Kay Saville-Smith

• PhD (Lancs)
• Research Director at Centre for Research Evaluation and Social Assessment (CRESA)

Aim: To explore associations between tenure and the health service use of older New Zealanders. Methods: Analysis of pooled data for adults aged 55+ from three New Zealand Health Surveys (2013/14, 2014/15, 2015/16) comparing owner-occupiers, private renters and public renters. Results: Public renters, and in some age groups private renters, re...

This report presents the findings of the monitoring project commissioned by the Commission for Financial Capability (CFFC) about the interface between retirement villages (RVs) and aged residential care through the provision of occupation right agreements (ORAs). This monitoring project has been prompted by a significant shift in the focus of RVs a...

Objective: To explore relationships between the housing tenure of older New Zealanders and their health‐related behaviours, and physical and mental health. Methods: Pooled data were analysed for 15,626 older adults (aged 55+) from three consecutive, annual, nationally representative New Zealand Health Surveys to compare owner‐occupiers, private ren...

Our ageing populations make it critical that older people continue to live and participate in their communities. ‘Ageing in place’, rather than in residential care, is desired by older people themselves and promoted as policy in many countries. Its success, both as policy and practice, depends on housing. House performance, resilience, functionalit...

This publication brings together findings from four research reports concerned with how we can go beyond the current New Zealand Building Code (NZBC) to construct better performing dwellings. The Building Act 2004 and NZBC are intended to provide a flexible framework focused on what buildings need to do, rather than how they are to be designed and...

This paper employs mixed methods combining in-depth, semi-structured interviews with quantitative data of paired house sales, administrative data and institutional analysis to investigate the impacts of leaky building syndrome and its potential stigmatising effects on older homeowners in New Zealand. Older homeowners are particularly vulnerable to...

Background Despite the importance of adequate, un-crowded housing as a prerequisite for good health, few large cohort studies have explored the health effects of housing conditions. The Social Housing Outcomes Worth (SHOW) Study was established to assess the relationship between housing conditions and health, particularly between household crowding...

New Zealand is susceptible to a wide range of natural hazard events. The response of dwellings to these adverse events is critical to both the resilience of whole communities and the individuals within them, with older people being particularly vulnerable when homes are damaged or destroyed. Older people are defined as those 65 years and older. In...

The BEES research has provided some key data resources for use in understanding energy and water use in non-residential buildings. As part of that work, it has for the first time provided data on the size and distribution of these buildings, identified construction and site placement. A common thread to the BEES results are the issues that have bee...

This paper describes the development and trialling of three home repairs and maintenance assessment and solutions tools. The tools are tailored for use by older householders, social services or providers of housing for older people. The tools were based on and responded to four years of research on the repair and maintenance investments and practic...

How do you know your house is sustainable if you have no information on what makes a house unsustainable? The Household Energy End-use Project (HEEP) (completed in 2007), provides baseline information on key measures of sustainability – the use of energy and the temperatures in New Zealand‟s residential buildings. This information is being built on...

The Household Energy End-use Study (HEEP) quantified how, where, when, and why energy was used in New Zealand houses based on the monitoring of energy and end-uses in a national sample of 400 houses. Based on these data, space heating was found to average 34% of total household energy use. Three issues are highlighted in relation to space heating:...

The artificial lighting used in the New Zealand residential sector is investigated, and the use of energy efficient lighting is assessed as an indicator of housing sustainability. A randomised survey of 150 homes in New Zealand identified that there are an average of 30 light bulbs installed per home, of which 18 are incandescent bulbs, 6 are compa...

Poorly performing homes and the burden of maintenance and repairs have been identified as major factors in prompting older people to disengage from their communities and shift into higher dependency residential environments. The Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (FRST) funded 5-year research programme Ageing in Place: Empowering Older...

Neighbourhoods are the scale of most people's daily life activities and form an important connection between individual households, businesses and communities to the wider city system. With over 80 per cent of the total population in New Zealand living in urban areas and almost half the population living in the nation's eight largest cities, urban...

To determine whether insulating existing houses increases indoor temperatures and improves occupants' health and wellbeing. Community based, cluster, single blinded randomised study. Seven low income communities in New Zealand. 1350 households containing 4407 participants. Installation of a standard retrofit insulation package. Indoor temperature a...

This paper describes the purpose and methods of a single-blinded, clustered and randomised trial of the health impacts of insulating existing houses. The key research question was whether this intervention increased the indoor temperature and lowered the relative humidity, energy consumption and mould growth in the houses, as well as improved the h...

Unlabelled: A national random telephone survey was undertaken to determine the prevalence of reported mold in New Zealand houses and the risk factors for it. A total of 613 households provided responses. Mold in one or more rooms was reported by 35.1% of respondents in the sample. House design and construction factors that were independently assoc...

Introduction The dominant rhetoric in public policy in the new millennium has been around the need to work cross-sectorally, the need to be outcome-oriented, and the need to establish and persist with programmes and interventions that are evidence-based. Nowhere is the rhetoric less in evidence than in the intersect between energy policy and social...

Over the last four years Beacon Pathway Ltd (Beacon) has been developing a Neighbourhood Sustainability Framework through which the sustainability of neighbourhoods can be assessed. In the development phase prototypes of the framework and tools have been tested. This has involved working with developers and local authorities. In doing so, opportuni...

Summary New Zealand's housing stock is well known for being cold, damp, difficult to heat, and greedy of resources. This comes at a significant cost to our community with many people living in homes that are not only unhealthy but also costly to run. Improvements to minimum building standards have not produced homes which are healthy and efficient....

This paper presents a Neighbourhood Sustainability Framework (NSF), developed by Beacon Pathways Ltd, to measure the sustainability of neighbourhood built form. Beacon has a vision for "Every new subdivision and any redeveloped subdivision or neighbourhood from 2008 onwards to be developed with reference to a nationally recognized sustainability fr...

Housing is one of the key determinants of health, but it has been a relatively neglected area for interventions targeting health. There has been very little research that has shown housing interventions are effective in improving health as housing interventions are complex and resource intensive.

Building sustainable homes and creating sustainable settlements through city planning, compact city patterns and urban consolidation have attracted considerable focus in recent years. Too often, however, the neighbourhood has been neglected. Yet the neighbourhood connects our homes with the city system. The location of neighbourhoods, the way in wh...

The term 'world class cities' implies urban areas that offer a high quality of life that is, presumably, sustainable. Yet many 'world class' cities host neighbourhoods that are far from that. This paper explores the concept of neighbourhood sustainability in the context of world class cities. It argues that world class cities need to be built on wo...

This paper describes the development of a Neighbourhood Sustainability Framework and its supporting assessment tools. The Neighbourhood Sustainability Framework is designed to assist local authorities, planners, developers and communities to improve the sustainability of the residential built environment in the context of both planning and developi...

As part of developing approaches to increase the sustainability of New Zealand homes, Beacon has developed a range of tools and support information to assist homeowners in making informed choices around renovating their home to improve its performance. The take-up and efficacy of those tools is being tested in 530 homes across New Zealand. This pap...

This paper considers the role of house condition, comfort and safety in assisting older people to stay in their own homes and connected to their communities. It reports on a five year research programme exploring the repair and maintenance investments and practices of older people. This paper discusses findings from the 2008 national survey of Olde...

People have traditionally moved from place to place in search of new employment opportunities. This has been a pathway for increased earnings, educational opportunities and standards of living. Some of New Zealand's critical infrastructural developments, industries and services have depended on a mobile labour force. However, transient families and...

In New Zealand, while territorial authorities throughout the country attempt to optimise the social and economic as well as environmental performance of New Zealand's cities and towns, they are confronting contradictory views around the merits or otherwise of the intensification of urban settlements and the trend to mixed use neighbourhoods. Beacon...