Webinar Invitation: Buildings as Infrastructure of Care: Mould, Health and Housing Tenure in Australia

In the middle of an Australian winter, many of us are cold in our homes. For households living with damp, mould and poorly maintained buildings, this is more than discomfort: it is a question of health, responsibility and who has the power to get housing problems fixed. Housing and health research often treats tenure as an explanation for unequal health outcomes: renters tend to be less healthy than homeowners, and this is commonly understood as a tenure effect. This talk argues that tenure is upstream: it determines who controls building care, a concept we use to capture the accumulated practice of maintaining, repairing, ventilating, and responding to material need. Drawing on the Australian Housing Conditions Datasets, latent class analysis identifies three dwelling archetypes along a care gradient: well maintained (16% mould), intermediate deficit (44% mould), and severe deficit (83% mould). Severe-deficit dwellings are found across both rental and owner-occupied housing. Analysis of HILDA panel data (374,563 person-waves) show the tenure-health gap is real, but tenure transitions alone do not predict within-person health change. This suggests that the condition of the home – and people’s capacity to have problems addressed – may be more important than tenure alone. Using this panel, we also argue that standards that do not shift building care practices will not shift outcomes. Building care is, therefore, measurable, predictive, and can constitute a policy target.