The Shitbox Society

Johnny O’Hagan Brebner (he/him)

The Shitbox Experience is an extra-special, two-in-one gift that the country has given students: shitty rentals and the expectation that we should enjoy them as a “rite of passage.”

Bernard* paid around $200 a week for his first flat; on a ten degree slant, gaps between the floor boards that the dirt underneath could be seen through, and of course plenty of rats. His second smelled of shit and only 2 out of the 5 bedrooms had windows. 

Abby has a great flat now. Her first room was $220 a week, but it was so damp the walls wept at night and her clothes would go mouldy over the weekend. 

Ren has had a better experience, but has spent most of his time in tiny rooms: “Harry Potter’s room under the stairs was better.” He currently has to spend his entire StudyLink living costs on another tiny space with no sunlight. 

Not only do we get to live in yellow-stickered, damp, $250+ per-week death traps mostly shared with rats and mushrooms, we also get to be sidelined when we complain about it. Surely, ask our older generations: “it’s not that bad? It can’t be that much worse than when we were in uni?” 

Well, they’d be half right—the quality of student housing has been pretty trash for decades, although almost everything around it has changed. Our parents and grandparents’ generation mostly had to deal with the The Black Mould Chair being broken over their heads. Now, students have to deal with that and gut-shots from the Property Manager Loveseat, a hiding from the Privatised Uni Pullout, and suffocation from the Beanbag of Unaffordability. 

Vic students know how dire the situation can be. 

Sarah was a student in the 90s and early 2000s. “Housing wasn’t such a big deal—it was crappy, but it wasn’t impossible to find a home close to uni and it wasn’t horrifically expensive.” She, and others, think the main difference now is rent. When she was flatting, students generally only paid $70 to $120pw. Income was more stable; student allowances covered most housing costs. She adds, “rents never used to rise annually as a rule.”

Billy*, a landlord of 32 years and six current residential properties, backed this up. When he first came to Wellington 24 years ago, he rented his first property out for about $100 per room. Now, his rents are closer to $210 per room, “and I'm still on the light end of the market.” Elsewhere it’s getting closer to $330.

A full time job is an increasing necessity to even afford rent, let alone expenses. Carmel* and Daria* have had to work 30-40 hour weeks for most of their university life—and Carmel currently has to illegally sublet off friends. Most students who talked to me were either working jobs as well as studying, or were in flats where most people did. 

Those unable to get jobs are being priced out. Jacob was pushed out of Wellington completely, and studies by distance in Hawkes Bay. Aaron* moved to Wellington after time in prison. He says that it’s now impossible to get a job other than orcharding or packhousing. The financial strain is impossible. It means he has to rely entirely on his student allowance, leaving only $50 after rent. 

“I could have gone back to selling drugs, but I left that part of my life behind and suffered for it.” 

Sarah and Billy put this down to rising house prices and the boom of property managers in the early 2000s. Both say that while property managers existed, there were way fewer, and they’ve since inflated the market. According to MBIE, property managers charge between 7.5% and 8.5% of rents. That means a rent of $200pw would otherwise be $183, $250pw would be $228. Sarah said, “they periodically [...] advise their clients to raise the rent to align it with “the market”. [But] the market rates are only increasing at the rates they are because property managers advise their clients to increase rents.” 

Meanwhile, house prices in Wellington have also been soaring; while only increasing 8.75% between November 2007 and 2015, they rose 81.61% in the following five years. As Billy points out, anyone wanting to maintain a steady return on an investment needs to increase rent with the price. $50,000 a year is a 5% return on a one million dollar property, but only a 4% return on 1.2 million dollars. And with interest rates low, borrowing money to invest in property is easier and provides higher returns than bank interest rates.

The property investment and property management businesses also cause issues for supply. Vetting out students, rents soaring with and because of house prices, and conversion to family homes means more students are struggling to even find flats. Sarah says there were still hectic lines for flat viewings when she was studying, but everyone found a place. 

Not so for Louis, fresh out of halls, who says he won’t be able to get a flat. He will need to board with his grandparents. He says every decision around Wellington has been a lesser of two evils compromise, “which is a bit shit considering uni and moving out are meant to be the golden days.”

When she was a lecturer, Sarah says she saw student homelessness escalate quickly since 2014. Previously she says homelessness was usually a result of other difficulties like mental illness, but not anymore. VUWSA’s Erica the Advocate agrees, blaming scarcity and cost, “there’s a lot of hidden homelessness, students living on their friend’s couch kind of homelessness.”

“It’s usually not their fault.”

Erica notes that students’ housing problems compound. Increased rates of illness affect grades, flat hunting stress is debilitating, movement out of the city hikes transport costs, and the growing need for jobs is overtaking study time.

Students also emphasised the emotional impact of their housing conditions. Carmel found it demoralising to be denied decent flats because landlords may not trust students, despite being an otherwise ideal tenant. Tamatha even suggests that there’s an entire section of Wellington’s housing stock “dedicated” to students because they’re such low quality.

Siobahn* talked about the endless feedback loop she went through. “It's not a priority for you to worry about making it to your classes if you can't even pay rent. Sometimes you can't even pay rent because your mental state is not in the right space for you to actually be at a job.”

For particular communities, it can be worse. Tamatha recalls people she knows removing “ethnic” names from applications. In Siobahn’s first flat of five Samoan girls, their white-passing flatmate took up communicating with the landlord so she would assume the rest were white. Tamatha has also heard from disabled students struggling to find flats, let alone accessible ones. With limited supply and a highly competitive market, there’s another issue: with multiple streams of income, student groups can afford to pay more than many working class families, especially Māori and Pasifika families. “People take advantage with substandard rentals because they know students and working class people will fight over scraps.” 

Pasifika Student Council President, Grace Peia, says that once many Pasifika students go into flats they tend to take substandard rentals on the chin—“there are bigger fish to fry.” While she says flatting standards are unacceptable, “you can't worry about housing if you can't even get your foot in the door with university.” She doesn’t see the Shitbox Experience as a rite of passage, just a reality that Pasifika students have to go through to be able to walk across the stage at graduation. 

The Queer community faces increasingly documented hurdles with housing, with disproportionate rates of abuse, mental illness, and homelessness, especially for trans and non-binary renters. Particular legal issues also arise; renters may have problems using deadnames on tenancy agreements. Recently, Kristine Ablinger was kicked out of her apartment for being trans, with only three hours notice as anti-discrimination laws don’t apply when tenants live with their landlords.

So, what do students think about having to deal with a reality others deny?

Responses ranged from “yeah that’s total bullshit imo” to “fucking satanic”. Erica the Advocate called it “rediculous and offensive”.

“Rose tinted glasses from the older generation” is the main sentiment.

Narratives like the Shitbox Experience are called “myths” by media students. In terms even I could understand, myths occur when a person or community’s past experiences are assumed to still apply to radically different times or conditions. 

The Quarter Acre Dream is a myth. While New Zealand used to be a country of comparatively high homeownership, ballooning prices leave the dream mostly dead. Despite this, Stuff still publishes stories about how it’s still possible, if you don’t eat for three years and buy in Bulls with a small $100,000 loan from your parents. 

Morten Gendre, Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, specialises in urban planning and development. Both he and Carmel point to why the Shitbox Experience exists.

Morten thinks “a lot of it comes out of the Dunedin experience. Going down there and living rough in Dunedin.” 

Carmel puts it down to two reasons. First, she agrees our parents’ generation has rose tinted glasses. “They've forgotten how miserable it was. They remember the camaraderie, the fun of it, and they connect it with a lack of responsibility—which may have been the case back when [...] they could just work holidays.” Secondly, she notes the public perception of students, “there's this perception of students being drunk, lazy, apathetic, just studying for the free money. And because of that stereotype some people seem to think we deserve to struggle a bit.”

And, as any media student will tell you, myths usually hold up existing power structures. As Daria says, “this narrative exists in order to undermine the lived experiences of students. If society deemed what was happening to be acceptable then things would change, but it’s to the advantage of the wealthy [...] to keep students living the way they currently do.”

By making the Shitbox Experience normal or expected for the majority of people, landlords aren’t as threatened as they otherwise would be.

Daria’s first two flats were terrible. As well as black mould, holey windows, rats and mice, she had mushrooms growing around the toilet, damp pantries, and faulty circuit boards. Unsurprisingly, flatting made Daria alternately angry and depressed. Especially as organisations like the Tenancy Tribunal and MBIE can be difficult to deal with. MBIE ignored Daria’s complaints and she, and other students, are worried to go to the tribunal in case they get informally blacklisted as a “problem tenant”.

Some landlords, of course, do their jobs. Abby’s current landlords are one of her favourite points of conversation. They only increased rent last year to cover rates and respond quickly to repairs. Billy also keeps his rents steady, “buys right”, and is basically a full time landlord as a builder by trade. Many students said, however, they just feel like any variety of their landlord’s personal ATM, cash cow, money bags, or free money tree. 

The future doesn’t look like it’s going to immediately improve. Bill, Tamatha, and Sarah think future homeownership for students in Wellington is a non-starter. Billy pointed out that some of the biggest landlords in the country primarily focus on the recent-graduate market, charging $500 a week for small, single-bedroom units. He thinks we’re going to have to get used to long term rentals. The future, it seems, is flatting.

In fact, a lot of people think that. Tam, Daria, Carmel, and Renters United all have pretty much the same pitch for post-Quarter Acre living—the European Model. This basically provides for longer term rentals, with more rights for tenants to modify the property to make it their own home. 

Solutions for student flatting are varied and contentious. Billy says that increasing regulations are pushing rents up and old landlords out. Both he and Morten think that public-private developments are the way to go. Social housing has the potential to work. But while Tamatha and Morten are optimistic, Morten points to the Kainga Ora model; they’re both still waiting on Central Government. Billy is more pessimistic, saying that the way Wellington City Council has run social housing has turned it, the country’s third largest landlord, into the country’s largest slumlord.

Morten, however, points to specific examples of higher density and higher quality housing that blend into the characteristics of their neighbourhoods. He also thinks the council has done well with its recent renovations of Arlington Apartments. But ultimately, these are isolated cases, rather than a comprehensive plan.

The big challenge, however, is the culture and systems the Shitbox Society plays into. As Billy says, “it's always going to be more in favour of the landlord. The landlord will be the one who's going to be there the longest because the tenants come and go. A lot of landlords just roll them over every year and then they'll just keep increasing [rent].” 

This is not an easy thing to change. The Shitbox Experience is a filter that many of our parents and grandparents actually see the world through. A good start is myth busting—wherever you can, challenge the idea that it’s okay to let students drown in a sea of lung infections and depression. Use your own experiences, in your own words, to get people to buck the fuck up. You can do this in your own life, or on a bigger scale. Contact the media about your dodgy property manager or windowless room. Ask people like Grant Robertson (the Wellington Central MP and Minister for Finance) why his government want house prices to continue rising. Submit on the Council’s goddamn spatial plan, it’s going to direct the next two years of urban development in Wellington, and will otherwise be another opportunity to kick the can down the road. And, of course, you can support or join advocacy services like Renters United or VUWSA.

The risk is that the Shitbox Experience turns into the Shitbox Society.  We shouldn’t have to pay more for a decent flat, but there’s shitloads we can do to help get everyone a home. 

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*Names changed

Salient reached out to Ngāi Tauira for comment but they were unavailable.

Support:

Erica and Alice the VUWSA Advocates: advocate@vuwsa.org.nz 

Pasifika Student Success: https://bit.ly/3drRAim 

Āwhina Māori Student Support: https://bit.ly/3s9USef 

Citizens Advice Bureau: https://www.cab.org.nz/