I’m currently deep in the weeds writing my latest book, Deep Energy Retrofit Handbook for New Zealand, and I keep finding myself re-reading a brilliant document released in April 2024: the Healthy-Homes-Narrative-Comms-Toolkit_F_Apr2024.pdf. This toolkit provides guidance on how we communicate about Passive House and EnerPHit projects by recommending we frame them simply as “decent” housing.
When we talk to the public, it is critical we reach the “persuadables” rather than the noisy opposition. As building science professionals, we love getting sidetracked by form factor, thermal bridges, and ACHn50. But the public doesn’t care about the recipe. We need to “sell the cake, not the ingredients”. High-performance metrics and MVHR units are just the flour and eggs; what we are actually delivering is a decent home.
The toolkit explicitly defines a decent home as warm, dry, accessible, and offering security of tenure. Furthermore, decent homes allow people to participate in our communities, get to work, and keep kids healthy and in school. A Passive House delivers the first two and that remains our focus.
This change in language is not going to be an easy change for me as I’ve spent decades talking about high-performance, and exemplar, and best-practice homes and buildings. It’s a bit daunting to change how we instinctively talk, but we must stop myth-busting. Endlessly explaining why a bad idea is wrong just spreads the bad information further and reinforces unhelpful thinking. Instead, we need to shift the frame entirely. We must stop talking about housing as just an asset class and start framing healthy housing as the infrastructure for care, connection, and contribution.
We have the knowledge and capabilities to ensure every New Zealander can feel at home in their home. The next time you talk about an EnerPHit retrofit or new build, skip the technical jargon. Tell them you’re building a decent home.
https://www.wrhhg.org.nz/better-explanations-action-research/
How to Talk About Healthy Homes: A Narrative Communications Toolkit April 2024
This is an update to work briefed to the Passive House community in 2019! https://sustainableengineering.co.nz/a-new-conversation-about-housing-in-new-zealand/