Source
http://web.archive.org/web/20250429005817/https://www.theworkshop.org.nz/publications/bd6cgqfrua26nyn9jyy2u69mfdhdr6 — original source (opens in a new tab; the file is not redistributed)
The Workshop / Ozarka, Hillyer & Berentson-Shaw (2024) — Homes That Meet Our Real Needs (BRANZ LR17946)
Summary
A framing and narrative research report by The Workshop (a NZ not-for-profit of social scientists and strategic communicators), funded by BRANZ (file reference LR17946), published December 2024 under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence. It maps how people in Aotearoa New Zealand think and reason about housing “performance” — the shared mental models (mindsets) and narratives that govern public and industry support for a better-performing building system — and advises communicators on the frames to embrace and avoid. It is explicitly Phase 1 of a multi-phase programme: a mindset/narrative diagnosis intended to guide later message development and testing. The evidence base is a framing literature review, nine building-system expert interviews, four focus groups (building & construction industry, real-estate industry, home-owning public, renting public), and a media/public-discourse analysis of housing articles published 1 May–31 July 2024. Its central finding is that the term “high performance” actively works against the goal — it is inconsistently understood, reads as an expensive luxury irrelevant to ordinary whānau, and is always defined relatively — and that the biggest obstacle to support for better homes is the “houses are assets/investments” mindset, which crowds out framings of homes as places for health, wellbeing and collective/community benefit. context: thesis — directly relevant to the thesis’s behavioural-acceptance, framing/communication, and housing/community-provision threads; not NI-relevant, so feeds: [].
Key claims
- claim: "Phase 1 of a phased framing/narrative research programme funded by BRANZ on 'how people think and reason about housing performance in Aotearoa New Zealand'. Method (Appendix 1): a narrative-and-framing literature review; interviews with nine building-system experts (nominated by BRANZ, in building science, architecture/design, indoor-environmental science, and performance inspection/grading); four focus groups — building & construction industry (12 people across two groups, ~half 'on the tools'), residential real estate (5, incl. two amateur property investors), general public who own their home (6), general public who rent (6); and a media/public-discourse analysis of performance-related articles published 1 May – 31 July 2024 using reflexive thematic analysis. Theory of change: raising public AND building-sector expectations will grow demand for changes to the building system (regulatory, supply-chain, procurement, building practices)."
source_location: "About this report p.2; Appendix 1 pp.28–29"
- claim: "'High performance' is not a useful term for the public or the building/construction sector: 'It is not easily or consistently understood (even among experts), it frames performance as irrelevant for the average whānau, and it does not reflect the goals and vision that people have for their own homes.' It is always defined RELATIVELY — experts/builders define it against the Building Code (with no consensus on where the line sits) while the public define it as 'anything better than what they were used to' (meeting healthy homes standards, having double glazing and insulation, new builds, or 'having a home at all'). Defined as 'better than the Building Code' it 'would always be a boutique offering, never the norm, and homes would lose their performance status every time the Building Code was updated.'"
source_location: "Changes you can make now (Section 2) p.6; Section 3 'The term high performance is unhelpful' pp.13–14"
- claim: "'High performance' reads as luxury, extravagance and irrelevance: interviewees (experts and public) 'often compared "high performance" houses to "high performance" cars — both are seen as unobtainable and irrelevant for most people' (the Lamborghini analogy). Builders framed better-performing homes 'as something for rich people' that 'costs more than it should do', not expected in a 'standard house'. Messaging must 'shift performance out of the nice-to-have box and into the must-have box'. The report is 'not yet certain' what to replace 'high performance' with; likewise 'healthy homes' has been 'perverted' by association with the Healthy Homes Standards, which people understand to be 'very low' and not a guarantee of a healthy home, and 'warm and dry' is taken as a given by owners/builders yet seen as too subjective/non-specific by experts."
source_location: "Section 3 'High performance implies luxury…' p.14; 'We're not certain what to replace…' p.14; 'Frames that need further research' p.27"
- claim: "The single biggest barrier is the 'houses are assets or investments' mindset — 'seeing houses as assets was one of the biggest mindsets getting in the way of support for performance improvements.' This consumerist narrative: overpowers the helpful 'homes are essential for a good life' narrative (a UK-research finding); is associated with a 'fear of overcapitalising' one's home (upgrades only seen worthwhile for a 'forever home'); 'reduces our housing needs to just accessing housing' (quality immaterial as long as 'we're putting more roofs over more heads'); and 'limits solutions to our housing problems to just one — increasing supply', undermining systems-level solutions that require building to higher performance and risking 'locking in' poor performance for generations of people and the environment."
source_location: "Section 2 'Talk about the benefits to people other than owners' p.7; Section 3 'Houses are assets or investments' pp.15–17"
- claim: "Four further unhelpful mindsets/narratives: (1) 'My house, my way' — houses seen as existing only for their owners, so performance regulation is framed as infringing owners' freedom and pushing the 'Kiwi dream of homeownership further away' (e.g. Minister Chris Penk quoted: 'The cost of building a house has increased by 40% since 2019…'); (2) housing 'falsely positioned as a consumer choice' — implying dissatisfied occupants can simply move, and that 'choosing poor performance is equally valid'; (3) 'That's just how it is and we can't change it' — normalising poor performance, especially in rentals, as an inevitable 'rite of passage' or 'waiting room' for homeownership; (4) 'New houses are good houses' — equating good performance with new builds, obscuring that existing houses also need attention and that current standards 'do not inevitably deliver warm, dry, healthy homes.' A separate 'Be afraid. Be very afraid' pattern — fear-based, data-heavy appeals — can backfire into fatalism ('the problem is so big that we couldn't possibly solve it')."
source_location: "Section 3 pp.17–21"
- claim: "On money framing: advocates commonly reframe performance around whole-of-life OPERATIONAL costs, but this 'can inadvertently reinforce the asset mindset' and is 'only relevant to a minority' — given the average tenure of home ownership in NZ is 'five and a half years', the long-run-cost reframe 'is not applicable to most people', and it ignores the split incentive between those who make build decisions and pay upfront costs (builders/developers/investors, motivated by 'margin') and those who pay operational costs (the people living in the homes). Advice: frame money 'as the tool that is needed to achieve the outcomes you want, not as an outcome itself' — shift from 'Better-performing homes will save the health system $X billion' to 'Better-performing homes will reduce the demand on our health system so that more care will be available to the people who need it' — and 'shine a light on systems' rather than telling character-driven or purely data-driven stories that can trigger blame ('just move if you don't like your house') or fatalism."
source_location: "Section 2 'Avoid reframing around operational costs' p.8; 'Show how money is a means to a greater end' / 'Shine a light on systems' pp.9–10; 'Be afraid…' pp.20–21"
- claim: "A frames-to-EMBRACE-vs-AVOID table advises: embrace 'homes' (avoid 'housing stock'/'property'); 'housing system' (avoid 'housing market'); experiential descriptions of what people will experience — 'A home you can rely on', 'A foundation for a good life' — instead of 'high performance homes'/'performance'; people-first labels ('people who own their home', 'whānau who rent their home') instead of 'owner-occupiers/homeowners', 'tenants/renters', 'landlords'; 'amateur landlords'/'people who've invested in property' instead of 'mum and dad landlords'; and control metaphors ('design/redesign', 'build/rebuild', 'programme/reprogramme') instead of force-of-nature economy metaphors ('surging house prices', 'buffeted by economic headwinds'). Rationale: 'housing stock'/'property'/'market' connote the home as a tradeable asset/commodity, cost-only money messages feel 'disingenuous', reducing people to labels reinforces 'us versus them' thinking, and force-of-nature metaphors 'frame the economy as out of our control'."
source_location: "Section 2 'Frames to embrace or avoid' pp.11–12"
- claim: "On the building system and public trust: experts report the industry treats the Building Code 'as a "target" standard to achieve — a maximum rather than the minimum it is intended to be'; the NZ building industry is 'non-professionalised relative to other countries and characterised by a large skills deficit'; yet builders 'clearly want to do a good job' and rely on the Code ('You literally cannot build a bad house [by following the Building Code]'), with 'a strong desire … for regulatory certainty', so 'regulatory change will ultimately be necessary … to implement higher performance standards in housing.' The general public holds 'high trust in the building system, the Building Code, and particularly builders themselves' and therefore believes 'their needs are already met and taken care of' — so a strategy of educating the public to 'use their consumer power to ask for a better building product would not lead to a better building system.' The recommended strategy is instead to 'grow support for a stronger building system' so that choosing better performance 'becomes the easiest, most affordable, and best option' and, 'over time … the default option', and to 'grow an understanding of homes as community infrastructure for people in the present and in the future' (potentially unlocking support for public funding such as low-cost loans)."
source_location: "Section 3 'The Building Code is an important structure…' / 'Builders want to do a good job' pp.22–23; 'The public is already where you need them to be' / 'Empower people to ask for the building system they need' pp.23–24; Recommendations p.5"Key thesis insights
- Framing determines whether people demand a better solution — a transferable behavioural lesson. The report’s central finding is that labelling a solution “high performance” makes people read it as an expensive luxury — a “nice-to-have for the wealthy few” rather than a “must-have for everyone”. Self-sufficiency and off-grid technology carry exactly the same “boutique / expensive / irrelevant to ordinary people” framing risk, and the report’s remedy — describe what the solution does for people in tangible, experiential terms and move it from nice-to-have to must-have — is a portable communication principle for the thesis’s behavioural-acceptance argument. OT_137
- The “asset mindset” is concrete NZ evidence for the commodification/sufficiency argument. The report names the “houses are assets/investments” narrative as the single biggest obstacle to support for better homes, and shows it crowds out wellbeing and collective-benefit framings and narrows the solution space to “increase supply”. That is directly usable NZ evidence for the thesis’s circular-economy / degrowth / sufficiency thread that market and commodity framing obstructs need-based provision — and it dovetails with the community-housing barrier literature already in the wiki (OT_054, OT_002). OT_137
- “Homes as community infrastructure” and collective-benefit framing support the community-resilience argument. The report’s recommended reframe — homes as “community infrastructure for people in the present and in the future”, with explicitly collective benefits (a power grid people can trust, a health system not overloaded by preventable housing-caused illness, climate/energy efficiency) — is precisely the private-asset → shared-infrastructure shift that a self-sufficient-community thesis argues for, and it supplies citable NZ framing language for that move. OT_137
- “Shine a light on systems” is a communication principle for both the thesis and the NI tool. The advice to explain how social, cultural and economic systems shape outcomes — and to avoid individual-blame, consumer-choice (“my house, my way”) and fear-based framings that backfire into blame or fatalism — is a transferable rule for how the thesis, and any public-facing Neobiome Intelligence output, should present community self-sufficiency without triggering resistance or apocalypse fatigue. OT_137
- The building-system capacity findings ground the building/habitat and regulation strands. The qualitative findings that the industry treats the Building Code as a ceiling rather than a floor, that the sector is “non-professionalised” with a “large skills deficit”, and that builders both want and rely on regulatory certainty, are concrete NZ system-capacity evidence for why better building/habitat outcomes are hard to achieve — complementing the regulatory/consenting and Healthy-Homes material elsewhere in the corpus. OT_137
- A method exemplar for behaviour/communication research. A rigorous, NZ-grounded framing/narrative study (framing science plus reflexive thematic analysis over expert interviews, focus groups and media analysis) that the thesis can cite as a methodological model, and that can inform how the project’s own survey and interview findings on community-technology acceptance are framed and reported. OT_137
Research targets
Documents to retrieve
- RT_381 — Miller, T. L., Gordon, S. & Stanley, K. (2022) Talking About Homes: The Foundation for a Decent Life (FrameWorks Institute, UK). The foundational overseas framing study repeatedly cited here (footnotes 1, 9, 10, 16) as the origin of the tested “a foundation for a good life” replacement frame and the UK finding that the asset mindset overpowers helpful “homes are essential for a good life” narratives. Retrieving it would put the tested frame and its evidence at origin rather than via this report. frameworksinstitute.org/publication/talking-about-homes-brief/ → thesis (behavioural/framing).
Research gaps
- RT_382 — The follow-on message-development-and-testing report from The Workshop / BRANZ. This report is explicitly Phase 1 (mindset/narrative diagnosis); it repeatedly defers the tested replacement frames, metaphors and value messages to a subsequent testing phase (“Next steps”, pp.25–27, and the caveat on p.6 that its own interim term “better-performing homes” is untested). Flag to retrieve that later output when published, since it will carry the validated frames this report only proposes. → thesis (behavioural/framing).
Notes
The Workshop, Homes that meet our real needs: How people think and reason about housing performance in Aotearoa New Zealand (December 2024). Authors Ellen Ozarka, Minette Hillyer and Jess Berentson-Shaw; funded by BRANZ (the file/report reference is LR17946; the report itself carries only The Workshop’s imprint and a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence). Read verbatim via pdftotext -layout (34 pp). context: thesis → feeds: []: the value is qualitative behavioural/communication insight, not NI energy/water/technology/cost data.
⚠ Most eye-catching numbers in this report are EXEMPLARS OF MEDIA/ADVOCATE FRAMING, not the report’s own findings. In the media-analysis and mindset sections the report quotes and critiques figures such as “a return on investment of 4 for every 1 spent” on insulation, “New Zealand could save around $1 billion by improving the quality of our housing stock”, “excess winter mortality of over 1,600 deaths”, “over 30,000 Kiwi kids admitted to hospital each winter”, and Minister Chris Penk’s “the cost of building a house has increased by 40% since 2019” — these are illustrations of how others frame housing, deliberately held at arm’s length, and must not be cited as this report’s validated data. The report’s own factual content is qualitative (mindsets, frames, recommendations) plus the methodological facts (nine experts; focus groups of 12 / 5 / 6 / 6; media window 1 May – 31 July 2024) and the “five and a half years” average NZ ownership tenure it cites (to Stuff / Taunton 2024). OT_137
data_quality: high — an authoritative primary report, read in full and captured verbatim. It is not set to verified because the substance is qualitative framing findings rather than independently-corroborated figures (model_design §2 reserves verified for corroborated quantitative claims); the few hard numbers are the media-quote exemplars flagged above, not the report’s data. (Sibling BRANZ thesis-context reports in-corpus — OT_054, OT_058 — sit at verified/high.)
Candidate further source (not raised as an RT): Boulton et al. (2022), “Māori Perceptions of ‘Home’: Māori Housing Needs, Wellbeing and Policy” (Kōtuitui 17(1):44–55, doi:10.1080/1177083X.2021.1920984), cited here on cultural/collective housing needs — a candidate for the thesis’s maori/housing thread if that strand is developed.
Connections
Links to