One in 20 is missing the basics
For years Kathleen Godinet Samuelu’s Lower Hutt home didn’t have a functional shower, forcing the family to walk across the road and shower at her sister’s house.
Her neighbour, Donna Amato, lived with a malfunctioning toilet and a mattress for a back door.
‘‘You couldn’t have a shower; my dad couldn’t have a shower . . . We’d go across every night to have a shower,’’ Godinet-Samuelu said.
They were among 207,000 New Zealanders whose homes don’t have access to at least one of six basic amenities – drinkable tap water, electricity, a toilet, cooking facilities, a kitchen sink, and a bath or shower – according to new research from the University of Otago.
But a community-led project in the Lower Hutt suburb of Wainuiomata repaired the women’s houses, and experts say similar initiatives could ensure more homes have those basic amenities.
A leaky water cylinder created a ‘‘huge mouldy hole’’ in the floor of the family-owned home, reducing the shower to a trickle.
‘‘It was just wear and tear over the years. It started to leak ... We ended up getting so used to it that we chucked a big huge bucket under it. Our kids even got used to emptying that bucket.’’
Godinet-Samuelu’s husband is a builder and replaced rotten floorboards beneath the shower, but the family couldn’t afford to make more substantive repairs at the house.
‘‘It was a lack of knowledge ... and resources,’’ she said.
Joseph Godinet, Kathleen’s father, bought the house in the late 1970s. His health had deteriorated in recent years, and he now lived with his daughter.
‘‘He just celebrated his 70th birthday,’’ Godinet-Samuelu said. ‘‘Crossing the road to shower was hard, especially for our kauma tua.’’
The shower was fixed as part of the Maori Home Repairs Programme, along with 13 others in Wainuiomata.
Tu Kotahi Maori Asthma Trust was a partner on the programme. Manager Cheryl Davies said high housing costs meant wha nau often struggled to keep up with ongoing maintenance costs.
‘‘It’s not just low-income families – even our working families are struggling to manage ... A lot of these homes are intergenerational.
‘‘They might’ve been left to them by a grandmother, with years and years of maintenance work needed. It becomes a huge task. They don’t even know where to start.’’
Donna Amato, whose home was also repaired as part of the programme, said she was still paying off the mortgage after renovating the house in 2008.
In the years since, the toilet at the house stopped flushing properly and the back door broke – the family eventually opted to use a mattress instead. ‘‘We’d get it fixed, but it wouldn’t last . . . We couldn’t really afford to do anything else.’’
Researcher Dr Helen Viggers said there was ‘‘a lot of deferred
maintenance’’ on New Zealand houses. She led the research into uninhabitable homes for the Ka¯ inga Oranga Housing and Health Research Programme at the University of Otago, Wellington.
Researchers analysed data from the 2018 census, assessing household access to the six basics of drinkable tap water, electricity, cooking facilities, a kitchen sink, a toilet, and a bath or shower.
They found 5.2 per cent of private homes – one out of every 20 houses – lacked at least one of six basic amenities.
Half of the homes lacking basic amenities were owned by the residents directly or through a family trust. The other half were rented, either privately or publicly.
The findings relied on available data, with the true number of houses likely to be much higher.
‘‘This is the best estimate we can make, but we’re pretty sure it’s an underestimate,’’ Viggers said.
The Ma¯ori Home Repairs Programme is a partnership between Tu¯ Kotahi Ma¯ori Asthma Trust, Well Homes, Regional Public Health, the Sustainability Trust and He Ka¯ inga Oranga.
Te Puni Ko¯ kiri funded the ‘‘structural repairs’’ to homes – including things such as the replacement of rotten floorboards or a water cylinder.
That funding enabled repairs at four Wainuiomata homes last year, with repairs at an additional nine houses due to be completed by the end of this month.
Workers completed building apprenticeships as part of the programme, leading to further employment opportunities.
If funded, an expanded programme would repair 40 homes in Wainuiomata.
Viggers said community-led solutions like this were ‘‘wonderful’’ and could help solve the crisis.
‘‘If we’re talking about plumbing issues, a good solution is funding community apprenticeships to allow locals to become plumbers,’’ she said. ‘‘In an income-constrained area, that will give people jobs and also fix problems at the houses.’’
There would be ‘‘different solutions for different sectors of society’’, with fixes in urban areas not necessarily suitable for rural areas, Viggers said.
Drinkable tap water (3.3 per cent) and electricity (1.8 per cent) were the amenities that residents most frequently lived without.
The report found 4.2 per cent of children under the age of 5 – or one in 25 children – lived in dwellings without drinkable tap water.
College of General Practitioners medical director Dr Bryan Betty said the finding was disgraceful.
‘‘Access to clean drinking water is a basic human right.’’
The report also looked at uninhabitable housing, defined as housing that lacked basic amenities and was inhabited by people on ‘‘extremely low incomes’’. More than 60,000 people were in that situation, ‘‘unable to either move house or fix the problem’’.
That group was actually considered to be homeless, according to the Government’s definition.
Repairs at Godinet-Samuelu’s home were completed over two weeks last June. ‘‘They gave us our mana back,’’ she said. ‘‘The mauri of the house has completely changed.’’
Amato said the repairs had improved the health of her family.
Both families were now saving for further repairs.