Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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Yeah, I can't remember now why curtains went, but they went fast - before full testing even.
I've been watching landlord message boards out of curiosity to see which points would cause the most outrage (as opposed to the different questions of whether it should exist at all, and fears of requirement creep or more council bureaucracy). Security stays were well up there, with some people concerned they'd prevent egress from fire. The hot water temperature requirement annoyed some people, along with the need for the property address to be clearly identifiable (that's so emergency services can find the place easily). Plus some discontent about the need for handrails on all steps accessing the house (that can be quite an ask in parts of Wellington...). There didn't seem be much fuss about the rest of it though, which was something.
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Sorry about that, patronising was not my intention.
And I had forgotten that Christchurchers mostly couldn’t have woodburners at all, which was almost as rude as forgetting that the draughts may have been recent additions to the house. So a bit of rudeness in response would have been entirely justified.
New Zealand's housing stock is old and cold in general, not just in Christchurch. Working in this field, and genuinely wanting to see NZ housing improved not only for health reasons but also for basic human dignity, I try to find some middle way to challenge statements that don’t align with evidence on particular housing improvements, exposures or interventions, without being patronising, or didactic, or over-simplifying, or over-technicalising, or a thousand other ways of being a dick. I’m not necessarily very good at that, but I still have to try. When I was responding to Hebe I was going for something closer to “what was true for you isn’t necessarily true for everyone else”, but clearly I flubbed that.
Sofie, the “Barnzy"* heatpump you talk about – is that a heat transfer system rather than a heatpump?
On the WOF front: it’s still a way off yet, and I believe the proposal is for it to be introduced in a rolling fashion so that a WoF will only be required at next tenant turnover. So if your friend’s daughter moves in now (before any WoF is introduced), you won’t need to get a WoF for the property unless you decide to relet it after she’s gone to Aus, and if the WoF is introduced in the meantime.
On the broader matter of similar situations, though, there are still questions to be answered. For me the biggest is, what happens if a property fails a WOF? Is the property able to be let at all, or are there limits on who it can be let to (e.g. no accommodation supplement, or no children, or no elderly – all sorts of problems with each of those, regardless of good intentions). Does the landlord incur a fine for letting a house without a WOF? What if (as in Sofie’s example) there’s no meaningful profit involved? The RTA doesn’t apply if a property’s let to family members, but does still apply if it’s friends, so there’s no outs there.
P.S. The draft WoF is available here in case anyone wants a look. N.B., numbers 15 (security stays) and 16 (curtains) have so far been removed from the list post-testing.
*Is Barnzy a brand, or a South Islandism I’m not familiar with?
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Hebe,
I'm glad to hear your son's asthma has gone, Hebe, but I'd hesitate to lambast heatpumps as "dreadful in a draughty old house" based on a sample of one (see also anecdotal evidence). As you'd moved house, there would be a lot of other exposures that would have changed at the same time, asthma tends to improve with age regardless, and even if the heat pump was causing or contributing to your son's asthma, that doesn't mean that they will generally cause or exacerbate asthma in other children. In many cases, replacement of existing inefficient heat sources with heat pumps improves asthma symptoms.
I would of course recommend insulating and draught-stopping before installing an expensive new heat source. Personally, I like a nice fire, and although we have a heat pump, in an ideal world I'd have both - but I have no professional opinion on whether heat pumps or woodburners are better for health.
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True. And after reading that previous paper, I found this, which would suggest that the market has (as I would see it) woken up to insulation in the last few years. I doubt insulation would have made that list at all 10 years ago.
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Lilith __,
I can’t speak for Auckland, but down here in the South Island where we get freezing-cold winters? I’m sure it does
Christchurch research suggests otherwise. "Many of the voluntary measures introduced by Governments to improve the energy efficiency of residential housing are still not considered important by buyers, indicating that a more mandatory approach may have to be undertaken to improve energy efficiency in the established housing market, as these measures are not valued by the buyer."
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Lilith __,
Thanks Lilith, I'd assumed that the removal of depreciation meant a total removal of depreciation - interesting to see it's still available for chattels.
The Heat Smart subsidy for installing energy efficient heating is no longer part of the Warm Up New Zealand subsidy programme (the scheme is now targetted insulation only because most of the cost-benefit of the programme came from installing insulation in the homes of community services card holders (*guilty look*)). I think some councils still provide some heater subsidies, but they're generally targetted and not as accessible as they were a few years back.
As for property appreciation... well, that seems to happen regardless if you're in Auckland. Otherwise, as Moz points out, the market doesn't yet value energy-efficiency measures. -
Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Lilith __,
You’d expect a rent increase for providing some form of heating?
Not for a $60 oil column heater, no. But the WoF requires fixed and effective (i.e. enough kW to heat the living space) heating – which ideally means heatpumps, woodburners, flued gas heaters, and other heating fixtures that tend to cost upwards of $1500 but which are cheaper for tenants to run than conventional resistant electric heating or the horrific unflued gas heaters. At present, the only incentives for landlords to install such heating are decency; the potential to attract better and longer term tenants; and the possibility of charging more rent.
I say “ideally”. Of course, I won’t be at all surprised to see some landlords refusing to install the $1500+ options, and opting instead for $60-ish wall-mountable heaters of one kind or another, which will meet the wording of the WoF, but won’t help the tenants’ energy bills one iota.
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Lilith __,
It’s even possible they acted out of basic human decency. Tax-deductible decency
Of course, and lots do - and buying a heater is probably counted as capital expenditure and therefore not tax deductible, except (then, not any more) for depreciation, so is even more a sign of decency if it's put in for sitting tenants, with no rent increase to match. I'd assumed yours had resisted human decency because you'd mentioned 10-day letters.
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Good to hear, Lilith – though the landlord’s responsibility to fix the broken oven comes from the RTA rather than the HIR; and I’m surprised but pleased to hear that you successfully used it to get a landlord to provide a heater. If the landlord knew his/her rights better - or rather, was more up with the play, since it's definitely arguable whether it really is a landlord's right to only provide a power point - and let you take it to the Tenancy Tribunal, I’m afraid you would have been out of luck.
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Lilith, the list you’re thinking of is the Housing Improvement Regulations 1947. In theory, they’re still in force, via the Health Act. In practice, because they fall under the Health Act rather than, say, the Building Act or the Residential Tenancies Act, they’re so loose as to be useless. Sometimes adjudicators will accept them as requirements under s45(1)(c) of the RTA (The landlord shall…comply with all requirements in respect of buildings, health, and safety under any enactment so far as they apply to the premises), and sometimes (I’ve heard, don’t have evidence) they say a breach of the HIR must first be established by council health inspectors, who are all too busy looking for cockroaches in restaurant kitchens to go looking at mould in residential dwellings. Lots of the regulations have been superceded by the Building Code, and even if they haven’t, there’s still the Tenancy Tribunal interpretation to worry about.
The current interpretation of “Every living room shall be fitted with a fireplace and chimney or other approved form of heating” is that there has to be a power point in the living room so you can plug your heater in. Which seems completely contrary to what I was taught about statutory interpretation, but there it is.