The Post: The memorial we owe to those who died at Loafers Lodge
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Kenneth Barnard. Liam Hockings. Peter O'Sullivan. Melvin Parun. Mike Wahrlich. These five men died in the Loafers Lodge fire, a year ago this week, and their city, and perhaps the country at large, made an implicit pledge not to forget their names.
That, at least, was the message sent when the local mayor said it had been one of the city’s “darkest days”, the prime minister talked of “an absolute tragedy”, and multiple inquiries were urgently launched. Things wouldn’t be allowed to stay the same; we wouldn’t forget.
And yet we have. Thursday, the anniversary of the fire, brought a raft of commemorative stories. But all sounded the same theme: how little has changed, how quickly the deaths have passed from our minds.
The basic facts of the fatality are these. Loafers Lodge, situated on Wellington’s Adelaide Rd, was a boarding house, defined in law as a private dwelling with more than six tenants, each renting separately and long-term. There are at least 800 such establishments nationwide, probably more. Some are unremarkable. Others, though, are cramped, down-at-heel, dangerous places that cater to people who might otherwise be sleeping rough.
I first encountered this world in 2012 when I went undercover in a Wellington establishment called Malcolm’s, in order to write about it for the Listener. Malcolm’s housed 14 people, many of them alcoholics, in rooms that were sometimes foul-smelling, dirty and damp. I vividly remember Bob, an elderly Scottish man, telling me that the window in his room didn’t close properly, so in wet weather the rain “just comes hosin’ thru”.
The building boasted only one working shower, with a cracked concrete floor; there was no washing machine and no hot water in the handbasins. And even then, 12 years ago, the rent was $150 a week, with no bond, no tenancy agreement, no paperwork and, I suspect, no tax paid.
Thankfully Malcolm’s was bulldozed some years back. But other boarding houses stay in business. As another tenant at Malcolm’s told me: “I’ve got nowhere else to go.” Most landlords won’t rent to elderly alcoholics and their fellow strugglers.
Boarding houses do also serve working people locked out of our country’s woefully inadequate and over-priced rental market. But these are hospital orderlies and the like, not accountants or lawyers.
These are not, in other words, middle-class people leading standard middle-class lives. And that’s why the memory of the Loafers Lodge fire has so quickly faded. Had the victims been bright young middle-class men and women, we would have had a year’s worth of media and political activity: heart-rending family photos shared, campaign groups set up, parents rightly using their cultural capital to bring about change.
Instead we have the news, announced in March with no real fanfare, that a review of 37 other boarding houses nationwide found 134 defects, some potentially life-threatening. Smoke detectors either missing their batteries or absent entirely; fire alarms not monitored; wires cut or systems switched off because of bills unpaid. Routine violations of basic standards for weather tightness and warmth, and no interest from owners in compliance.
Other inquiries will establish who is to blame for the Loafers Lodge tragedy. But we already know it could all too easily recur. After the fire, the Listener reprinted my 2012 article in full, because essentially nothing had changed. And here we are again, with essentially nothing changed.
Our politicians have agreed to toughen penalties for negligent inspectors who certify dangerous boarding houses as safe, and to review the fire safety provisions in the Building Code. But that is, at best, half the story.
The deeper problem is that boarding houses aren’t meaningfully regulated. The government doesn’t always know where they are. Responsibility for monitoring them is spread across multiple laws and multiple agencies; the checks are of the once-over-lightly kind; inspection generally is under-resourced. Tenants are scared to complain lest they be evicted. Owners face minimal penalties for non-compliance. ACT’s David Seymour wants to deregulate the country; the irony is that large swathes of it are desperately under-regulated.
Our politicians also know that, if they put the worst boarding-house operators out of business, the homelessness crisis will worsen. Bad as they sometimes are, boarding-house owners are picking up the pieces left by an inadequate welfare state and a failed housing market.
On Thursday night I walked past the grey concrete hulk of Loafers Lodge, the fire damage on its façade looking like infected flesh, its upper-storey windows gaping open as if people were still trying to escape. Down below, the boarded-up entrance spoke of a desire to forget.
But just around the corner, by the Te Whaea bus stops, a memorial plaque to the victims had been unveiled. And I can imagine a better memorial still: a change in our laws, and in the way we care for each other, of such magnitude that these tragedies can never reoccur.