Dunedin students are living through the coldest weeks of the year in flats that are no warmer inside than the street outside, and in some cases those flats already meet the minimum standards the law sets for rental housing.
RNZ reported on Thursday that student flats near the University of Otago campus remain bitterly cold despite passing the healthy homes standards, and that advocates want the rules tightened and actually enforced.
Second-year student Rosie moved into a Leith Street flat after a year in a hall of residence where her room was warm and insulated. The change was a shock, and she told RNZ she did not know of any flat that could be called warm. Her flatmates wear jackets indoors and she was sick for most of the first semester.
“We’re all pretty restricted on our power use. We don’t use our communal heat pump,” she said. “We probably each individually have an oil heater in our rooms and we use that a couple of hours a day because rent is so expensive and power is so expensive in general, we’re pretty reluctant to do that.”
The house is about a century old. Rosie said the walls could not be accessed to insulate them, so only one room has double glazing and there is no insulation in the walls or under the floor. “It’s honestly the same temperature as outside,” she said.
A few streets away on Castle Street, the flat known as The Feisty Goat does meet the standards. It has insulation, heating and ventilation, and its landlord has put work into it. It is also 145 years old and, according to flatmate Dylan, still freezing.
“We love the house, like it’s real, real cool. Like we have a lot of fun, but it does get like freezing cold, especially at night,” he told RNZ. “We all got like girlfriends and we spend a lot of time spending the nights at their houses because it’s actually too cold to sleep here, especially in the winter.”
The heat pump made so little difference that it stayed switched off most of the time, he said, and the flat relied on dehumidifiers instead. The most worn item of clothing in the house was a large jacket his mother sent down from Auckland. Draught gaps in the property were sealed on Wednesday, and he was hopeful that would help.
Otago University Students’ Association president Daniel Leamy said finding a decent quality flat in Dunedin was close to impossible. “Perhaps in the 21st century, we maybe shouldn’t be subjecting our young people to a, quote, rite of passage that essentially just means you live in unsafe, unsatisfactory housing,” he said.
The healthy homes standards were worth having, Leamy said, but they were the bare minimum and they were not enforced. Students often knew their flat fell short and chose not to act on it. “The problem is the power dynamic between landlords and tenants is so, so unfair on young people who want to get a good reference so they can actually get more housing and another place to live, say next year if they move on,” he said.
Part of the gap between a compliant flat and a warm one is written into the rules themselves. The heating standard requires one or more fixed heaters able to lift the main living room to at least 18 degrees within two hours and hold it there. It says nothing about bedrooms, which is where students sleep, study and spend most of a Dunedin winter evening. The insulation standard covers the ceiling and under the floor, not the walls, and there is no requirement anywhere in the standards for double glazing. A villa with an insulated ceiling, a heat pump in the lounge and single-glazed sash windows in every bedroom can tick every box and still be miserable.
The pattern shows up in the national numbers as well. Research published in June found New Zealand living rooms have warmed noticeably since the standards came in, while bedrooms across the country still run cold through winter. The World Health Organization recommends homes be kept at 18 degrees or above, and higher again where there are young children, older people or anyone unwell.
New Zealand Green Building Council residential impact manager Matthew Cutler said the cold student flat had become part of the city’s folklore, and that was the problem. “Some of the conditions here are just so bad for students and we’ve become as a culture, kind of accepting of that and I don’t think that should be acceptable,” he said.
Draughts were a common weakness because New Zealand does not require anyone to measure how airtight a house is, unlike many other countries, Cutler said. “The healthy home standard is a really good start, but without a true warrant of fitness or an energy performance certificate, which is something that’s very common in the residential sector across the world and certainly in the OECD, then it is really just the first step.” He said enforcement was another weak point, because compliance relies on landlords reporting it themselves.
Inspectors have found the same thing on the ground. The Tenancy Compliance and Investigations Team, part of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, visited 14 Dunedin rentals in May and found several still fell short, with blocked gutters, gaps around external doors, broken windows or latches, mould and incorrectly installed smoke alarms, RNZ reported in June. National manager Brett Wilson said most of the faults were minor but the message was not.
“We want to tackle the culture that living in poor quality housing is an accepted part of life for university students,” Wilson said. “The healthy homes standards are minimum requirements for rental properties and have been compulsory for all rental properties since 1 July 2025.” A larger sweep of 53 Dunedin rentals the year before found two-thirds breached the law, and follow-up enforcement produced new gutters, bathroom renovations and new heat pumps.
The timing is unkind. The country has just been through one of its coldest spells of the year, with clear skies and light winds dropping temperatures well below zero in the South Island and pushing national electricity demand to an all-time record of 7141 megawatts earlier this week. For a flat where the heaters are already rationed by the power bill, a cold snap is not an inconvenience so much as a decision about which room to give up on.
Leamy said students who were struggling could get help through the association’s support centre, and he wanted more work done on the quality of the housing stock itself rather than another round of minimum requirements that a hundred-year-old villa can technically satisfy while its tenants sleep in jackets.
Did you flat in Dunedin, and was your place any warmer than these ones? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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