Leaky home: Even curtains were soaking
A few days ago I phoned a friend in Christchurch to check on her health. She’s in her 70s, and like a lot of older people she has her creaky bits, is reliant on a colourful daily parade of pills and is on close terms with a couple of eminent specialists. Never had any trouble with the bellows though; in respiratory terms she’s been tickety-boo. Not any more.
She used to live in Auckland but moved back to her hometown just shy of two years ago and, she told me, it has almost killed her.
The Housing NZ flat she moved into in Redwood looked fine at first, but within a few months my friend was struck with a succession of colds and flu. The house felt perpetually damp. She noticed that when she vacuumed the floors (which being a tidy type, she did three times a week) the vacuum cleaner would fill up with dust and sludge. An HNZ contractor came through and told her water was seeping through the concrete foundations. Definitely a health and safety issue. They filed a report with Housing NZ. No action was taken.
The colds turned into pneumonia, then double pneumonia, then pleurisy. She was in and out of hospital, her weight plunged from 65kgs to under 50. At one point she was moved into a rest home for several weeks to try to get some strength back.
My friend made the connection pretty quickly – her home was making her sick. Letters to Aged Concern, and then her electorate MP looked promising but yielded no help. Finally, a local friend helped her email the Minister for Social Housing Amy Adams, and miraculously, a warm, dry home was found.
On moving day she took down the bedroom curtains in the old place and found they were soaking wet to the halfway point.
How are you now? I ask. It was better as soon as I moved, she tells me, I’ve regained a couple of kilos but I have asthma now and I’m on the waiting list to have part of my lung cut out – it’s too infected to heal.
There is a pause while I work out what possible response I can come up with to that news.
My friend relies on the state for housing, so she’s lucky to have a home at all, yada yada. Not so lucky if that home is likely to kill her.
The latter part of this week has been dominated by the awful sight of London’s Grenfell Tower, home to hundreds of families just a few days
We're shocked by the Grenfell Tower deaths. So why are we seemingly okay with the knowledge that damp, cold homes in this country will hasten the deaths of 1600 Kiwis this year?
ago. That community now knows it’s lost at least 17 of its own in Wednesday’s inferno.
Their landlord is being blamed for failing to make the place safe. It’s too awful to think about for long, all those panicked, desperate people trapped and dying in their homes.
We’re shocked by those deaths. So why are we seemingly okay with the knowledge that damp, cold homes in this country will hasten the deaths of 1600 Kiwis this year? In London, Prime Minister Theresa May has ordered a full, independent public inquiry into the Grenfell Towers fire. Here in New Zealand, we puttle around our issue ignoring the sixteen-hundred deaths and pretending that the percentage returns for Mum’n’Dad investors matter more than lives.
State houses like my friend’s (a survey in 2014 found only four per cent of Housing NZ homes passed the Warrant of Fitness scheme being considered by the Government back then) and private rentals alike are affected.
We seem unconcerned that good schemes like Warm Up New Zealand which gives subsidies for insulation, will end next year leaving between 400,000 and 600,000 Kiwi homes uninsulated. Now we’re hearing that the leaky home crisis is bringing another wave of public health distress.
There are good landlords, who wouldn’t dream of renting out a place without insulation and heating. They don’t want to be lumped with the dodgy ones, and fair enough; anyone genuinely trying to do the right thing should be celebrated.
Then there are mongrel landlords who own rentals like the freezing, mould-encrusted one on the Kapiti Coast that sent a one year old girl to the intensive care ward with bronchiolitis. This guy bought the house 18 months back and blames the house’s former owners for the state of it. He nevertheless slapped it back on the private market, gaps in the floorboards and holes in the ceiling. He’s going to get around to insulating it fully and heating it at some point, he says.
Statistics show us every that for dollar spent on heating and insulation, we save five on public health spend – an irony as bitter as the wind that whistles through the gaps in so much of our sub-standard housing stock.