Letters: Easy solution to cold, damp homes

There's simple solution to damp homes, a reader says.

Jim Adams opinion (Letters, March 4) on greedy landlords who are fleecing tenants is typical, in my view, of someone who has never been a landlord.

What he is asking for is not sensible and I think a few homeowners would be upset at the prospect of property prices falling.

We are landlords and I often wonder why with all this talk in the media of cold, damp mouldy homes no one who writes these stories has ever asked a landlord what causes mould.

The answer is us as people in how we live in the house. I grew up in a house that today would be considered unsuitable for tenants. There was no mould, running windows, and we were rarely sick as children.

Now Jim Adams why do you think that was? Simple, my mother was mad on fresh air and there were always windows open.

Most people have no clue about living in a house; many don't understand fresh in stale air out.

Also keeping a house clean and making sure we know the basic principles of having a healthy home.

If the windows are always shut, curtains drawn, and we don't let the sunshine in it all contributes to the problems of cold damp homes.

Ruth Ferreira
Rotorua

Renters vs homeowners

Paul Carpenter's assertion that people who rent actually do pay rates misses the point.

People who rent don't know how much their rates are because they don't get a bill: therefore they don't associate voting for council with anything except what they can get out of the council. So councils can waste money, in my view, because most voters don't care about fiscal probity.

If the council goes bankrupt and the free services dry up, renters move to somewhere nicer.

People who rent have no buy-in to the community. They don't care about whether their street is tidy or not. They don't care about loud noises at night or wild parties, dead cars or bags of refuse. Why should they? Nobody in New Zealand cares about them.

The entire government, social and business community is focused on extracting as much money as possible from people who live in rented houses.

People who rent are considered second class citizens, looked down on or pitied at best.

What's my point?

The "Kiwi lifestyle" so pathetically appealed to by anti-capital gains tax campaigners is a form of civil slavery where one segment of New Zealand preys upon another.

GJ Philip
Taupo

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