Have heard a couple of landlords that I know say “the tenants will end up having a warmer house than me!” … and it’s like, if you can’t afford to insulate one house, maybe you shouldn’t own more than one house!

We talk about our housing woes as a failure of successive governments’ policies (which they are) but it’s also to a large extent a cultural phenomenon in New Zealand. We were so accustomed to living in cold, damp houses because that’s all we knew

This issue is only starting to get traction because many Kiwis have lived abroad in colder climates and gone “hang on, you don’t need to wear five layers while inside?… interesting” And new migrants to NZ from Europe/North America bring that knowledge with them too

NZ’s “harden up, put another sweater on” mentality is perhaps a legacy of our frontier colonial past, but it’s also because the climate here is not *quite* cold enough for *quite* long enough in the year. So you can *just about* get away with not heating/insulation properly

That’s just not even a viable trade-off in Northern Europe or North America because you *would* die. Here it results in “huh… I wonder why we have the highest child asthma rates in the world? It sure is a mystery”

So because WE (as a people) don’t value being warm inside our houses, any easing in credit conditions (interest rate cuts) or increase in income/savings, just goes into further bidding up the price of land and not into improving the quality of the houses on it