Kāinga Ora has delivered 174 homes in Hawke's Bay since July 2021.
OPINION:
Take a walk around Hastings' many suburbs - including Mayfair, Raureka and Mahora - and you'll see whole streets of new affordable houses being built, so families can move into warm, dry homes.
As the building work continues, residential areas, left derelict with old rundown uninhabitable state houses, are coming back to life and neighbourhoods are being transformed into communities once again.
The 317 new houses are a combination of public and transitional homes and papakāinga.
Since July 2019, Kāinga Ora and other community housing providers have delivered 215 new homes, including replacing 70 old houses throughout Hastings.
This has seen our Government and agencies working very closely together with the council, community providers, iwi, developers and many local business to get more homes built.
We've funded more than $36 million for Hastings District Council for civil and water infrastructure to get the pipes in the ground and new roads built.
There has also been new transitional housing built to support people out of hotels and affordable homes for first-home buyers.
The improvement in new builds is also lifting the quality of whole streets and the new subdivisions also include landscaping, parking and modern street lighting.
All this work is continuing to create a pipeline of work, adding greater confidence to the local economy and job security and new employment opportunities.
Infrastructure funding is key for unlocking more new housing across Tukituki.
The country's housing crisis has been decades in the making, and we know one of the main barriers to the construction of more homes is a lack of basic infrastructure.
As part of this, we've just announced $18.5m through the Infrastructure Acceleration Fund for Hastings, enabling around 4000 new homes across multiple developments.
This investment is designed to speed up the pace and scale of house building, like kick-starting more council and iwi affordable housing projects including 150 homes in Flaxmere.
We're also taking steps to modernise the country's building consent system, established over 30 years ago.
A better building consent system will support our work to transform the housing market, unlock productivity growth, stimulate urban development where it is needed, and make homes more affordable for all.
There's still more work to do, but every New Zealander deserves a healthy, affordable place to call home – and we're making good progress.
