Economic & Social Determinants

Philippa Howden-ChapmanHe Kainga Oranga/Housing and Health

Research Programmewww.healthyhousing.org.nz

New Zealand Centre for Sustainable Citieswww.sustainablecities.org.nz

University of Otago, Wellington

The importance of empathy

Most respondents in the NZ Values Survey were prepared to pay increased taxes to provide better health services and a better standard of living for the elderly and the disabled. Carroll et al, THE WIDENING GAP, Social Policy Journal, 2011

Waitangi Tribunal: truth, reconciliation, and compensation

Newspeak?

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• Current HNZ tenants most deprived 5% of households

• Healthy Housing Programme27% fall in the total number

of acute and arranged hospitalisations of year

61% fall in hospitalisations after crowding reduction

• Excluding 55 % of applicants is a faster path to overcrowding, infectious disease (25% of acute hospitalisations) + homelessness

• Unfair to reduce small stock of social housing when private rental properties unregulated +

some landlord’s discriminatory

Energy poverty

“Any one who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor”

James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 1961.

Built Environment

-- Private rental housing stock requirements extremely limited

Boarding houses and camping grounds increasingly housing of last resort

Insecurity of tenure -> residential mobility -> irregular primary care -> school attendance

++

Evidence-based policies+ Government funding – underpinned by

research – has led to step change in retrofitting insulation and heaters for home-owners

co-benefits: health, education, energy + climate change

+ Experiment with mixed-tenure, low carbon urban houses with low operating costs

Develop economies of scale

+ Social Inclusion