Cars can be dangerous to your wellbeing. If they have a dodgy wheel bearing, thin tyres, a cracked windscreen or a dying battery, they don’t pass their warrant of fitness. It’s too dangerous to drive. Before you’re allowed to have your car on the road, you have to fix the sub-standard parts. These checks are done annually for the health of all. It makes a lot of sense – so why can’t we do the same for flats?
The shitfuckery of student housing has been a hot topic this year. Newly elected 2026 Residential Rep Zoe Eckhoff’s horror story with a notoriously awful landlord gained widespread media coverage and the attention of local government candidates. I almost gagged when she showed me pictures of the yellow fungus bulging out of one of the walls. I recognised the name of the landlord, too. This was a landlord who had doxxed and harassed Critic staff in 2019 when they reported on her having gone to the Tenancy Tribunal 31 times in the space of three years.
Zoe’s story is a particularly bad one but it’s also nothing new in Dunedin. Landlords don’t care about the health of their tenants. They aren’t incentivised to. It’s an investment. A business. And students are the cash cows, their suffering wellbeing a minor concern, and the Tenancy Tribunal is ineffective in stopping it. Students are constantly sick as a result of mouldy, damp homes that they’re overcharged for, rendering them too poor to heat them properly. Worse still, they’re gaslit by exploitative landlords into thinking that’s a “rite of passage”. It’s psychotic.
Politicians have attempted to address this before. First came Healthy Homes standards in 2019, which set minimum requirements for heating, insulation, ventilation, moisture, and drainage. Good in theory, but the standards haven't quite worked – they’re not very enforceable, and the onus is on students to complain to the Tenancy Tribunal if their flat isn’t up to scratch. July 1st was the deadline for having made improvements to flats, and as Zoe pointed out during her campaign, many put their properties up for sale when that deadline hit.
Zoe campaigned on a rental WoF as a renter-friendly alternative, a solution that the Green Party has been pushing for years. A Stuff article from 2021 quoted Chlöe Swarbrick's passionate appeal – and in 2025, she is still fighting for it, having talked to Critic about it in July. Back then, critics argued that any rental regulations should wait until the standards were fully phased in. Now is that time. Thanks to Zoe, students’ plight has been front and centre in local body election campaigns.
In this issue’s local body elections pull-out magazine, candidates were asked for their positions on ten different student priorities agreed by the OUSA Exec. The rental warrant of fitness received some of the biggest support across the board – except for the Court of Saint Pamela, who simply responded “no” to every question except one.
It was heartening to read the thoughts of council candidates on this issue. One put it especially well, “Yes, absolutely—everyone deserves a warm, dry, healthy home, and students are no exception. Landlords in Dunedin have for too long exploited the idea of the ‘student experience’ to justify high rents for substandard, often unliveable accommodation. A rental warrant of fitness would help ensure all properties meet basic health and safety standards, protect tenants’ rights, and hold landlords accountable. It’s a crucial step toward fairer, healthier housing in our city.”
With the new Residential Rep for OUSA and local government candidates strongly backing a rental WoF, something might just improve in an issue that’s wracked the Otago student body for decades (there’s an issue of Critic from the ‘70s that depicts the same derelict state of housing). But there’s hope. We’re in a position where we might have the right people in power to do something about the plague of housing in Dunedin. This is the last week to vote in local government elections. Students are being poisoned by their homes, and it needs to end. Vote.