There are times I’m really outraged by the lax manner we allow standards to slip in this country because it’s always the poor who pay the steepest price.
NewsHub’s recent report on deplorable conditions of boarding homes in this country is a perfect example.
The filthy rooms we were shown weren’t suitable for animals, let alone human beings. Charging $230 a room for houses as contaminated as that simply adds insult to injury.
We know 1600 New Zealanders die each year from the cold and that is driven by uninsulated and substandard houses.
Desperate people forced to live in such desperate conditions are a direct failure of Government policy, and those desperate people are always those too poor to fight back.
Allowing the vulnerable to freeze and grow sick is a Government decision. They have gutted affordable housing, privatised state housing and fed a property bubbly to make National voters feel rich.
When you are only concerned about enriching your voters, those who don’t vote don’t matter.
That’s why National are the political party of the slumlord.
If Labour are in a position to form a Government, we will have legislation within 3 months to force warrant of fitnesses on all boarding houses on top of a mass housing rebuild plus 1000 new State Houses each year.
I have always involved myself in politics to help those who the rich ignore. Watching National protect the slumlords while punishing the tenants makes my blood boil and if I’m in a position to make changes in September, I will.
The slumlords have to go.
Willie Jackson is a candidate for the Labour Party
Well said Willie the greedy landlords that don’t give a shit about their clients need to be prosecuted to the fullest degree if their carelessness causes a death.
Is the landlord responsible for cleaning the kitchen?
D J S
No, but they are responsible for a few extravagant luxuries like unbroken windows, running water and working toilets.
No, but s/he is responsible for providing facilities that are (a) functional (b) sanitary (c) easily cleaned. Lack of power points; cracks in benches; porous surfaces; etc, makes maintaining a clean standard harder than it should be with unnecessary barriers.
You call THAT a kitchen David Stone ?
Anyone who has to ask a stupid rhetorical question like that, David Stone, has no awareness.
If landlords can’t keep up a certain standard, they shouldn’t be property owners. This is where the so-called “free market” breaks down, as there is no surplus of houses where tenants can “shop around”.
The only solution? Nationalise all rentals.
That’s precisely the thing I’d expect to see when people are degraded, impoverished and humiliated by poverty and consequentially intellectual persecution foisted on them by Bank oriented tyranny. The rich get rich because they manipulate the many into contemporary slaves who soon find themselves in emotional free fall while fighting psychiatric diseases.
Why is that kitchen not clean and tidy despite clear evidence of poverty and disillusionment? The answer is because the poor bastards are unwell and they caught their diseases from the banks which is spread/marketed by those few, in this case , landlords, who’ve learned how to exploit the systems created by the banks, for the banks.
To quote another dirty, filthy, leftie award winning NY Times jurno’…
― Chris Hedges
There have to some minimum standards however not all tenants are good tenants and I have experienced them in the past. However when rents are through the roof like they are these days people should at least be getting a warm comfortable dwelling to live in.
There have to some minimum standards however not all tenants are good tenants and I have experienced them in the past. However when rents are through the roof like they are these days people should at least be getting a warm comfortable dwelling to live in.
Yes, I wrote to todd Barclay asking WHY he was letting them break the law by not complying with the sanitary standards, and WHY the council was not doing anything about it. His reply completely missed the point – so GOOD RIDDANCE
Well said willy well said keep up the good work ur amazing.
There is of course more than a little irony in this article given the foreign student marae debacle entirely managed by Labour this very week.
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/claims-labour-party-housed-foreign-students-in-sweatshop-marae-help-election-campaign
Fair point Nitrium, *if* the spin in the news media reflects the reality of the situation. Here’s another perspective from somebody who personally visited the accommodation in question:
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/06/23/why-the-labour-party-student-intern-scandal-is-a-smear/
The event was not organised by Labour, it was organised by the Campaign for Change manager Matt McCarten
It even says it in the link you supplied: “former Labour….”
Did you read past the headlines?
“The event was not organised by Labour…”
Ah, wrong.
1. The advertisements (http://bskstage.weblog.leidenuniv.nl/files/2017/05/New-Zealand-Labour-Party-2017-Campaign-Fellowship-1.pdf) refer to a ‘Labour Campaign Fellowship’.
2. The campaign ads began while Matt McCarten was still working for Labour.
3. The speakers were to be the current leader, deputy leader, senior party stakeholders and staff, and the party president.
This event was a Labour Party project, apparently funded by the unions (http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2017/06/revealed-grand-plans-behind-labour-s-intern-scheme.html) and an anonymous donor.
You can argue a lot of things about this, but this was a Labour Party initiative, dead set.
“we will have legislation within 3 months to force warrant of fitnesses on all boarding houses”
Just boarding houses, Willie, or all rental housing? As I mentioned in my guest blog on TDB about this issue (https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/01/23/guest-blog-daniel-strypey-bruce-basic-standards-for-rental-housing-is-win-win/), I’ve lived in and visited a lot of rental housing around the country over the last couple of decades. Some landlords are caring and responsible, while others are slumlords, who rent out decrepit buildings at full market rates. This is just as true of people renting out houses to groups of people (families, student flats, shared houses etc) as it is to people renting out individual rooms in “boarding houses”. The housing “warrant of fitness” needs to apply to any building being rented out as permanent accommodation, and the standards covering hotels, motels, and backpackers need to be applied to any building (or part thereof) being rented out as temporary accommodation, including through internet platforms like AirBnB and BookABatch.
While it looks shocking. There needs to be some consideration of the tenants and where ‘semi functional’ tenants can get accomodation.
I don’t think that ‘exposes’ like this actually get votes for Labour, in fact I think they lose them.
Anybody who lives in the ‘real world’ not ‘concept land’ knows people who are Meth users, alcohol abusers, ex cons, mentally ill with hoarding issues etc, but where can these people go?
The streets? – they are worse off as it’s more dangerous,
community run shelters? often have strict rules on conduct and so the above are thrown out, so they don’t turn into the state of the boarding house, above.
private landlords with nice places? won’t rent to the above or they get evicted pretty fast even if they can afford the rents (which they can’t), flatmate situations? often don’t work because of the social issues.
State houses which are full and more likely to go to families and again can these people stay there without eviction if they have social issues?
Mental health housing – full.
Drug and alcohol treatment centres – full.
Family members – yep they take them to a point but some people are just too much to cope with, or they do not have family ties to help them.
Yep, the boarding houses look bad, but there needs to be a place for tenants that have ‘social issues’ and there has to be a bit more understanding of the overall problems and issues.
The other day similar story in the herald about a caravan in Auckland that looked pretty dodgy for $125 which included Internet, water and power. Seriously in Auckland you can spend $125 just on power in winter, and it’s probably the cheapest place anybody can find if they are on the unemployment benefit. I’d prefer to be in that caravan that homeless on the streets in winter.
So before all the do gooders get on the witch hunt about accommodation, have a plan for where ‘special needs’ people can find accommodation at that price, or else they will be homeless on the streets if the boarding houses and caravans are banned.
The only time Labour got some traction on housing beat ups, was when they showed the little girl who just missed out on the scholarship in the van with the working mum, the disabled family forced to live in the dodgy over priced hotel and so forth. That is disgusting and any normal person would agree.
It’s not so easy to house some people who fall though the gaps if they have major social issues, and banging on about cheap boarding houses and caravans catering to them is not winning any body over, more like looking like out of touch.
I don’t usually read the NZ Herald but yesterday my sister showed me an pertinent article coming from an unexpected source, about the shoddy and dangerous high rise apartment now being built.
Paul Lochore wrote:
“High-rise and multi-unit chicken coops that will soon be viewed as slums are being designed and constructed in Auckland.
Within the next 10-15 years, I predict, the leaky building fiasco will seem like a school picnic compared with what’s going to happen to the high-rise slums we’re building right now in your neighbourhood.
My concern with these buildings is the substandard design and construction and the low quality of materials being used.”
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=11880933
Yep, it’s one thing to have existing dumps like the boarding house, it’s quite another to be building high rise slums for the future.
Firstly we should be eradicating poverty, so we don’t need the extra slums. Shouldn’t we be striving to get into the 1st world?
Secondly our government is anticipating there will be demand for slums based on their low wage economy and growing underclass of people to fill the slums.
I defiantly have an objection to expanding the slums that National party is creating, and that is why I support Labour/Green government.
This is Hong Kong, coffin cubicle cage homes. NO THANKS. Lets get some decent housing and infrastructure into Auckland and the rest of NZ feeling the pinch before going into National’s social cleansing replacement experiments, fuelled by supercity, deregulation and unitary plan deregulation.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2017/jun/07/boxed-life-inside-hong-kong-coffin-cubicles-cage-homes-in-pictures
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2015/apr/23/price-property-mumbai-in-pictures
totally agree with the link from ARCHONBLATTER
“We’re not solving the problem, we’re just creating another one. Without a sense of community you get stress, mental illness, juvenile delinquents, and an increase in crime.
Just look at what’s happened to the dilapidated tower block estates in the UK that have become hotbeds of crime.
Yes, we’re 40,000 dwellings short in Auckland and we have a shameful homelessness issue – but let’s get it right. We need to think long term and build quality homes and units, not slums.”
Well, it would revealing no doubt to have a list of the major developers now erecting Hong Kong ‘coffin, cubicle, cage’ high rise apartments here in Godzone. Ying tong iddle ipo, what a coprophagous way to go.
Maybe there is a connection with the excerpt from the following article in the NZ Herald last year.
“Police research concludes a loophole is seeing lawyers, accountants and real estate agents being increasingly used to launder $1.6 billion in dirty money annually – including into New Zealand’s booming property markets. “Recent police investigations have exposed the fact that professional services and the real estate sector are closely linked to organised crime and drug offending,” officials said. That research, sampling freezing orders obtained to seize the proceeds of crime, found 26 per cent of cases involved unpicking the work of accountants and lawyers, and more than half (56 per cent of cases) involved property deals where “offenders were ultimately successful in integrating criminal proceeds by purchasing real estate”.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11706741
” to force warrant of fitnesses on all boarding houses” (warrants of fitness?)
Oh, get off the soap box!
Places like this, and worse than this, have been around for more than thirty years and rarely to never raised even a goose-bump on the righteous hearts of the comfortable. Unless there was a ‘tragic fire’.
When you’ve ‘forced’ these warrants – who is going to do the inspections? How often? And who will actually ensure that the conditions are kept? Who gets to pay?
Leave it to a local council and, sure as sunrise, the money will waft away. Mates’ rates will apply (does for the rest of the building and housing management.) The scrape of dragging feet will be everywhere heard. Regional councils? Not really their brief.
How about it’s made mandatory for a portion of the rent going to pay for a daily cleaner? And that tenants/renters must leave their rooms open to being cleaned. That happens in hostels and hotels – why not in boarding houses?
So, before you rush to create more wallpaper ‘policy’ – think it through. Right down to the actual eyeballs and reports, and the hands on the floor mops.
Otherwise – your pav needs a few more hours in the oven and a lot less boiling blood.
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