Kāinga Ora housing in Rotorua. Photo / Andrew Warner
Kāinga Ora housing in Rotorua. Photo / Andrew Warner
Opinion by Dr Karamia Müller
THREE KEY FACTS
In 2019, Kāinga Ora was formed by the merger of Housing New Zealand with subsidiary HLC and the KiwiBuild Unit.
Kāinga Ora is a Crown entity, with assets of $45 billion and more than $2.5b of expenditure each year.
Kāinga Ora owns more than 70,000 homes and is the country’s biggest landlord, providing accommodation to people often in great need.
Dr Karamia Müller is co-director of Māpihi – the Māori and Pacific Housing Research Centre – at the University of Auckland and is a Pacific academic specialising in indigenous space concepts. She is interested in Māori and Pacific values in the built realm.
OPINION
Housing continues to be a pressing issue for the country.
Across the housing sector, changing approaches to emergency housing, addressing land supply and affordable housing have been trialled and discussed.
A conversation that doesn’t occur as often is about the needs and aspirations for Māori and Pacific housing.
There are several facets, as housing and health intersect for these communities, which are as just important for other groups as for Māori and Pacific people.
Too often, we hear and see Pacific families bear the brunt of poor housing through conditions like rheumatic fever, which thrives in the cold, damp conditions of New Zealand’s older, poorly insulated housing stock.
The issue was widely highlighted by epidemiologist Jason Gurney (Ngāpuhi) in his recent book, and the work and research of He Kāinga Oranga and professor Philippa Howden-Chapman.
For Pacific people, the issue of urban displacement is a recurring theme.
Inner-city homes are in vogue. Photo / Ted Baghurst
While removing urban/rural boundaries on the face of it may seem like a productivity-based solution, for Pacific peoples the memory of “gentrification” in places like Grey Lynn and Ponsonby in the 1970s, and more recently, in Glen Innes, which saw families displaced to city fringes in West and South Auckland, remains.
With more housing developments at the edge of already sprawling urban centres, will we see history repeat itself and see families forced out further and commuting for longer.
The “Going for Housing Growth” policies champion the freeing up of land for development at urban fringes, enabling intensification through liberalisation and deregulation, and promoting mixed-use developments.
While it may indeed enable housing supply, it is important to ask, at what long-term costs?
These developments will need strong infrastructure for the next 50 years, and it is important for all that everyone benefits fairly. The cost of favouring fancy suburbs over other areas will be a price paid by future generations of New Zealanders.
Building new houses that are warm, dry and secure is urgent and necessary; houses that are close to work opportunities, schools and community hubs. It is critical that Māori and Pacific children live in such homes.
At Māpihi, the Māori and Pacific Housing Research Centre, a transdisciplinary research centre at the University of Auckland, we seek to investigate better ways for Māori and Pacific whānau to live in healthy, sustainable and affordable homes.
What that looks like is threefold: self-determined Māori and Pacific housing industries, housing intensification and health connections for Māori and Pacific people, and successful papakāinga and Pacific community housing.
For the latter, we can look to community housing providers (CHPs) like Penina Health Trust, led by CEO Tupuola Roine Lealaiauloto.
Penina Health Trust has built new solar-powered homes for Pacific families. And they’ve recognised the vital need to provide multigenerational homes as a key to Pacific family wellbeing.
Similarly, Māori housing needs often can be more communal and family orientated.
Dr Karamia Müller.
Te Puni Kōkiri supports the development of papakāinga on whenua Māori. This is on a small-scale of under 10 homes at a time.
Wouldn’t it be great to see some on a larger scale?
