Do our chances to cross the threshold of the housing we provide offer some answers for getting ventilation right?
Ventilation, good or bad, is in every home.
It impacts the health and well-being of tenants, the condition of the homes you rent and the cost of renting in maintenance and repair, missed rent, your time and legal costs.
Notwithstanding the cost to the very community you're trying to support, in ill health, missed school, work days and more.
The air we breathe is as important as the water we drink and the food we consume.
Everything everywhere, all at once
The ubiquitous nature of ventilation, if done well, offers us an opportunity to deliver meaningful outcomes in such a broad cross-section of our housing it can’t or shouldn’t be ignored. It’s a central pillar in the outcomes of so much of what we want to achieve with good housing.
Yet this omnipresent nature of ventilation is part of what makes it a challenge to diagnose and unpack. I mean, where do you even start, right? House type, Age, Tenancy, Stock Condition Survey?
Data through environmental monitoring will eventually provide some of those answers, but still only covers a tiny fraction of the stock and can be more or less successful depending on the systems we use and how it’s deployed, but more on that later.
Touch Points
I find it helpful to think at an organisational level about opportunities to cross the threshold/ access a property.
What structures and systems have access to properties, and when and how does that open opportunities to assess, understand or intervene?
You may have some or all of these or call them something else, but typically they can be.
Damp and Mold Surveys
Damp and Mold Repair
Retrofit Surveys
Retrofit Work
Maintenance and repair work
Replacement schemes (Kitchen, Bathroom, windows, boiler etc)
Void Work
New property handover
Housing Officer Visits
Stock Condition Surveys
And more
These processes or programmes offer an opportunity to understand, assess and sometimes intervene in ventilation. But they also tell a story about how ventilation is understood within the systems and silos of a housing organisation.
Each of them may have elements of internal, DLO, and external stakeholders. Come under different management structures and reporting. Often they will even have elements of records and data that are shared or not.
One of the advantages of taking a lens to something like ventilation is that it is so ubiquitous that it offers a chance to laser focus on one system and see how an organisation handles a subject matter across all of its systems.
In many cases, it also offers quick wins with often minor tweaks and adjustments in alignment that more than pay for the effort of taking the time to do the exercise.
Please, not the road again
You know “that” road, don't you?
The one outside your home or on the way to work. You can't quite decide if it's ineptitude or deliberate. Here they are again, digging it up two weeks after whoever it was that had dug it up the last time.
You have no idea what went in before, and no idea what's going in now, but something cant be right.
Part of the work of undertaking a proper diagnosis of the challenge of ventilation is to understand what is working and what isn't; it's about understanding the stakeholders, policies and systems in play and how they align or not.
This focus on ventilation offers a way of scrutinising the structure behind outcomes and starts the process of thinking about and developing broad policies that can then deal with the nature of the challenge.
Without this process, it's hard, if not impossible, to develop policies that stop duplication, miss communication and alignment between the structures of an organisation which means we see void work undertaken. Ventilation is not considered as part of that work or worse, someone back in after that work is completed fixing something that could have been fixed then, as a simple example.
Its later than you think
Whether we like it or not, either under our control or through third parties outside of our control, the conditions of the spaces we manage are being peeled open like an onion.
The Internet of Things (IoT) and the rapidly changing cost of environmental sensors are bursting open the performance of our housing stock. Sometimes it's visible in the programmes you deploy often times it's a slow creep with other technology. But it's coming and right quick.
Within the next few years, we all will be judged by the ongoing performance of the spaces we manage and own. And under that spotlight, based on where we are today, there is much work to do. And ventilation, I'm afraid to tell you, is right up there.
Now is the time to start thinking about how you understand the spaces you manage and develop policies that deal with the challenge and actions that have an impact on the outcomes that we want.
Opportunity
Opportunities for improvement with ventilation are everywhere, it has to be mapped out and coordinated. Sometimes there are very easy wins, other times, there are systemic changes in how we deal with things, and sometimes a need for investment.
But the impacts of getting this right will pay dividends for years to come and in some cases pay very quickly.
If you would like to understand how I am already working with housing organisations on improving outcomes and developing strategies that work, please don't hesitate to reach out through the website or DM me.