Danielle Gartner, outside her father's home in Palmerston North, which she shares with 10 other people. Photo / Mark Mitchell
When the first email came in with an offer of help, Danielle Gartner burst into tears.
Then came another email and another.
Last month, the Weekend Herald published an article about the 31-year-old Palmerston North mother's struggle to find a stable home for her five children. Soon after the story was published, readers got in touch offering support.
Collectively, they've donated about $3000, along with boxes of clothes, a voucher for a family outing at a trampoline park, and a Lotto ticket.
The generosity from Weekend Herald readers was unexpected and overwhelming, Gartner says, and allowed her to pay off an overdue bill for new tyres and car repairs and two high-interest loans; and to do something she hadn't done in a long time – buy her kids the presents they wanted for Christmas.
"I was able to get pretty much everything the kids wanted."
For several years, Gartner has struggled to make ends meet while living at motels, and friends' and family's homes in Waikato before moving in with her father in Palmerston North earlier this year, where 11 share the three-bedroom house.
This year, thanks to the kindness of those strangers, she has been able to buy roller skates, a new cellphone for her son, tie-dye kits, Lego, and a remote-controlled T-Rex for her son Anthony, who is obsessed with dinosaurs.
"Anything that makes a noise and goes 'rah', he absolutely loves it," Gartner said. "We brought the big ones that actually make the noises. There is a remote-controlled dinosaur that I was able to get that he plays with every single time we go into Kmart."
Gartner is among thousands of New Zealanders stuck in a precarious living situation because of a desperate shortage of affordable housing and an oversubscribed public housing system.
They're trapped in a cycle of instability, surviving from week to week in whatever temporary accommodation they can find — motels, the spare rooms of friends and relatives, garages, cars – with low incomes, no savings and suddenly even more vulnerable now that the coronavirus has brought another period of sustained uncertainty.
KidsCan chief executive Julie Chapman says the shame and stigma parents feel of not being able to provide for their children can have a huge toll on their mental health.
"For one-parent families, life can be relentless. It's a really exhausting struggle for them to stretch their money. Pretty much every week they find themselves in deficit.
"It has a huge impact on the children because they start to notice what they don't have and they see themselves as different, which can also affect their self-worth and confidence."
An Auckland man who wanted to be known by only his first name, David, said he donated a "modest" sum to Gartner because he could sympathise with her situation.
He had grown up in a boarding house in Napier with his family, where bathroom and kitchen facilities were shared and there was little privacy, before the family eventually won a ballot for a state house.
"We went from just really awful circumstances to living in a state house. It was just sheer luck. It was lovely, it was brick and tile. It was really nice home. For us, it was paradise."
At the end of June, the housing register had increased nearly a third year-on-year to 24,474 people, of which 32 per cent were sole parents. The majority on the register were Māori - 50 per cent, with 23 per cent New Zealand European and 12 per cent Pacifika.
Professor Emeritus of Paediatrics at the University of Auckland and spokesperson for the Child Poverty Action Group Innes Asher said the housing crisis had devastating impacts on some children – affecting their schooling, mental health and wellbeing and emotional development.
"The children who grow up, having to move around a lot and living in disadvantage, their whole developmental outcome trajectory can be affected so they don't develop their full potentials, they are permanently harmed. Later catch-up can help but it doesn't necessarily make up for all those years of harm," she said.
"This is extremely grim. For people who are doing it hard, it's become more grim than you could even imagine."
The Government recently announced a $282m housing boost for five Auckland suburbs where up to 1260 public, market and affordable houses would be built – while previously it had to committed adding more than 18,000 public and transitional housing places by 2024.
Labour and National teamed up late last month on a new housing policy which they said would help address the housing crisis by allowing as many as 105,500 new homes to be built in less than a decade under the Housing Supply Bill.
Otago University associate professor Nevil Pierse said the public housing waitlist would be an under-representation of the true need as people who needed a house wouldn't apply as the list was so long – and instead move regularly between expensive but low-standard private rentals that would be disruptive to the children's education and health and wellbeing.
"It's the cycle of vulnerability and it doesn't work," he said.
Kāinga Ora housing was more stable than private rentals, he said, because it was consistently affordable.
"The average child in private rental housing stays there, in Auckland, about eight months. The average child in Kāinga Ora is about five and half years. That gives them the chance to get that support in education and things like that."
Natalie Vincent, chief executive of Ngā Tāngata Microfinance, said incomes and benefits were too low for people to afford the essentials each week, with many ending the week in deficit.
"What we often see, people who come through to us, are some of the best budgeters you've ever seen. They can stretch their small amount of income across a week a lot further than people that are earning high income. They are expert budgeters. There is just not enough money to pay for everything."
Gartner is still looking for a private rental or waiting for a public house to become available in Palmerston North - but she's grateful for kindness of a few strangers that has eased the pressure of Christmas.
She says she wanted to share her story to highlight the challenging situations "mums and kids and dads out there" face.
"Thank you," she says to the people who helped.
"I just feel like thank you is not enough."
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