Housing charity boss: Renters living in warmer houses than homeowners

Thursday, 22 July 2021

Habitat for Humanity Invercargill general manager Paul Searancke says a $250,000 injection into its home repairs scheme will ensure more city homeowners get the help they need.

Healthy Homes laws requiring rental properties to have insulation and adequate heating means many renters are now living in warmer houses than homeowners are, an Invercargill housing charity boss says.

The Government’s Healthy Homes programme requires minimum standards for heating, insulation and ventilation in rental properties.

However, there was no compulsion for draughts to be fixed in homes lived in by their owners.

Habitat for Humanity Invercargill general manager Paul Searancke said many homeowners on fixed incomes were living in cold and draughty houses which they didn’t have the financial means to fix.

Anecdotally, many rental properties were in better condition, thanks to the Government's Healthy Homes regulations, than homes which were owned privately, he said.

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However, financially-strapped city homeowners living in their own properties were not being left completely in the cold.

Searancke said Habitat in Invercargill had been running a self-funded home repair programme which completed repairs for up to eight financially-struggling homeowners each year.

And the organisation would soon be helping more homeowners after this month tapping into a $250,000 fund for just that purpose.

The BNZ has provided Habitat Invercargill with a $250,000 interest and fees-free line of credit which it will use to help additional homeowners who were struggling financially and needed repair work done.

“This [$250,000] allows us to get some scale to help more people, and it gives us the ability to hopefully grow the programme for the future,” Searancke said.

Age Concern Southland manager Janette Turner says they sometimes came across elderly homeowners who are unable to afford repair work, especially if a partner has died.

The money was targeted for homeowners who couldn’t afford to get the work done commercially.

Habitat for Humanity organised the work with tradesmen, had it completed at cost and agreed to a repayment schedule which was affordable to the homeowners.

“That money comes back into the fund, and then we help the next people.”

A lot of the home repair work Habitat did in Invercargill cost less than $3000 per home.

“But to the people that need this, it’s made a huge difference to how they live. The whole point is to improve people’s living conditions and make it easy for them.”

The work included weather tightness, heating, mould fixing, ventilation repairs and bathroom and kitchen work.

A BNZ spokesman said the bank had been providing affiliates of Habitat for Humanity interest and fees-free lines of credit for two years to help the charity organisation deliver its home repair programme.

The bank’s initial funding of $1m in 2019 had been increased to $2.6m to various Habitat affiliates across the country, including the $250,000 for Habitat Invercargill.

Age Concern Southland manager Janette Turner said it sometimes came across elderly homeowners who were unable to afford repair work, especially if a partner had died.

If relevant, Age Concern referred them to Awarua Synergy to see if they qualified for subsidised home heating and insulation, she said.

Southland Community Housing Group convenor Margaret Cook said the Healthy Homes regulations were potentially good for renters if their landlords did the work they were supposed to.

“As a generalisation I think most landlords are pretty good, then you get the others.”

She knew of “two or three” landlords in Invercargill who owned multiple homes who were not abiding by Healthy Homes requirements, and those people desperate to find rental properties ended up living in their houses, she said.