Healthy homes
Encouraging and Enabling Healthy and Sustainable Homes
Housing is at the heart of building secure, connected and caring communities, creating jobs and a diverse economy.
Everyone in the district deserves access to a decent home that is warm, dry, safe and affordable. In partnership with our community and stakeholders, we want to work together to deliver better housing outcomes.
One of the five focus areas identified in Taupō District Council’s Housing Strategy is facilitating social housing development.
What is Council’s role?
Council is eager to collaborate with our partners and educate the community to ensure both new and existing homes are accessible, warmer, drier, and more environmentally sustainable.
Good quality, warm, and well-built homes are a vital element to ensure our residents can live well and contribute positively to the community. High-performing homes promote health, economic efficiency, environmental wellbeing, and can reduce demand for infrastructure and services and increase resilience. Healthy homes also support the climate and help to address the district’s carbon footprint.
This goal is strongly linked to our ‘Leadership Through Partnership and Advocacy’ principle due to the need for collaboration with our partners and education in the community. This goal also supports the national policy statement on urban development directive that councils support reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and ensure urban environments are resilient to the likely current and future effects of climate change.
What issues does the Taupō District face?
Poor quality houses
There are a number of homes in the Taupō District, particularly rental properties, that do not meet healthy homes standards.
The cost of renovating these properties, such as insulation, double glazing, and a heat pump, is substantial. Financial assistance is likely to be required to enable low-median income homeowners to bring their home up to standard.
New constructions and rental properties are required by law to meet the minimum building code requirements, which is aligned with the current healthy home standards. However, meeting these requirements involve more construction material and labour, which increases house prices and reduces affordability.
Overcrowding
Census 2018 data showed that 4 percent of the district’s households were overcrowded. This is lower than the New Zealand average of 5.7 percent, but it still places the Taupō District mid-range compared with other districts.
Crowding is caused when the homes that people live in are too small to accommodate the number of people in a household.
The Stats NZ measure calculates the number of bedrooms needed based on the demographic composition of the household. It presumes that there should be no more than two people to a bedroom, but that couples and children of certain ages can share a bedroom. Nationally, about a quarter of tamariki and rangatahi (children and young people) lived in a crowded home.
The data showed that larger and more complex households, particularly multi-family households, were the most likely to be crowded. Crowding is stressful to health and well-being and causes adverse health outcomes such as infectious disease, respiratory illnesses, and mental health problems.
Sustainability and climate change
Emissions reduction targets set by Government are essential to work towards.
Making better decisions locally about how we build and live in our homes is critical and the ways that homes are built and remodelled, and how they are heated, are all areas in which both collective and direct individual action can make a difference. Creating efficient, sustainably built homes to last makes environmental, health, and economic sense.
Energy-efficiency
The ability for households to heat their homes is variable, and the biggest driver is affordability of heating.
The 2018 Stocktake of New Zealand’s Housing report found that:
- Only about two-thirds of New Zealand houses are even partially insulated, which makes the remainder cold, less energy efficient and more costly to heat in winter.
- 5 percent of New Zealand households did not usually heat living areas at all and almost half did not usually heat any occupied bedrooms.
- Owner-occupied households had access to more cost-effective heating compared to renting households.
A Statistics NZ report on energy hardship showed that up to a third of New Zealand households struggled to afford their power bills, spent a large part of their income on power, or often felt cold. Again, renters were more likely to experience hardship, with 44 percent of renting households reporting at least one energy hardship indicator compared with 22 percent of households who owned their own home.
What solutions is Council proposing?
Opportunities in this space include collaboration with our partners to see where we can complement existing activities, and education in the community.
We will also develop a business case that outlines Council’s role in the delivery of healthy home initiatives and ways we can support existing homeowners with repair work to meet the healthy homes standards.
Further investigations will look at options to support environmental efficiency and sustainability when building new homes, for example introducing fee waivers on building consents for solar and retrofit insulation.
The next step in Council’s climate change work is an adaptation plan. This plan will look at ways we can ensure homes and buildings are climate resilient, and that new and existing developments are planned and managed to minimise risks to communities from climate change.
Action plans
Healthy and Sustainable Homes
These actions include collaboration with our partners and education in the community to ensure both new and existing homes are accessible, warmer, drier, and more environmentally sustainable.
- Develop a webpage to inform the community about:
- council’s role in the delivery of healthy home initiatives
- existing healthy home programmes in the district
- ways existing homeowners can do renovations to meet Healthy Homes Standards.
- ways to achieve environmental efficiency and sustainability when building new homes.
- Work with accessibility advisors and local disability groups to inform how Council can help improve the supply of accessible housing in the district.
- Develop a public information campaign about where to find information about retrofitting older houses and any access to funding to do so.