Current Situation

Housing has a large global carbon footprint

The International Energy Agency, the IEA state the buildings sector has a very large carbon footprint when indirect emissions are accounted for. About 9% of global energy and process-related CO₂ emissions result from the use of fossil fuels in buildings, another 18% come from the generation of electricity and heat used in buildings, and an additional 10% is related to the manufacturing of construction materials. A building’s entire lifecycle is therefore responsible directly and indirectly for ~37% of global energy- and process-related CO₂ emissions, which calls for whole-lifecycle emissions restrictions.

Housing has a smaller carbon footprint in Aotearoa New Zealand, but that's not good news either...

A report by Think Step estimates a building accounts for 20% of NZ’s carbon footprint over its life cycle. They state it is lower as a percentage as our use of low-carbon electricity and the large share of direct agricultural emissions. The New Zealand Green Building Council believes we need all new homes to be Net Zero Carbon by 2030 and all new and existing buildings to be Net Zero Carbon by 2050.

We have damp, cold, leaky, and mouldy homes

• Insulation was not commonly installed in New Zealand homes built before it became compulsory in 1978.

• Ceiling and underfloor insulation has been compulsory in rental homes since July 2019.

• A Building Research Association (BRANZ) survey found in 2015 that 40% of NZ homes were damp and mouldy.

• A report on Housing in Aotearoa 2020 by Stats NZ, found 21.5% of NZ homes were sometimes or always damp and 16.9% had visible mould larger than A4 size at least some of the time. Northland homes are amongst the worst affected in Aotearoa New Zealand.

• Low income home owners can apply for a grant of 80% of the cost of insulation or approved heater, like a heat pump.

• The Leaky homes crisis affects 90,000 homes and will cost $48 billion to fix. One of the main causes is the failure of cladding allowing water ingress into the timber framing, causing rot. Houses built mostly between the late 1980s and the mid-2000s, using plaster style monolithic cladding systems.

Buying our own home is becoming virtually impossible

• 55.1% of all households in all of Northland are owner occupied (2018 Census)

• Māori ownership (2013 Census): Far North District (43.7%), Kaipara District (39.7%) and Whangarei District (36.2%)

• The median house price in 2021 was: $615k in the Far North District, $795k in the Kaipara District, and $737k for the Whangarei District (qv.co.nz)

• In 2019, the Stuff website wrote a series of articles, "Kāore te kāinga kāore te ora; No place to live" on a housing crisis in the Far North, including an article on a Rawhiti whānau and housing inequality

Papakāinga initiatives

• Te Puni Kokiri (TPK) has papakāinga funding available which is helping whānau develop housing projects on their whenua

• TPK have written a toolkit and brochure on papakāinga for whānau in Te Tai Tokerau

• Architectual designer and housing advocate, Jade Kake, who is focussed on Papakāinga initiatives in Whangarei, talks about the issues here. A link to her Master's thesis on the topic can be found here