Editor’s Note: This is another weekly column in the Wanganui Chronicle.

You know that point in a horror film when the demented axe murderer sneaks up on the unsuspecting teenagers and you’re thinking, “Turn around! Turn around!” Haven’t a fair number of us been saying that about the frightening Auckland housing market for the last five years?

Why is it just now – when the axe is in mid-swing – that Finance Minister Bill English has turned around?

For anyone with beyond intermediate school maths skills it is obvious that the so-called “Rock Star Economy” was mostly the result of artificial house price inflation in Auckland and the Christchurch rebuild. Even Freddy Kruger knows this.

Maybe the “Rock Star” in question was Marilyn Manson.   

But now that the housing Ponzi scheme has so much momentum behind it that it threatens the nation’s economy, leadership is finally saying, “Oh, this is a little scary.” As with the enamored teenagers, government may have waited too long to turn around.

Like the plot line of most slasher movies, Auckland’s housing bubble has been totally predictable, yet the “unsuspecting victims” walk blindly into the path of danger. Additionally, the story line is a bit like a self-fulfilling prophesy: Now that the Nats have ridden the artificial rock star economy for years they can turn around and redirect policy and finances “to provide assistance to middle-income families if interest rates rose” (Isaac Davidson, 24-10-15, Wanganui Chronicle). Instead of free-market this sounds like market manipulation.

At the end of the day – aka “the witching hour” – its just another frightening aspect of housing in the land of the long white cloud, which drops a considerable amount of precipitation onto the compacted clay soils that surround far too many dwellings with poor drainage and inadequate sub-floor ventilation.

Dramatic musical interlude.

Zombie-like, water vapour rises from the earth underneath unsuspecting households to stalk its living prey. Under normal conditions, each square metre of ground releases 0.4 litres in a 24-hour period. This translates into 60 litres per day for a typical 150 square metre house with a raised floor.

Rising damp is a major issue for hundreds of thousands of Kiwi homes yet it does not seem to be taken seriously. Very few health professionals appear to recognise the issue of cold and damp homes and what to do about it. “Turn around! Turn around!”

Just a reminder: Zombies and Mould are not normal conditions for a home.

While I renovated my own House of Horrors – a Monster Mash-up to be sure – I spend most of my time these days visiting others. A few recent examples include one with a $1,000 monthly power bill and another with a $4,000 bill to replace mouldy blinds. Its enough to make you Scream.

Then again, both of these homes are contributing significantly to GDP so it must be a good thing, right? So too do hospital visits contribute to GDP. After the housing bubble pops, perhaps asthma and diabetes could be central to a new economic policy.

As someone who grew up in the Northern Hemisphere, it is difficult for me to adjust to Haloween as a spring holiday. I remember trick-or-treating in the cold, dark rain, not the bright sunshine. I get the same feeling when I look at poorly designed homes facing the wrong way. Perhaps they were designed by vampires who need to live in the dark.

Recently I had a look at a Jekyll and Hyde home. In other words, during beautiful spring and autumn days with light winds and fair skies, the house would be a fabulous place to live. That is the Jekyll.

But Mr. Hyde haunts the house during the rest of the year primarily due to poor design, which makes it uncomfortably cold in winter and uncomfortably hot in summer. Heating and cooling the structure effectively would mean Frankenstein power bills.

The good news is that as a village we can choose to take up our pitchforks and torches to drive the beast of substandard housing from our midst and put and end to the Scary Movie.

Editor’s note: Here is another weekly column in the Wanganui Chronicle.

 

Six weeks ago I contacted Chronicle editor Mark Dawson regarding a significant health threat to many families in our community. I knew that damp homes, mould and respiratory illness would be major issues for the rest of winter and far into the spring. Slightly tongue in cheek I titled the email, “Health Epidemic Looming!”

I was fishing for a headline to rival “GASSED!” but had to settle for a sidebar for my weekly column:

“Our soils are super-saturated and likely to remain so for at least the next 4 months.

Rising damp will be a major issue for many homes for the remainder of winter.

Rising damp can account for 30-60 litres of moisture inside a home per day.

Cold, damp homes make people sick.

Sick people miss school and work.

“We can be proactive about addressing the issue now by:

Bringing attention that damp homes will be even worse this winter.

Installing a ground vapour barrier is cheap and effective.

If you are unable to install a ground vapour barrier then other effective strategies should be involved.”

Good on the Chronicle to helping distribute information sheets on moisture and condensation in homes, and on how to prevent rising damp. These materials are still available at the Chronicle offices in Guyton Street. They are the most up to date and accurate materials in the nation at this time, and have been written to be easy to read.

Good on Doug Davidson and the River City Press for helping raise awareness about the health threat to our community, and for making the information sheets available at the RCP offices.

Considering the attention the issue of unhealthy homes has received from local media as well as national media – lead by the infamous Duncan Garner – it raises the question as to why our local health care community has failed to recognize this significant and foreseeable problem.

On second thought, I should not say the issue has gone unseen by health care professionals. As reported in the Chronicle (3^rd August), Phil Murphy of the Whanganui Regional Health Network said, “Nationally, Wanganui’s child health doesn’t compare well. That’s because of the type of population here – typically high needs, low income and poor housing, which is particularly relevant when talking about respiratory illness.”

So far so good. What’s the next step?

Apparently, the solution to the problem of unhealthy homes in our city is to make a map. I’m all for collecting data, but this approach really seems like treating sick children like statistics rather than human beings living in shitty homes. If this is the best strategy we can expect from the health providers in our city, no wonder a Chronicle headline the following day (4^th August) read, “DHB changes are ‘short-sighted’.

You don’t need an “app” to know where the shitty houses are in Whanganui.

To be fair, the article on the 4^th was about a completely different issue, but isn’t the headline a telling reflection on the article that appeared on the 3^rd?

Mapping unhealthy homes while doing nothing about them is like tracking northern white rhinos while letting poachers shoot them. Cecil the lion was well monitored, but he ended up dead by a bullet from a trophy hunter.

If we want to have a serious discussion about children’s health in our community we need to address the elephant in the room. In so many cases the child’s own bedroom is ‘the elephant in the room’. Mould is not a normal condition of housing and we should not tolerate it as so.

The only way for us to move toward a healthier community is to take a holistic approach to the well being of all its members. Anything short of a holistic, cooperative approach to community health will end up being unsuccessful and costly.

Six weeks ago I told Doug Davidson that there was no doubt in my mind that hospital visits due to respiratory illness would be up this winter. I’m sure the DHB has a tidy graph showing just that. What’s the next step?

For my part, I’ll be scrutinizing the WDHB board candidates a lot closer next year than I did in 2013.

 

Peace, Estwing