After a two-year inquiry into housing in New Zealand, the Human Rights Commission has released its final report on the state of our country’s housing sector.

The Housing Inquiry spearheaded a focus on acknowledging that a decent home was a human right. The housing crisis was recognised at an international level in February 2020 when a United Nations rapporteur visited and reported on New Zealand housing. Key features of a decent home include habitable, affordable and accessible, meaning that homes function without discrimination.

Accordingly, new homes that are built today with poor access into the home, limited structural spaces and unusable bathrooms for disabled people could easily be seen as discriminatory. We have the techniques available to change this by embracing Universal Design and requiring all social housing to be built to these new standards. To require less is unacceptable in a modern human rights-based society.

Driving Change in New Zealand’s Housing Sector

Measurement is a crucial aspect of policy change and there are numerous ways to evaluate the features of a decent home. From an accessibility perspective, homes must “meet everyone’s access needs and support disabled people to live fully in our communities” (Human Rights Commission, July 2023, Housing Inquiry, pg 29).

This can be achieved by evaluating the design aspects of new homes and calculating their level of accessibility. A starting point is simply to evaluate baseline features such as Access into homes, Bathroom usability and structural and spatial Circulation requirements – the ABCs of accessible design.

Some councils are already starting to do this, and we will continue to work with those progressive councils and organisations who take on this responsibility to improve their housing supply. Our Lifemark Design Standards provide a useful framework to help ensure houses are usable, adaptable and have space in the right place.