Wake up and smell the mould

There’s nothing fun about the fungi growing rampant in many Kiwi homes.

Sometime within the next 18 months, my teenage son will most probably be packing up the car he has not yet saved enough money to buy, and driving to Dunedin to begin one of the big adventures of nascent adulthood in New Zealand. If accepted, he will be an undergraduate at Otago University.

Living in Dunners as a student is a lark, by all accounts. All the best (worst) stories of student days come from there. One very famous dude I grilled for the gory details this week told me he: Lived in a six-man flat above a pub, and would be handed a pint by the bartender as he climbed the stairs for bed.

Was once, while very drunk, pronounced dead in his bed (by a med student);

Put down a hangi in the flat’s backyard and inadvertently boiled the underground pipes.

Mr Famous told me in that flat, he would wake up on cold mornings, and there would be frost covering his duvet, in the places it wasn’t wet from condensation.

The thing I worry about when I think of my youngest child going to uni in Dunedin is what kind of dripping, rotting, black-mouldinfested abomination of a ‘‘flat’’ will he and his mates be paying the thick end of a grand a week for? A couple of weeks back, eight students who’d rented one of those dives won an undisclosed settlement after it was found to be shot through with toxic black mould.

This week, another property owned by the same landlords turned up in the news. There were claims of rats, possums, leaks in the bedrooms, and raw sewage spewing from broken pipes. The property manager defended the $1288 a week being charged for this dump, by saying it was a ‘‘coveted’’ 8-bedroom property. For years now, in dozens of

interviews, I’ve been fed all sorts of nonsense by spin doctors for landlords who seem defensive, rather than contrite, that their ‘‘businesses’’ are making people sick.

Their favourite tactic is to flip the blame back onto tenants.

This line has so often been trotted out over the past 10 years, it’s become a trope on its very last legs. But it was given a spectacular revival this week, by Otago Property Investors’ Association president Cliff Seque.

Cliff said, ‘‘generally, as long as a flat was well maintained, mould was due to the lifestyle of the tenants, including such things as drying clothes inside, not opening curtains and not airing out their homes.’’

So far, so predictable. But then, in one of the most gobsmacking public utterances of the year, he finished thus: ‘‘You don’t see mould in empty houses.’’

It would be lovely if people didn’t live in houses, wouldn’t it, Cliff? Especially rental houses. Think about it for a golden moment. No pesky human-forms doing things like eating, sleeping, cooking, or any of the other potentially damaging practices that ‘‘business owners’’ in the property sector must hate so.

Because I like these columns to be informative, rather than just unhinged rants, I went to an actual expert for advice.

Dr Nelson Lebo is the Eco Design Manager for Palmerston North City Council, and a font of genuinely helpful advice on staying warm in winter.

He explained that back in the day, most homes in Dunedin had open fires to warm them and constant airflow to keep the air dry. Once the coal ranges and open fires were removed, it changed the moisture balance in these homes dramatically.

I also asked Nelson (for Cliff’s sake) to confirm that: ‘‘Houses are meant to be lived in by human beings, and so an objective assessment of a home’s moisture levels must include people and their activities. We can’t simply blame tenants for ‘not opening the windows enough’.’’

Nelson says that yes, tenants can make a difference – don’t use an LPG heater, he says they should be banned – and get a condensing dryer if you can. But those are not the factors that led to toxic Stachybotrys mould spreading through a house that was not watertight. And it’s common: the student association says up to 75 per cent of Otago students report living in mouldy accommodation.

Isn’t it ironic that we lost our biccies for years over the potential for meth contamination to harm our health, but appear to accept it’s OK to offer cold, mouldy, and – yes – dangerous housing?