One Two Three Home

This year marks 110 years since the very first renters’ organisation was founded in Wellington. In May 1916 (quoting from my PhD, where I list the references): Meeting participants drew attention to “whole families being housed in one or two rooms”, and noted that “the sanitary arrangements of these high-rented ‘shacks’ were disgraceful”. They called…More

Recent years have seen a lot of discussion of the monuments in our streets and public spaces, asking us to consider, for example, whether it’s appropriate to have monuments to people like William Wakefield or Captain Hamilton, complicit in the violence of colonisation. Leonie Hayden has argued that, alongside taking down some of these monuments,…More

Recently I interviewed a woman who’d had curtains installed in her rental property through a curtain bank, as arranged by one of the Healthy Housing Initiatives. She described how her life had changed. Previously her home was so cold that she and her kids had often gone directly to bed after dinner to keep warm…More

We have just published a paper in Cities that looks at the history of policies around tenure mix in New Zealand, and draws on de-identified integrated government data to understand how public housing is distributed across New Zealand, and how the proportion of public housing in a community affects the health of tenants living there.…More

Eviction resistance – refusing to leave the home when the landlord ends the tenancy – is a strategy used by tenants worldwide both to enable them to keep their housing in the short or long term and to send a message to policymakers about the importance of improving rental conditions. I’ve recently published an article…More

Elinor Chisholm, Sarah Bierre, Cheryl Davies, Philippa Howden-Chapman* [This is a repost from Public Health Expert Blog on 14 June 2022 – thank you to the editors. ] Eviction, or a forced move from rental housing, is a common experience for New Zealand renters, yet we know very little about its effects. In this blog…More

Last week I wrote about a paper we recently published that looked at how New Zealanders define mixed-tenure communities, and what’s important in how they’re designed. This is important because of the major developments going ahead that will transform the lives of thousands of people – those displaced by development as well as those housed…More

Replacing public housing with housing for different socio-economic groups has been a focus for governments and housing providers in a number of countries. Developing public and market housing, usually on land formerly occupied by public housing, offers the chance to increase the supply of private and public housing, while improving housing quality and community design.…More

The Healthy Homes Initiative (HHI) is a unique programme, celebrated for being an outstanding public service delivering positive outcomes for New Zealand. A paper has recently been published by Nevil Pierse and other colleagues about what one HHI does – Well Homes in Wellington. People can be referred to Well Homes when they have a…More