Bob's three-year-old daughter developed asthma as a result of the damp houses.

It had boulders, damp houses and foreign tourists posing dangers.

Is there more truth and freedom in the Nevsky and in the big damp houses than here?

I want to be in those big damp houses where people suffer, embittered by work and need.

Dr Woods said the scheme focuses on children and the elderly, who suffer the most from cold, damp houses.

Every year, 25,000 kids go to the hospital because of health problems related to damp houses.

It is the bane of our lives to send children with these kind of conditions home to cold and damp houses.

Those children would then go back into the same cold, damp houses - just to be re-admitted to hospital, Professor Howden-Chapman said.

She said some at PYP had lived in damp houses, and were currently living with chronic conditions due to poor living conditions.

A Dunedin student who is living in one of the city's worst flats, Leander Schulz, says cold, damp houses should be illegal.

About 15 to 20 percent of New Zealand's poorest people are living in cold damp houses, he said.