London’s fire sprang from landlord logic
apartments are rubbish, and we’re now told that leaky homes are still being built despite changes in the building industry. Oh, and landlords aren’t taking up a government subsidy to insulate houses they rent out. Why on earth not?
People aren’t being burned to death by these shoddy buildings, but they are getting sick. They include schools, prisons, and an estimated 100,000 homes. The full cost of this folly has been estimated at up to $11 billion, but could be more, and the health cost could be $1 billion on top of that. Meanwhile landlords are free to rent out substandard houses in a market of short supply, where tenants outbid each other just to get a roof over their heads.
We’ve just completed a house renovation that crawled with engineers, architects, tradesmen of all kinds, and council inspectors. I don’t resent it. We’ve saved a wellbuilt house made of solid native timber that we wouldn’t be ashamed to sell on if we had to. But why I have to comply with fiddly building codes while rental properties are allowed to be cold and grotty is something I can’t understand. Greedy landlords practically get a slap on the back and a cigar for milking substandard properties they wouldn’t deign to sleep a night in themselves, and they don’t maintain them either. No profit in that, right?
A dose of landlord logic hit Mt Ruapehu skifields earlier this week. Families who took their kids to play in snow there would have to pay $59 for adults and $35 for children to access areas that until now had been free. Ruapehu Alpine Lifts, the company involved, justified the idea on the grounds that it wasn’t fair for snowboarders and skiers to carry the cost of upgraded facilities, which they actually used, while families really only wanted their kids to throw snowballs. The company came to its senses, I’m glad to say, and backtracked. I guess someone remembered the value of good public relations.
In contrast to the grasping ethos, what a pleasure it was to read this week about Ian Devereux, a scientist and successful Kiwi businessman who always said it was never about the money, and meant it. Profits in his company, Rocklabs, were shared equally by all staff each year while he owned it, and he never paid the lowliest staff member less than the average wage. When he sold up in 2008 he again shared the money with his workers.
Few though they may be, men like Devereux affirm your shaky faith in the human decency that survives in our material world. Amazingly, against the odds, they do exist.
The catastrophic Grenfell Tower fire was all about the money.