There’s nothing like pulling on a pair of icy leggings from the line which haven’t quite dried yet. Yarg! Gah! etc.
In what feels like the depths of a Waiheke winter, laundry is taking longer to dry. Many of us are festooning the warmest room in the house with festive banners of fragrant damp woolly things. I have seen some creative solutions to the ongoing battle of keeping stuff out of the dryer – a device designed by the devil to superheat your electricity bill along with your undies.
I knew a mountain climber who, in winter, dried his son’s football kit in the foyer of his house using carabiners, climbing ropes and a pulley system. Nothing says ‘man cave’ like a chandelier of rugger shirts and boxers.
Haven’t we all, at some point in our lives, bolted through the house hiding dangling lingerie from the aunt, the boyfriend, the client or the friend-with-the-immaculate-house?
Unless I invest in solar panels, my electricity bills will not be going down – in fact, I understand they will rise, in what Bernard Hickey growls is a “de-facto tax increase” caused by chronic state under-investment in the electricity grid and lines networks, and high interest rates. Among other things.
“This is one of those feedback loops,” Hickey writes, “where tight monetary policy causes inflation, along with higher government and council fees and charges to reduce budget deficits partially caused by higher interest costs.”
This is the kind of feedback loop which traps my brain in spin cycle, like the old joke about being a sock in the laundromat of life.
At least, as an owner-occupier, I only have myself to blame for my home’s heat leaking maintenance issues. One third of New Zealanders rent.
It has long been accepted that the private rental sector, while offering, yes, plenty of healthy homes, has the worst housing quality overall, compared to owner-occupiers, Kāinga Ora or community housing providers.
We know this from studies like the General Social Survey by New Zealand Stats in 2018, and a more recent paper by New Zealand scientists Dr Lucy Telfar-Barnard, Distinguished Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman and Professor Nevil Pierse: Renting Poorer Housing: Ecological Relationships Between Tenure, Dwelling Condition, and Income and Housing-Sensitive Hospitalisations in a Developed Country (2020).
If you have never heard of the phrase ‘housing-sensitive hospitalisation’ I don’t blame you. The tragic upshot is that there are “clear associations between income, tenure and house condition, and winter-associated hospitalisation risk.”
Private renters, says study author Dr Telfar-Barnard, who penned a Spinoff piece on Monday with public health researchers Rachel K Dohig and Sebastiaan Bierema, are saddled with a “large burden of housing related ill-health”.
On Waiheke, as we know, houses (and rents) are not particularly affordable. Since 1 July, the Reserve Bank’s new debt-to-income (DTI) ratios cap borrowing at six times household income (for owner occupiers), putting first home ownership even further out of reach for Waiheke workers.
The reality is that a large number of Waiheke Islanders will rent privately for the rest of their lives. As every renter knows, renting is an insecure business. Affordable places to live can be almost impossible to find, especially without a testimonial. This makes renters reluctant to raise issues about the standard of their housing with landlords or property management.
“The less secure a tenancy is, the more likely the tenant is to avoid raising housing quality issues,” Telfar-Barnard’s group writes in The Spinoff. “Due to the inverse housing law, tenants who are in the least secure positions to complain about housing quality are also those most likely to live in properties that require urgent maintenance or don’t meet minimum standards.”
Interestingly, when the team looked at the health of private renters who had been based in the same house for a long time, it was “up there with homeowners and public housing tenants.” In other words, helping to make tenancies more secure pays off in measurable ways – like staying out of hospital.
Public health researchers like Dr Telfar-Barnard oppose the government’s proposed changes to tenancies, which include bringing back 90-day no-cause notices, and allowing landlords to end fixed-term tenancies at the end of the term without giving a reason.
“Yes, it’s technically illegal to evict someone because they’ve asked for their home to meet minimum standards,” the group points out in The Spinoff. “But the threat of 90-day no-cause notice puts tenants on the back foot.”
Under Healthy Homes Standards, landlords must provide one or more fixed heaters (of an approved type) that can directly heat the living room to a maintained temperature of at least 18 degrees Celsius – the minimum indoor temperature recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Most of us will know Waiheke renters who are living in freezing, mouldy houses who feel unable to complain about it. I know someone who is so cold he uses the glow from his computer to ‘keep warm’.
I know someone else living in a leaky house filled with mould, on Waiheke, who raised this with the property management agency weeks ago.
They have not even bothered to reply. • Jenny Nicholls
