In a New Zealand Tenancy Tribunal hearing, a man whose room had become a landscape of accumulated takeaway containers and fizzy drink bottles was ordered to clean his living space — not merely as a legal formality, but as a last threshold between shelter and its loss. The adjudicator, recognising that the breach carried both practical hazard and human complexity, paired her order with a quiet encouragement: that help, offered without judgment, exists for those who cannot find their way through alone. It is a small case in the machinery of tenancy law, yet it holds the larger question of how sy