Michael McGowan reporting in The Guardian.
A month after a storm made his son’s bedroom uninhabitable, mushrooms were growing in the skirting boards and Dean Kahukiwa was still waiting for repairs to begin.
When the ceiling of an upstairs bedroom in Dean Kahukiwa’s public housing unit in Sydney collapsed during a storm in February, the father of three immediately started calling for help.
“I was watching it as it was happening, first the water started to come in through the window. Then it sort of spread across the ceiling towards the light and all of a sudden a crack started to appear. Then ‘whooosh’ it went,” he told the Guardian.
“I was in tears mate. I’m on the phone to housing, trying to get them to do something, they said we can send someone in 48 hours. I had to get the SES to come out and they did an inspection but they said it was too unsafe to go on the roof because no one had fixed the gutters.”
A month later, nothing had changed. The room was covered in mould and debris from the storm, and mushrooms had begun to grow in the skirting boards of the bedroom.
Ned Cooke, from the Inner Sydney Tenants Advice and Advocacy Service at the Redfern Legal Centre, said stories like Kahukiwa’s were “extremely common”.
“It’s a major issue and has been for a long time, and typically it’s the most major repairs where it’s really affecting the liveability of the housing are when it’s the hardest to get any action,” he said.
While the issues with public housing maintenance were “multi-faceted”, the lack of coordination between the tenancy and maintenance services created a level of “accepted inefficiency” within the system.
Read the full article here (14 March 2023).
