The house is owned by Blackdog Properties, which also owns the Queens Dr, Dunedin flat where nine tenants received a confidential settlement after raising issues of toxic mould and leaking wastewater.
OPINION: Sometime within the next 18 months, my teenaged son will most probably be packing up the car he has not yet saved enough money to buy, and driving to Dunedin to begin one of the big adventures of nascent adulthood in New Zealand.
If accepted, he will be an undergraduate at Otago University.
Living in Dunners as a student is a lark, by all accounts. All the best (worst) stories of student days come from there. One very famous dude I grilled for the gory details this week (his mates at least will recognise him from the following) told me he:
*Lived in a six-man flat above a pub, and would be handed a pint by the bartender as he climbed the stairs for bed.
*Was once, while very drunk, pronounced dead in his bed (by a med student);
*Put down a hangi in the flat's backyard and inadvertently boiled the underground pipes.
He also told me a wonderful yarn about the flat's two toilet rooms, which faced each other through a common wall. Somehow a hole appeared (provenance unproven) in the wall, exactly at head height. Result being, one person would sit down and begin, only to inevitably find a flatmate staring straight at him through the hole. Awkward.
Melanie Coslett, a Christchurch-based shareholder and director of Blackdog Properties, which owns the Leith St and Queens Dr properties.
At the time this conversation was taking place, the temperature in parts of the South Island had dropped to -6 degrees. Mr Famous told me in that flat, he would wake up on cold mornings, and there would be frost covering his duvet, in the places it wasn't wet from condensation.
It's not the drinking, or the 'O' Week carry-on, the parties, overcrowded gigs, drugs, casual sex or any of the other imagined horrors from a parental perspective, that I worry about when I think of my youngest child going to Uni in Dunedin.
The thing I worry about, is what kind of dripping, rotting, black-mould-infested abomination of a "flat" will he and his mates be paying the thick end of a grand a week for?
A couple of weeks back, eight students who'd rented one of those dives won an undisclosed settlement from the owners of the building, after it was found to be shot through with toxic black mould.
This week, whaddayaknow! Another property owned by the same bloodsuckers – um, I mean, landlords – turned up in the news. There were claims of rats, possums, leaks in the bedrooms, and raw sewage spewing from broken pipes. The property manager defended the $1288 a week being charged for this dump, by saying it was a "coveted" 8-bedroom property. Which you and I can interpret as; because a bunch of young people wish to live together in a largish group, go ahead and feel free to rip them off, because that's the free market is working for you!
When media sought comment from the Directors of Blackdog Properties, which owns both of these disgusting ****holes, Melanie Coslett told reporters she couldn't comment because "it would not be appropriate."
You know what really would not be appropriate? Blackdog Properties being permitted to rent any more of their dives to students, or indeed to anyone.
Dunedin landlord Cliff Seque said, "You don't see mould in empty houses".
For years now, in dozens of interviews, I've been fed all sorts of nonsense by spin doctors for landlords who seem defensive, rather than contrite, that their "businesses" are making people sick.
Their favourite tactic is to flip the blame back onto tenants – if only they opened the windows and used a bit of "elbow grease" on the mould, the problem would disappear!
This line has so often been trotted out over the past ten years; it's become a trope on its very last legs. But it was given a spectacular revival this week, by Otago Property Investors' Association president Cliff Seque.
Cliff said, "generally, as long as a flat was well maintained, mould was due to the lifestyle of the tenants, including such things as drying clothes inside, not opening curtains and not airing out their homes."
So far, so predictable. But then, in one of the most gobsmacking public utterances of the year, he finished thus:
"You don't see mould in empty houses."
Empty houses – no mould! What a piece of genius. If it weren't for people like Cliff, skipping down the truth highway flinging "facts" hither and thither like a wee tulle-skirted flower girl at a wedding, where would we be?
It would be lovely if people didn't live in houses, wouldn't it, Cliff? Especially rental houses. Think about it for a golden moment. No pesky human-forms doing things like eating, sleeping, cooking, enjoying the company of their pets, or any of the other potentially damaging/and or annoying practices that "business owners" in the property sector must hate so!
Cliff obviously was thinking about exactly that when he formulated his argument. I can see him now, at the pub, drowning his sorrows in a lonely beer, only able to wish he'd said that on social media instead of in an official utterance to the actual media. A Tweet can at least be deleted. The thunk, thunk you hear is Cliff slowly banging his forehead on the polished Rimu bar top.
Because I like these columns to be informative, rather than just unhinged rants, I went to an actual expert for advice.
Dr Nelson Lebo explained that back in the day, most homes in Dunedin had open fires to warm them and constant airflow to keep the air dry.
Dr Nelson Lebo is the Eco Design Manager for Palmerston North City Council, and a font of genuinely helpful advice on stay warm in winter.
Nelson explained that back in the day, most homes in Dunedin had open fires to warm them and constant airflow to keep the air dry. Once the coal ranges and open fires were removed, it changed the moisture balance in these homes dramatically.
I also asked Nelson (for Cliff's sake) to confirm that: "Houses are meant to be lived in by human beings, and so an objective assessment of a home's moisture levels must include people and their activities such as cooking and showering. We can't simply blame tenants for "not opening the windows enough."
Nelson says that yes, tenants can make a difference – don't use an LPG heater, he says they should be banned – and get a condensing dryer if you can. But those are not the factors that led to toxic Stachybotrys mould spreading through a house that was not watertight. And it's common; the student association says up to 75% of students at Otago report living in mouldy accommodation.
Isn't it ironic that we lost our bikkies for years over the potential of methamphetamine contamination to harm our health, but appear to accept its okay to offer cold, mouldy, and dangerous – yes, dangerous – housing?