Stuff Digital Edition

Terrible landlords aren’t ‘bad apples’ – they’re endemic

Rental housing is routinely so awful in this country that mere compliance with the law elicits superlatives.

Max Rashbrooke Senior associate, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington-Te Herenga Waka

Among my generation, it’s a grim joke that an outstandingly good landlord is one who fulfils their basic legal responsibilities. That’s how low the bar is. Rental housing is routinely so awful in this country that mere compliance with the law elicits superlatives.

A flat that Stuff profiled last year in Hanson St, Newtown, is typical of our rental stock: not just damp and mouldy, but degraded by holes in the walls, malfunctioning lights, draughty windows and earthquake damage.

Property investors would have you believe the landlords of such places are a few bad apples. But every reputable survey reveals a garbage dump of ghastly flats.

A few years back, building researchers BRANZ uncovered damp in one-third of rentals and mould in half. An Otago University trial found one in two would fail a basic warrant of fitness.

A 2020 stocktake by Stats NZ showed one in three rentals had large gaps around windows and doors, more than one-third were always or often cold, and nearly half were mouldy. One in two needed moderate or major repairs.

A Habitat for Humanity survey this year found many rentals needing repairs either internally (38%) or externally (42%).

In short, somewhere between 30% and 50% of our 600,000 rentals – that’s 200,000 to 300,000 dwellings – are in terrible condition.

The Government’s grand plan to deal with this social catastrophe centres on the Healthy Homes Standards, which – in theory at least – require landlords to insulate their properties, install a fixed heater (ideally a heat pump), fit fans in kitchens and bathrooms, fix holes in walls, and ensure water isn’t pouring in. These are not overly taxing demands.

A law that is not enforced, however, is no law at all. And in the past, rental rules, like too many New Zealand regulations, have relied largely on the affected individuals complaining.

This policy has been a disaster. Even though they are now theoretically protected against nofault evictions, few renters want to complain about their landlord, who can make their lives hell in many different ways.

But, in a potentially seismic shift, the Government has given itself the power not just to respond to tenants’ complaints but to identify and target the worst landlords. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that, to investigate 200,000-300,000 terrible rentals, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has employed a frontline inspectorate numbering . . . 37. Each inspector will have to check somewhere between 5000 and 8000 rentals.

This reminds one of the fanciful calculations showing Santa Claus would have to be a high-speed blur if he really visited each of the world’s 2 billion children on Christmas Eve. Less humorously, it recalls the sole inspector employed to check mine safety around the time of the Pike River disaster, which killed 29 men.

The comparison is apt: health experts estimate that damp, mouldy, unsafe houses cause 230 deaths each year, and put thousands more in hospital. They are one reason why diseases eliminated in most developed countries, such as rheumatic fever, continue to haunt our children.

Just 37 inspectors could still make a difference, with the right attitude. And in the year since the Healthy Homes Standards came into force, MBIE has – it tells me – ‘‘proactively’’ engaged with 300 landlords. But just 43 have been issued with improvement notices, and none has been successfully prosecuted in the Tenancy Tribunal, though cases are under way.

In the ministry’s defence, it has faced Covid, and various set-up challenges. Rentals, moreover, have to meet the standards only when their tenancies are renewed, meaning tens of thousands will not yet be covered. But tens of thousands will be.

One big problem is that, like most regulators, the ministry insists on starting gently. Initially it just informs landlords of their obligations, before ‘‘encouraging’’ them to comply, and only after that starts thinking about enforcement.

Even when enforcement is chosen, it happens on a slowly ascending scale, from warnings through to ‘‘enforceable undertakings’’, improvement notices, infringement notices and, finally, the Tenancy Tribunal.

Though this may sometimes be the right approach, it creates unendurable delays for the tenants of slumlords. It is also inefficient. While one landlord slowly complies, the others look on, unthreatened and unlikely ever to face one of the 37 inspectors.

In France, they used to say of the English that from time to time they like to shoot one of their admirals, pour encourager les autres :to encourage the others.

Without going so far as actual shootings, the ministry should bring some big, high-profile cases against slumlords, and levy enough fines to put them out of business.

The others will rapidly be frightened into full compliance. Only that way can renters expect the scourge of substandard homes to be tackled in their lifetime.

Mainlander | Opinion

en-nz

2022-08-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282295323980453

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