Bay of Plenty town banding together for better housing and better health

June 29, 2019

The community of Minginui was sick of waiting for promised help which hasn’t come.

For years the small village of Minginui in the Bay of Plenty has been promised help to improve its substandard homes but literally sick of waiting, as their physical health declines, the community is backing themselves to finally make change.

A village gutted by the economic reforms of the 1980s, successive governments have been assessing housing needs in Minginui for decades.

The problem has been looked at by ministers but hasn’t been solved.

"There were ministers traipsing through their houses in the worst of weather with rain and storms coming down through the ceilings, buckets of water catching the rain and they sidestepped all of that and said they’d be back and never did," says Matekuare Whānau Trust chairwoman, Hinerangi Goodman.

The Matekuare Whānau has had enough and is now driving a programme of change - getting funding for a study to establish hard data around just how sick these homes are making the residents.

Researchers found that 88 per cent of occupants had long term physical or mental illness.

Respiratory disease is also entrenched in the community, driven by cold, mouldy and damp housing.

“If you're significantly cold for any period of time your blood actually flows slower, you've got more chance of clotting so you know, chest pain shortness of breath - those sorts of things can happen in the cold,” says Shelly Lyford - Toi Ohomai Institute of Technolgy Researcher.

The research is also being used to help design twenty healthier homes for a new papakāinga - communal housing on Māori land.

Infrastructure is now going in on the Matekuare's land - a heavy focus on thermal and moisture control, combined with energy efficiency with the aim to make homes more affordable over their lifetime.

"It's bringing a whole whānau together. It's making our whānau wholesome, healthy - all the things that are really quite basic for our people," says Ms Goodman.


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