Speaker by Various Artists

Yesterday's Herald piece, "Horror tenants frustrate landlord", was its most popular throughout the day. The article is about "horror tenants", or, as this landlord describes them, "pigs". The "renters as pigs" genre is clearly a popular one, and includes TV shows such as Renters, which warns the viewer against even living next door to one of these "dirty, dim and despicable" creatures.

It's odd that a third of the population get such a bad rap. It's particularly odd when “horror tenants” are not that much of a problem, in the scheme of things. According to the article, only a small proportion (0.6%*) of tenancies wind up in damage disputes in the Tenancy Tribunal per year, and one supposes that the proportion that finds the tenant at fault is smaller. In any case, that's why we have such a court: to settle disputes.

Although this case is clearly on the extreme end of things, it too has been dealt with by the Tribunal. Presumably the landlord was not content with the court's judgment, and sought media attention. However, the Herald is wrong to say the landlord is "chasing rent". The Tribunal has ordered compensation. Whether compensation is swift enough, or whether the case was dealt with quickly enough is another issue altogether; it's about the justice system and its potential reform rather than "horror tenants".

It's wrong when tenants maliciously damage the houses they rent. But as with any investment, it’s sensible for property buyers to look at both the potential risks as well as the likely benefits of buying any one property. Property damage, falling values, and the chance an employer will leave town are some of the risks of buying rental properties. Tax-free capital gain, and the speed with which property values rise in New Zealand, are some of the gains. Presumably this landlord decided that this investment was worth their while.

The Herald asks readers to send in photos of the damage wrought by their own problem tenants. There's no similar call for photos of damage wrought by landlords' neglect of their rental properties (most landlords don't budget for maintenance). But if there were, we might not see many people submit their stories, for the same reason that it's far less common for a tenant to take a landlord to the Tenancy Tribunal - even though we know that, according to BRANZ, 44% of rental homes are in poor condition (twice the amount of owner-occupied homes). This has massive and well-documented detrimental effects on health.

We hear less about horror houses because of the lack of options available to renters. Complaining about, say, housing conditions, to the media or to the courts, may damage the tenant-landlord relationship, and the tenant might get their notice, despite the illegality of 'retaliatory evictions', as Dr Sarah Bierre has written. There's a disincentive to complain when you risk losing your home - moving is financially and emotionally taxing. Added to that, having a reputation as a tenant that complains won't do you any favours when you search for a new home. The article, in fact, recommends that landlords check the references of potential tenants; it's probably that a positive reference is unlikely to come from a landlord who you took to the Tenancy Tribunal for not fixing the leaky roof.

"Horror renters" are a very small issue, about 0.6% of the population, that, fortunately, we deal with through the courts. Horror rental houses, on the other hand, is a huge issue – 44% of our rental homes. Our current system, with its lack of quality standards, and with its disincentives to tenants for taking issues of quality to the court, is not working. Bring on the WOF.

---

* I think it is it something like 0.6%, at least based on the figures provided. 32% of 1.5 million houses rented makes 480,000 tenancies. 45,000 of those per year wind up in the Tribunal  An article this morning says that 6% of claims from July 2013 to May 2014 were about damage; 6% of 45,000 is 2,700. 2,700 cases of damage from 480,000 rented houses – that’s 0.6%. There must be repeated cases, however, so this figure is just a best guess. 

Elinor Chisholm (@ElinorChisholm) blogs about housing issues at www.onetwothreehome.org.nz

On Tuesday night, TVNZ reported on two things: one state tenant’s vow to resist eviction from her Glen Innes home, and overcrowding in Auckland state houses. While both things are newsworthy, we should be wary of thinking that one causes the other. TVNZ’s framing – and, actually, the government’s – confuses the issue.

In the report, Dalyce Poulson, a member of a 12 person family in a three-bedroom state house, says, with her baby on her lap:

“We’re struggling with everything. We need a…There’s just not enough houses.”

Later, Niki Rauti, the state tenant who has decided to resist her eviction, and who is described as living on her own in another three-bedroom, was quoted saying: 

“They’ve offered me two places to go to. I do not want to go there. I don’t want to be a transient. I would rather stay here and fight.”

When you hear these two things together, it might seem only rational to think that Niki should move, so families like Dalyce’s can live in better homes. In reality, however, such framing of the issue misses a couple of important things.

First, Niki’s house is not going to be filled by a bigger family, it’s going to be demolished so that eventually, other houses can be built there, most of which will be houses for private sale. This is problematic. At present, as Dalyce put it, there’s just not enough state houses, and, as the TVNZ report showed, they’re not being built at the speed previously promised by Government.

Second, Niki’s concerns about transience reflect those of a whole lot of people who are concerned with the effect of Housing NZ’s new policies on relocation (for redevelopment or through reviewing tenancies) on individual and community wellbeing – from Regional Public Health to the Productivity Commission (pdf, p.16).

Finally, we should put ourselves in Niki’s shoes. “Place”, David M. Smith wrote twenty years ago, “is necessary for human existence. This goes beyond other needs, such as for food and clothing, and indeed beyond the physical occupation of space and of a structure thereon. Our place, and sense of geographical space or territory, merges imperceptibly with a broader sense of identity, of who we are, of position in the general scheme of things. Satisfaction with all this is central to well-being.”

Smith continues with an idea we should all consider while watching the countdown to the end of Niki’s lease: “Those who would take other people’s place should have very good reason, and the moral principle of universalization, expressed in the question of how they would feel if the positions were reversed, is an appropriate test of whether the reason is good enough.”*

Elinor Chisholm (@ElinorChisholm) blogs on housing issues at onetwothreehome.wordpress.org.nz

*David M. Smith (1994), Geography and Social Justice (Oxford, Blackwell), p.253, 276 via Tom Slater

Last week, the Social Services Committee criticised how Housing New Zealand has gone about the redevelopment of three areas of state housing. It’s about time. By the accounts of the communities of Maraenui, Pomare and Glen Innes, what’s happening looks very different from the glossy photos on the redevelopment websites.

It looks like boarded-up and vandalised houses, the halving of a school roll, or watching bulldozers demolish a neighbourhood, and waiting three years for new houses to begin to appear. It feels like not being heard and losing a home and a community.

The acknowledgement from MPs of the failings of the redevelopment processes, and the admission of errors from HNZ, is a credit to the efforts of state tenants in the three communities over several years. In order to make their voices heard, they’ve tried many avenues. They have marched to their Mayor, to their police station, and to Parliament.  They have gathered to physically prevent the removal of houses. They have planted gardens, created memorials and gathered together to sing, eat and camp out on empty sections. They have made three submissions to the select committee. Their children have made a movie and a submission on how it feels to watch your community disappear.

We should keep an eye on HNZ to make sure they’re true to their word of communicating better with state house communities.  As one state tenant from Pomare told the select committee, while it’s too late for her community, her actions are motivated by a desire to prevent others experiencing what she and her neighbours have been through.

 But we should also keep in mind that state tenants did not just protest the process of the redevelopment. They protested the whole idea behind the displacement. In doing so they’re challenging the ideas behind HNZ’s new goal of having no more than 15% state housing presence in any community.

While Housing New Zealand argues for this goal in terms of its putative social benefits, state tenants are right to describe what is actually happening as gentrification: replacing the poor with the rich. Urban renewal is only possible in a place where middle and high income people are willing to move. Land previously used for state housing has been sold. By definition, lower proportions of the new, mixed communities will be poor.[1] The areas selected for redevelopment are close to the centre of their respective cities.[2] They have all been reported as desirable and popular places to buy, where property prices are rising rapidly.[3]

The redevelopments are not just about, as Housing NZ claim, improving communities through mixing the rich in with the poor, and making houses warmer and dryer through the sale of state house properties. Improving shoddy houses and investing in disadvantaged communities is something that should clearly happen, but just as you don’t need to sell a school to improve another school, there’s no reason that funding should come from state house sales.

The clearest beneficiaries of this type of urban renewal are not the poor, but the current and future private property owners of the area, who benefit from living in well-connected, central places, or owning land in areas where prices are rising as the rich buy in.

We already know about Auckland’s housing affordability issues, and how these are compounded by high transport costs for those living on the outskirts. Choosing to displace poor people in one of the few places in central Auckland available to them is working towards a city mainly for the rich.

Like the state tenants of Maraenui, Pomare and Glen Innes, we should challenge public sacrifice for private gain, and work to ensure the right of everybody, including the poor, to the city.

Elinor Chisholm blogs about housing issues in New Zealand at http://onetwothreehome.wordpress.com/

References:

[1] In Pomare’s case, 89 houses were demolished, and 150 new houses will be built. 13% of the new houses will be owned by community providers, “up to” 13% by the state, and the remainder will be privately sold. In northern Glen Innes, 156 houses are being removed in order to build 260 houses: 78 owned by the state, 38 owned by other social housing providers, and the remainder for private sale. Development in Maraenui, so far, is not on such a large scale or as concentrated: 96 houses have been demolished throughout the suburb, and only 18 new homes are planned.

[2] Glen Innes is 9km from the centre of Auckland. Maraenui is 3km from the centre of Napier. Pomare is 7km from the centre of Lower Hutt.

[3 See: House prices up in Maraenui, Property Report: Continued property growth but questions over 2014, Strong interest in new Pomare subdivision, Glen Innes Area Profile.

Ask any New Zealander to reflect on the past last five years in New Zealand, and two tragedies are likely to spring to mind: the Canterbury earthquakes and Pike River Mine. Both struck the nation by surprise: prior to the first Canterbury quakes, no one even knew there was a fault line sitting restlessly below the Canterbury plains.

Similarly, few people even knew of the name “Pike River Coal”, let alone the massive financial pressures it was facing, or its flagrant disregard for health and safety. Both tragedies were characterised by high death tolls, and both showed the impact of the National Government’s deregulation agenda in the 1990s – and the failure of subsequent Labour Governments to reverse those changes.

The stories of both Pike and Christchurch are by no means over; these books are far from closed. In the case of Christchurch, the rebuild is only just beginning; the ground still trembles, and people still face the very frustrations they faced immediately after quake. The Pike tragedy is in somewhat of a different place.

Just under six months ago, it was announced that the MBIE prosecution against Peter Whittall, the CEO of the company at the time of the explosion and Pike’s first employee back in 2005, for breaches of the Health and Safety in Employment Act had been dropped. It left the Pike story in a precarious place, where it seemed no one was going to be held accountable at law for the wholly preventable death of 29 men. For anyone familiar with Pike, it simply beggared belief.

When the news that Whittall’s prosecution would be dropped broke in December 2013, I did not hear one word. It was reported, absolutely: this is a story that many New Zealanders follow closely. Yet I did not see one angry tweet, not one Facebook rant, and no outraged blog posts. That is not to say they did not exist – far from it. Many people – especially the families of the 29 mine – were devastated by yet another knock back in what had become a story as much about unfilled promises and knock backs as the disaster in the mine itself. However, in the small circles of the “liberal elite”, there wasn’t as much as a murmur.

When I read Rebecca Macfie’s book Tragedy at Pike River, I felt incensed, but I also felt ignorant. I couldn’t believe this corporate scandal had been exposed, and yet up until that point I hadn’t even been aware of its existence (beyond sketchy details of the explosion itself). I interviewed Macfie for a piece prior to her talk at Auckland Writers Festival on Saturday, and I was left, again, feeling outraged that this tragedy could play out before our eyes, in clear sight, and yet no one would be held accountable.

When I published my piece, something peculiar happened: nothing happened. No one in my usual liberal circles seemed interested. My editor said it was one of the best things I’d ever written, but instead a post I had once written on the tiny screen of my iPhone while sitting on the bus had generated hundreds of responses and shares. People had been more outraged by my comments on the irrelevant Bob Jones than the failures of our government, a company and its directors to protect the lives of those men down that mine.

I went along to Macfie’s address at the Writers Festival. She was simply brilliant. She talked about how just two days prior to the Pike explosion a group of shareholders had been down the mine. “How different this story would’ve been if it had exploded then,” she remarked.

Macfie’s talk at Writers Festival showed how many people care about what happened in Pike River. However, in a room where there was standing room only, I was one of perhaps ten people under the age of 40. Where were the outraged young liberal bloggers and tweeters? Where were the people I converse with about social justice every day? Where were the Young Labour activists?

This is not a slight against any one of those people. It is, however, a challenge. It’s a challenge for us to fight the working class battles. It is so important we challenge, sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia, but let’s also talk about class. Those men down that mine were not the liberal elite, and they might not be people we know or can even relate to, but they were part of a group that is systematically marginalised and whose rights are constantly under threat – and that in itself should be enough to command action.

When I raised these points on Twitter, a number of people suggested people feel disengaged because the issues are simply too big and too hard. I don’t accept that for a second. Class battles are big, just like battles of gender and race. But if you’re prepared to engage, there are points of pressure – just like any battle.

Pike is a book that’s still open: we can demand action from the police in terms of private prosecution against Whittall, we can support the CTU’s judicial review efforts (be it by donations or just raising awareness and media interest), and we can make Pike an election issue. Beyond Pike, if you’re not a union member, become one. We can challenge left-ist parties to strength our labour laws, especially in terms of union rights in an employment context. We can look at corporate accountability, especially where there is loss of life. We can connect the dots between the deregulation of the 1990s and what is happening now, and ensure it doesn’t happen again. There are simply no limits.

And as a start point, we can read Macfie’s book, and push for accountability for what happened down that mine four years ago. 

It’s human nature that people make mistakes. Even if you think you don’t, there will be other people on the roads who do -- so you need to change your driving to allow for them. That’s the message in the New Zealand Transport Agency' latest road safety ad, 'Mistakes', which has gone viral.

The end result of any car crash is basic physics. The faster you’re going, the worse the outcome will be if you crash. And if you hit another car that’s moving, the impact speed may be doubled meaning the outcome will be twice as bad. That’s a huge amount of force even if you’re doing 50km.

A slower speed may have allowed the driver in this ad to take evasive action – he would have had more time to react to the other driver’s mistake. They would probably still have crashed but the impact speed would have been less - meaning the physical force (and the outcome) would have been less severe. Even slowing down when seeing the other car waiting "just in case" something happened would have given him more time to react.

How does the ad make you feel about mistakes? What challenges have you experienced around driving at a safe speed? Have you seen examples on the road where people misjudging or making mistakes around speed have played a role in a crash or near-miss?

This post has been sponsored by the New Zealand Transport Agency.