Cancer sufferer’s leaky home hope
Lucy’s Mangere town house is one of the secret leakers. The home’s brick and linear board exterior gives no clue that it isn’t weathertight.
It looks like a tidy, solid home, with nothing in common with the patched and decaying monolithic cladding leaky homes dotting Auckland’s suburbs.
But the 2004 home was badly built, and it leaks, and Lucy, who is battling cancer and undergoing chemotherapy, faces a bill of $150,000 to reclad it, at least.
That was a quote from 2011, and building prices have risen dramatically since then.
‘‘I thought $20,000 would fix it, but they said it all had to be reclad,’’ says Lucy, who asked for her real name, and street address, not to be used.
Lucy’s is just one of 11 identical homes in the street, but she’s the only owner to register with the Weathertight Services, and fears her neighbours will be angered if she ‘‘outs’’ the streets’ problems.
She’s now been told the final bill could be as much as $250,000.
‘‘I can’t afford to fix it,’’ she says even though she’s been approved for the Financial Assistance Package, which is now closed to new applications, under which the homeowner would be responsible for paying half the reclad costs, with the government and council each picking up quarter shares of the bill.
So she’s joined a class action law suit being prepared by lawyer Adina Thorn.
‘‘It’s my only hope,’’ Lucy says, but that hope is waning as Thorn is struggling to get enough leaky homeowners on board to take the case.
Selling is not an option. Signing up to Weathertight Services was ‘‘like shooting herself in the foot’’ as it’s recorded on her home’s LIM.
‘‘It’s now on record as a leaky home,’’ she says.
Thorn says there are many unidentified secret leakers around the city.
Homeowners, and homebuyers, either have no clue to the future problems of the buildings, or they choose to cross their fingers and hope.
‘‘In most you can’t smell it, sometimes in the garages maybe,’’ Thorn says.
Many, like Lucy’s are solidlooking homes with two cladding systems.
Lucy doesn’t want people to think she was a foolish buyer.
She bought her place in 2008 after paying for a building report. The inspector failed to identify inadequate flashings, and areas where the two cladding systems did not actually meet.
These are not strong houses. Recently someone hit a golf ball over the fence from the adjacent park. It went straight through one of the linear weatherboard panels.
She’s spent thousands on emergency repairs just to stop the problems from escalating rapidly, and now she’s just not got the resources to go it alone.
‘‘I can’t afford to strip this building down and reclad it. I have two cats and two dogs. How on earth am I supposed to go to a hotel with them for months?’’
Debilitating chemotherapy, and grief at the death of her mother have made the past year a very hard one, she says.
Thorn’s planned class action case is that Auckland Council, and its forerunner councils, were incompetent in allowing buildings like Lucy’s to be built, and then issuing them with code compliance certificates.
‘‘It’s so easy to build these houses right. This was just utter laziness,’’ Thorn says.
Thorn has handled many claims to the Weathertight Homes Tribunal in the Mangere area, and she believes there was no need for any of them to have happened.
Manukau City Council consented Lucy’s home in 2004 several years after the publication of the Hunn Report, which confirmed the country had a Canadian-style leaky building problem.
‘‘They were on notice. It’s just incompetence by council,’’ Thorn alleges.
But, she adds: ‘‘People with leaky homes can’t afford to sue, and that’s been the council’s best defence.’’
That’s not translated into people signing up to her class action which would be funded by litigation loans.
Litigation lenders take a cut of compensation in cases they fund, but if the case is lost, they and their insurers bear the costs, not those who signed up for the class actions.
Thorn needs to build a ‘‘book’’ of leaky home owners seeking a combined $10 million of compensation.
She’s not reached that yet. There’s a 10-year legal liability limit on seeking compensation, but Thorn reckons there are still hundreds, if not thousands of homeowners who are within that time-limit, including around many who registered with the Weathertight Tribunal, but never advanced their cases.
Each month a number withdraw their registrations, giving up all hope of getting compensation.
An Auckland Council spokeswoman, Katherine Forbes, says: ‘‘Council cannot comment on proceedings it has not seen, however, it is likely that the council would defend any class action brought against it.’’
Asked if the council had accepted being incompetent in its consenting, and compliance inspections, of leaky buildings, she adds: ‘‘Each case is dealt with on its own facts and circumstances and we cannot comment on individual circumstances.’’
‘‘The courts have made findings against Auckland Council in relation to its inspection processes, which the council has accepted.’’
Thorn is currently taking a number of class actions, including a $250m case against James Hardie alleging it made and sold faulty cladding, and a $40m case against Carter Hold Harvey alleging failure of its Shadowclad cladding system.
But the true scale of the leaky homes crisis is unlikely to ever be known.
A 2008 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated $11.3 billion costs to fix around 42,000 buildings, but there have been far higher estimates from building experts.
The seeds were sown for the crisis, which also included leaky schools and commercial buildings, in 1994 when New Zealand moved to a ‘‘self-regulated’’ building regime, combined with a rise in the use of cheap cladding systems that allowed fashionable Mediterranean-style designs.
Also adding to the problem was a downgrading of apprenticeship schemes, leading, it’s believed, to many poorly trained, and inefficient builders joining the workforce.
Between the start of 2007 and the end of 2016, just over $5.25b of consents to alter buildings were granted in the Auckland region, though it is not know how much was to fix leaky buildings. Plastic covered buildings being fixed remains a peculiarly Auckland sight.
People with leaky homes can't afford to sue, and that's been the council's best defence.