It shouldn’t take a fire and yet so often it does. In the wake of tragedy, questions will be asked about the living conditions of the six people who died in the Loafers Lodge boarding-house, but as ever, too late.
Loafers Lodge is just one of several hundred similar boarding houses scattered across New Zealand. Once predominantly a rough but functional form of accommodation for single working men, such places have long since catered to a wider range of people, most of them down on their luck.
The tenants of Loafers Lodge included nurses working shifts at the nearby Wellington hospital, but also cash-strapped retirees, people on community sentences and other members of the marginalised and vulnerable poor.
I first came across boarding houses a decade ago, when I spent three weeks as an undercover reporter in one in central Wellington. The rooms were foul-smelling, dirty and damp. Some windows didn’t close properly, so the rain just came “hosing through”, as one resident observed. The place provided just one working shower for 14 people, and even that had a cracked concrete floor. There was no hot water in the hand-basins, no toilet paper in the toilets. The kitchen, such as it was, boasted neither fridge nor washing machine.
It's not obvious yet what exactly has gone wrong at Loafers Lodge and why lives have been lost. Maybe it's unrelated to its status as a boarding house. But I can't help thinking that the incredibly lax approach to (not) regulating housing for the vulnerable won't have helped.
— Max Rashbrooke (@MaxRashbrooke) May 16, 2023
The people living there tolerated these appalling conditions because they had, as another resident put it, “nowhere else to go”. Whether it was alcoholism, poverty, difficult behaviour or other assorted conditions, no conventional private landlord would have them as a tenant. Social housing was in short supply.
The tenants, some of whom had lived there for decades, enjoyed few legal protections. Boarding house tenants can be evicted with 48 hours’ notice on various grounds, including where the landlord claims they will cause “serious damage” to the property.
Needless to say, such provisions are open to abuse, and help create a climate in which tenants feel frightened to speak up. Not that it would necessarily help if they did: when I tried I discovered the local council had virtually no legal powers to force improvements.
No one yet knows how the fire started at Loafers Lodge and it could be unrelated to its status as a boarding house. But there were, reportedly, warning signs. A nearby business owner, florist Laura Newcombe, told media she wasn’t surprised by the tragedy: “It’s just a maze in there.”
One hospital worker said they “often used to think when I used to visit: God, if there’s a fire it’s like a rabbit warren.” Conflicting reports have also emerged from residents over whether alarms went off when the fire broke out. Fire and emergency said on Tuesday that they could not confirm whether alarms had gone off.
Either way, Loafers Lodge shouldn’t bear all the blame. Wellington City Council has said that the lodge was issued with a Building Warrant of Fitness in March this year, indicating that it met minimum safety standards at the time.
It has been widely reported that the building had no sprinkler system, but there is no legal requirement to retrofit older buildings with sprinklers – even when the presence of large numbers of vulnerable people, some of them cooking in their own rooms, creates a frightening fire hazard. For over a decade politicians have known the risks posed by such places and done nothing.
Boarding-house owners are, in a peculiar sense, victims of a wider failure. It shouldn’t be their responsibility to care for such troubled people. The state should provide safe, secure accommodation, with wraparound public services available on-site. It is starting to do so, through initiatives like Housing First, but not yet at the required scale.
And as long as vulnerable people live in private accommodation, tougher rules may be needed. It’s not yet clear exactly what could have saved those who died in the fire, but it’s not hard to imagine how closer regulatory attention – mandatory sprinklers, licensing regimes, a legal framework that ensures tenants feel safe speaking out – might have at least alleviated the tragedy.
As it stands, all we have is grief, and a growing pile of unanswered questions.
Speaking in parliament on Tuesday, Green Party co-leader James Shaw made clear his anger: “What kind of country are we, where those people have so few options in life but to live in substandard accommodation with a reasonable chance of lethality?”
It’s a good question. It’s just a shame that only now, after people have died, will there be anything like sufficient investigation into the conditions in which they lived and whether those conditions contributed to their deaths.
