Rent freeze? No. Rent, freeze: Australia’s winter housing nightmare
If you were to try to distinguish a house from a cave, you might ask: “Is it cold? Is it damp? Do fungi grow there?”. By this metric, some caves around the world would pass as houses, but many of our houses would pass as caves.
Cold homes in Australia: Questioning our assumptions about prevalence, a study by the Australian Centre for Housing Research, monitored homes through the winter in 2022. It found that during that time, 81 percent averaged below 18 degrees Celsius, the minimum “healthy” standard of indoor temperature set by the World Health Organization.
The effects of cold on the human body can be deadly. Colder temperatures cause blood vessels to constrict to reduce heat loss, increasing blood pressure and raising your risk of heart disease and strokes. Likewise, cold, dry air can narrow your airways, making chronic bronchitis, emphysema and asthma attacks more likely. A report by the University of Melbourne Professor Rebecca Bentley, published in 2024 with the headline “Your cold house is bad for your mental health” also found that those who cannot afford to keep their homes warm are 49 percent more likely to report depression or anxiety.
The cold is more deadly in Australia than it is in Arctic-straddling Sweden. Research published in the Lancet in 2015, “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, found that 6.5 percent of all deaths in Australia are at least partly attributable to cold weather, almost twice Sweden’s 3.7 percent. Thousands are dying from the cold, and the danger doesn’t end there.
Asthma Australia surveyed 5,041 people in 2022, finding in its report Homes, Health and Asthma in Australia that one in three people have mould in their homes, while one in two have problems with either mould or dampness (water damage, condensation, water leaks or flooding). Black mould spores can cause asthma attacks, allergic reactions and immune system disorders. One couple recently interview by the Sydney Morning Herald explained that the mould in their flat made them sick for months with vertigo and cyclical vomiting. This isn’t just a problem in old, poorly ventilated homes. The 2015 Nationwide Condensation Survey found that more than 40 percent of new buildings had problems with condensation and mould.
So why are our houses so crap? It certainly isn’t because we don’t know better. Building shelters is something human beings have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. The cumulative effort of countless generations struggling against the elements has taken us from animal skins to adobe bricks to heaters and fibreglass insulation. The wind catchers used in Iran today—ingenious chimneys that use basic physics to displace hot air inside a home and replace it with cool air—date back thousands of years, while ancient Roman villas commonly used hypocausts that acted as a system of underfloor central heating.
The gap between the kind of housing we’re forced to endure and what science makes possible is immense. Australia’s Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) rates houses out of ten stars. A 10-star home is one that remains comfortable all year with little or no heating or cooling, while a 0-star home provides almost no protection from the outside climate at all.
In a 2022 piece in the Guardian, “Freezing indoors? That’s because Australian homes are closer to tents than insulated eco-buildings”, the head of the University of New South Wales School of the Built Environment, Phillip Oldfield, calculated the amount of power that differently rated homes would require to be kept at a comfortable temperature. “If [a house] received a 2-star NatHERS rating”, he wrote, “it would need 27,349kWh’s of electricity. If we assume $0.20/kWh, the cost would be $5,470 per year. A 6-star home would require 8,249kWh and cost $1,650, while a 10-star home would need only 100 kWh, costing a mere $20 a year.” The average Australian home has a NatHERS rating of just 1.8 stars.
Although new buildings and major renovations are now required to meet a 7-star rating (and most do not go above this minimum), 70 percent of all homes were built before national energy efficiency standards were introduced in 2003. There is no national standard for that 70 percent, which includes most of the properties leased out by landlords today. The only state requirements are in Victoria and the ACT—which now require landlords to install ceiling insulation (i.e. the absolute bare minimum).
Paying for proper insulation and double-glazed windows would eat into the profits made by property hoarders and developers. So it doesn’t happen. Instead they pass on the costs to those who end up living in their houses, who face the terrible choice: pay thousands each year to warm their homes, or suffer through the winter cold and the damaging consequences for their health.
For most people, this isn’t a real choice. They can’t afford to stay warm. Finder’s August 2024 Consumer Sentiment Tracker found, based on a survey of 1,049 respondents, that one in two Australians had gone cold to avoid a high energy bill, with 36 percent avoiding using heating as often as possible, and 13 percent going cold all the time.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Double-glazed windows are the norm throughout much of Europe, where triple-glazed windows are becoming common. We could raise the minimum NatHERS rating to 9 or 10 stars, reducing the need for heating and air conditioning to a bare minimum. All houses could be required to meet this standard before being leased or sold, and we could tax property hoarders and developers to subsidise those who own only a home or two to do so.
We could mandate new building designs to feature cross-ventilation, so that we can cool our houses at night when it’s hot and avoid the build-up of condensation. We could mandate mechanical ventilation for old homes. With high standards of insulation, we could create houses that stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer, something that will be increasingly important as the climate crisis worsens.
Houses where we can live with dignity are not beyond the reach of science, or our resources. They are only beyond the reach of our for-profit housing system.
