FEATURED ARTICLE
The Lifemark New Zealand story by Geoff Penrose
T
his is the story of Lifemark, a not-for-profit organisation that has battled to change the way housing is built in New Zealand. It’s a tale of perseverance and how, like a sailing boat, you keep tacking into the wind to get to your destination. To begin let’s look at the challenge. The housing market in New Zealand is big and complex. The market is valued at $1.5 trillion and consists of around 1,800,000 dwellings with around 30,000 added every year. There has been a history of poor regulatory choices such as the failure to include insulation, the failure to produce water-tight buildings and more recently the need to upgrade the seismic strengthening of all buildings. Set against this misery, accessibility was also virtually excluded.
30
Whilst there is clearly a shortage of accessible housing across New Zealand, the lack of coherent statistics makes it difficult to quantify this issue. What is also very clear is that market forces do not deliver accessible homes. From a regulatory perspective, the Building Act (2004) has no residential access performance requirements and the New Zealand standard for Access and Mobility NZS 4121 (2001) ignores residential dwellings. Even Councils struggled to encourage accessibility as independent hearing panels simply rule that any imposed Universal Design or Access conditions infringe section 18 of the Building Act that meant you cannot require performance criteria above the building code. The net result was that by 2008, probably around 99% of the New Zealand housing stock was inaccessible, if we define access as including a
THE MAGAZINE FOR THE ASSOCIATION OF CONSULTANTS IN ACCESS AUSTRALIA
