumonia, bronchiolitis, and even diseases that have been eradicated in other countries such as bronchiectasis. That’s a preventable chronic disease found (unusually) more often in New Zealand than other countries.

A 2008 study found more than 400,000 New Zealand homes are cold and damp enough to make their inhabitants sick. About 30,000 people go to hospital every year for diseases ‘potentially attributable’ to inadequate housing.

Cold indoor spaces and mould in houses damage our childrens’ lungs. Stats show that every year on average 20 children die due to preventable illnesses brought on by our shoddy, damp housing stock.

That’s a disaster. It’s really awful.

It’s also racist, as we allow it to harm some of us more than others.

Rheumatic fever, for example, is disproportionately affecting Māori and Pasifika children aged four to 19 years old, especially if they have other family members who have had it. Rheumatic fever thrives best in cold and damp houses.

Surely everyone would choose to make their home healthy?

If we had a choice, yes.

Yet we are a growing nation of people who rent rather than own and who pay for the right to live in someone else’s house. Because of this, we are at the mercy of weak rules around what landlords must provide in a house they put up for rent. Sometimes a landlord won’t even allow small fixes.

For people who own their home, it requires the available funds to be able to do up the house, which not everyone has. Many of us don’t have enough to live on beyond the next week or month.

The kind of easy fixes (like curtains for all rooms, or insulation) which would make a difference, is not a priority before putting food on the table, putting petrol in the car or paying the electricity bill.

I know a few landlords personally and they are nice people.

Yes, they, I mean we, are all nice people. Generally.

As a rule people who have become a landlord bought a second or third (or more) house to earn an income. People who rent out their houses are investors. So not all landlords will put the health of their tenants first and treat it as a measure of their success, as investors. They are reluctant to spend more money than they need to.

They are also actively encouraged not to consider the health of their people living in their houses — at the beginning of September the industry group for landlords told them to hold off installing heat pumps as required by a new law in case the government changed and they didn’t have to.

It sounds like this is a problem that could be solved real easy. Isn’t the government doing anything about it?

As mentioned, there have been some measures taken to raise the quality of housing for health.

The Winter Energy Payment is a payment for people receiving welfare support to help with the cost of heating your home over the winter months and was increased in March.

The Healthy Homes Guarantees Act 2017 requires landlords to insulate and ventilate their rental properties (by July 2021) and ensure tenants can heat their living rooms to 18℃.

The Warmer Kiwi Homes programme provides subsidies for owners for heating and retrofitting an estimated 9000 homes.

There are some great existing programmes such as the Healthy Housing Initiatives. There are eight of these programmes around the country which intervene to improve the homes of the people who need help, including kids who are hospitalised for illnesses that could be related to poor housing conditions. However these programmes need more funding to provide crucial interventions such as heaters and bedding.

Local government action is also really important. Auckland Council has measures in its Unitary Plan that will help with affordable homes. Wellington Council is proposing better rules around allowing more medium to high-density building that would really help people renting.

I hate to ask, but what about Kiwibuild and the 100,000 new houses the Labour-led government meant to build — I guess that was going to help?

Yep, it could have helped. Not enough houses creates scarcity, which means people have few options and end up in unhealthy houses. Landlords have more options as there are so many people looking for a house and can evict tenants for their own personal reasons.

Building new houses would take stress out of the market and give us more options to find a healthy house to live in, and more power as renters.

Yet Kiwibuild has proven to be harder to do than said. So we’ll see.

Kāinga Ora, which provides public housing options are not evicting people as readily as previously, which is good, but it’s causing longer waiting lists and fewer openings, even as more people need homes — we need to provide more public houses.

So are things getting any better?

Actually, I don’t think so. The economic response to the Covid crisis preserved the existing settings which keep house prices high and investments safe. Waiting lists for public housing keep increasing while the number of new private houses built are low. The ones that are built are for people with higher incomes who can already find a healthy house.

All these things keep pressure high and make it difficult for people to find adequate housing, which means more of us living in houses that make us unhealthy.

I’m guessing there are lots of things needed to fix this, but — if you were Prime Minister what is the one thing you would do to fix housing?

Fixing up old houses and setting standards for new ones would lead to better health for us all.

We could:

put in place regulations to make it easier to make landlords to fix unhealthy houses;

set higher standards in the building code so houses meet a better star rating and healthy outcomes.

we could offer more funding grants for all homeowners to fix their own houses for health. In the long run it would save $ compared to the cost of treating people in hospitals when they get sick;

set targets for 100% healthy houses and prioritise this over simple GDP measures. This would be easy for the government to do as part of its Wellbeing Budget.

Is it so wild to imagine designing and retrofitting all our houses to protect our health?

Seems legit. So that’s it.

Well, actually — reforming our tax and planning systems to enable more housing to be built and more people to access housing may be the bigger solution!

Our houses are at the moment both the places we live, and the best return on investment for those of us with savings — and the two don’t work together. This is actually killing us.

If I were Prime Minister, I would reverse the decision to scrap a Capital Gains Tax, or I’d create a new land tax or wealth tax. Or there could be a simpler answer as suggested by economist Shamubeel Eaqub — to use our current laws which already allow for capital gains to be taxed if the purchase is made with the intent to profit from capital gains.

This would mean our houses can be homes. We can change the settings so there’s no such thing as a ‘housing market’ where we put all our savings and push house prices higher and higher.

It would have other benefits as people who remain landlords would become professional landlords, not just investors. They would be interested in making renting a healthy experience and supporting people to be long term happy tenants in their awesome properties.

For our health, and our lives, we should separate our homes from the market.

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Thanks to researcher Elinor Chisholm for pointing us to useful resources. Follow her own great blog series all about housing and health: ONE TWO THREE HOME — A blog about housing in New Zealand and other places

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