Lead

Lead. It’s the most deadly thing in the name of “Led Zeppelin”, and the other thing is Zeppelin, which makes people think of the Hindenberg. And then the Titanic. And other massive disasters.

Pb. Lead. It’s is a heavy metal that poisons animals. We’ve seen it happen in communities across the world, from India, China, and even the United States of America. It’s happening right now in all of those places, and millions of people are being affected across thousands of water systems.

There are millions of kilometers of pipes across the world that leach lead, and millions of kilometers of layers of paint that degrade and create dust which hundreds of millions of people breathe in.

A child can be poisoned and seriously affected by 10mg of lead. A teaspoon contains around 4,000mg of lead. That means irreversible damage to the brain can be caused by a house painted with lead paint.

Housing New Zealand has said it is committed to providing safe and healthy homes to tenants. It says it “regularly” inspects interior and exterior of its properties, identifies properties with flaking paint and tests it for lead, provides information to contractors and staff, and communicates with tenants about lead paint removal processes and precautions.

If you know of any Housing New Zealand property with flaking paint, then please immediately call your member of parliament in order to have it tested and have your landlord or the government pay for it.

 

Update 12 January 2020:

I wrote an email on 22 February 2017 to the then Minister for Building and Construction, Nick Smith, asking what efforts Housing New Zealand is taking to reduce the amount of lead paint on its properties.

I received a response on 20 March 2017 from Rachel Kelly, Manager Government Relations, who stated Housing New Zealand agreed that lead poisoning is a serious health issue, and is committed to providing safe and healthy homes to tenants.

I thought I was getting fobbed off, and I was, but today I have found an article on Stuff.co.nz, from 31 March 2019. It states “While Housing NZ manager of government relations Rachel Kelly said she couldn’t state ‘with certainty’ exactly how many of its properties have paint containing lead, she estimated up to 52,383 of their 64,333 properties contained lead-based paint” and this: “In the 12 months to June 30, 2018, 1135 Housing NZ properties have had exterior paint work done to remove lead-based paint.”

Apparently, lead-based paint removal began just months after I sent my letter. It’s probably just a coincidence, but in a nation where people in authority do not listen to the opinion of others, I will take this is a small win in an ocean of being ignored.

Here’s the article:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/111473661/more-than-50000-housing-new-zealand-homes-still-contain-toxic-leadbased-paint

New Zealand’s Housing Crisis

I saw this story online at stuff.co.nz , and knew I had to post about it.

Who Is At Fault For Current House Prices?

“[W]ho, if anyone, is to blame for the current state of the housing market?”

BNZ chief economist Tony Alexander, surprisingly doesn’t blame baby boomers, but puts the responsibility on people moving to the cities and “re-structuring” of borrowing money. Which is, of course, what somebody in the banking industry is going to say, because they’re desperately trying to avoid any blame.

I know who is to blame, and the reason why I know it is because I worked with members of the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ) in the late 1990s. I actually helped set up and run the original Real Estate New Zealand property website, which at the time was known as RealENZ, despite over a dozen people telling our bosses that the name sounded like those on the phones were saying “rear ends”. They didn’t listen to that, and they didn’t listen to people telling them that their philosophy was fundamentally flawed.

Their philosophy was: “there is a lot of money to be made, by everybody, in property”. Real estate agents (mostly baby boomers) held the belief that there would always be houses being built, and salaries would always increase so that homes would always be affordable. The boss of RealENZ at the time had a discussion with me one evening after work where he said “the population is getting older. Those people have invested, they have the bank balance to afford to sell their places, and get better ones. We have a growing group that can afford to not only keep up with the price rises, but will be able to pass on the wealth to their children, so that they can keep being wealthy, too.”

My previous job before RealENZ was as a high school teacher on the border of central/southern Auckland. Almost none of those students had parents who could afford to buy their own homes. I knew that if vendors sold their homes continually for a massive profit, with agents driving up the prices because that meant they got higher commissions, that people coming into the market wouldn’t be able to afford it. So I mentioned that to my boss.

He, like a number of other real estate agents I spoke to over those years, said that there would always be houses for people entering the market, such as people from overseas.

At the time, I knew the only people entering the market from overseas were people with a large amount of cash on hand. But the argument against my opinion was always that those stories were of minorities.

I was constantly told: new houses will be built for people entering the market. The population is growing older, and there are less young people. We will have more houses than what is needed.

The problem was, obviously, that most of the new houses were being built for people already on the property ladder. Not only the people living in homes, but those who were renting one, or more, of those properties out.

And more people were being born, more people were coming in from overseas, and prices continually went up, and new properties were slowly being built, mostly available for those with the ability to purchase them.

Real estate agents knew this. Property investors knew this. The government knew this. It was inevitable.

But those people did not care. They refused to believe it was possible.

Can we blame the baby boomers? Hell, yes we can. The problem is, they do not care, or they refuse to take responsibility.

So, nothing will be fixed.