Bad Housing in Aotearoa and our young people

Its funny how you normalise bad housing conditions because thats all you know and your only option. Isn’t overcrowding a thing in everyones household? 

At the moment there are eleven people that live in our rented four bedroom family home — five adults, six kids and one cat. We make it work because we have to ie. we’ve become very good at negotiating a shower schedule, with kids at night and adults in the morning. The sad thing is that we are by far not the worse off in Aotearoa, the New Zealand Herald reported “the number of people in the urgent queue for social housing has passed 10,000 – a 70 per cent increase in the last year’ (Davidson, 2019). Just recently on Checkpoint they interviewed a young girl from Tamaki College who’s family had been evicted by Housing New Zealand in 2016, their only option while HNZ helped find them another house was to live in a tent in her Nans backyard. This process took six months. 

Bad housing can be many different things to different people and involve a wide range of issues, the most prominent being homelessness, overcrowding and poor conditions. These issues greatly impact the lives of young people and their learning.

Homelessness: This refers to families who have been fund to be homeless by a local authority and placed in temporary accommodation. 

Overcrowding: An example of overcrowding conditions would include situations where different sex children ages 10 or over have to share a bedroom; where parents have to share a bedroom with a child or children; where there are more than two children in a bedroom and where rooms such as kitchens and living rooms are used as bedrooms.

Poor conditions: Unfit or poor conditions are where housing is in need on substation repairs; is structurally unsafe; is damp, cold, or infested; or is lacking in modern facilities. 

(Harker, 2006).

Studies have shown that in bad homes children are more likely to get sick. “When homes are damp and overcrowded, these are nourishing environments for viral pathogens to grow. The body becomes susceptible to these and kids pick them up”(Chen-Xu, 2015). This results in children from bad homes having more time off school due to reoccurring illness. These conditions can be so harmful that they can result in death as “a NZ coroner ruled that cold, damp conditions in a state-owned rental property could not be discounted as contributing to the death of a two-year-old child [in 2015]” (Inadequate Housing in New Zealand and its impact on children, 2016). Access to warm and safe homes is a universal right and our children shouldn’t be dying as a result of bad housing.

The causes for poor living conditions in Aotearoa are multi faceted and can be attributed to many things including “rising property prices and rents in urban centres, and outdated regulatory framework governing housing quality and security of tenure for private tenants and income poverty” (Inadequate Housing in New Zealand and its impact on children, 2016). Bad housing not only affects a young persons health physically but also their mental well-being as well. 

With all the staggering statistics about child poverty and inadequate housing in New Zealand, it’s very likely we’re going to see the faces of those children in our classrooms. If you teach in a low socio economic area you likely to see a lot of those faces in your classroom. This won’t be easy, but one of the best things that you can do in your class and for your class is be a caring teacher that uses effective pedagogy. One of the favourite things I heard from a teacher of a low socio-economic high school was “they actually just want to learn” — so please don’t assume that don’t. 

References 

Chen-Xu, M. (n.d.). New Zealand’s poor housing is making our children sick. Retrieved from https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/75275542/new-zealands-poor-housing-is-making-our-children-sick.

Davison, I. (2019, February 19). Wait list for social housing tops 10,000. Retrieved from https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12205332.

Harker, L. (2006). Chance of a lifetime: the impact of bad housing on childrens lives. London: Shelter UK.

NZ Child and Youth Epidemiology Service, & University of Otago. (n.d.). Child poverty related indicators. Retrieved from http://www.nzchildren.co.nz/#Housing.

Thematic snapshot report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child: Inadequate Housing in New Zealand and its impact on children. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.hrc.co.nz/.