Chief Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt: Communities have responsibilities for state housing

Kāinga Ora is working with developers to build new state homes to house the 24,717 people on the housing waitlist. Photo / RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly

Opinion

OPINION

We’re catching a glimpse of the thousands of homes needed to stave off the housing crisis. Kāinga Ora is working with developers to build new state homes to house the 24,717 people on the housing waitlist. And yet, up and down the country, they are being met with fierce opposition from would-be neighbours.

The would-be neighbours have turned out, sometimes in their hundreds, in community halls and have told Kāinga Ora, ‘We just don’t want you here’.

Some have yelled abuse at Kāinga Ora staff and petitioned to get home building stopped.

Others tar all Kāinga Ora residents with the anti-social behaviour of a few. Such stereotyping is desperately unfair.

Of course, communities have legitimate questions and concerns, and Kāinga Ora must meaningfully engage with them.

New developments must include suitable infrastructure – schools, clinics, roads, green spaces, playgrounds, and wrap-around support for those who need it, both newcomers and long-term residents.

But communities have a responsibility to welcome newcomers, whatever their backgrounds.

Human rights are sometimes misunderstood as only being about entitlements, but they, and Te Tiriti o Waitangi, are also about responsibilities and relationships.

Kāinga Ora. Photo / RNZ / Nate McKinnon

I often hear inspiring stories about our rich multiculturalism in Aotearoa. But I also hear communities talking past each other, for example, when they campaign against homes for those on the housing waitlist and portray their prospective neighbours as the enemy.

In 1990, there were 203 state houses for every 10,000 people in Aotearoa. In 2022, that number dropped to 149. In those intervening years, state homes were neglected, sold and not built. This was disastrous, especially for the many people who cannot afford to rent or buy in the private housing market.

We are just beginning to get back on track, but we still have a long way to go, and we need community support, not knee-jerk resistance.

Of the 185,000 people who live in state homes, more than 68,000 are aged under 18.

The stability of a state home can make a profound difference to the life and future of a child. Living on the housing waitlist, families move often and live in unhealthy conditions. This undermines children’s learning, health and behaviour.

State housing is also home to a huge number of single, older people. So Kāinga Ora is right to build homes tailored for them, just as it is right to be building homes that allow for multi-generational living, which is the practice of many cultures.

Chief Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt.

In July, Te Kāhui Tika Tangata Human Rights Commission concluded its housing inquiry, which outlined the human rights and Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations of Government and the private sector.

We reminded the Government they mustn’t evict people into homelessness. Temporary accommodation should meet basic decency principles. We need independent accountability to hold Government to its housing obligations. The inquiry highlighted the Government’s Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligation to ensure equality for Māori, which includes equitable access to a decent home.

Māori are disproportionately represented in rates of homelessness in Aotearoa. They are more than half of the applicants on the current public housing waitlist, due to the historical impacts of colonisation.

In the first major wave of state housing built in the 1930s, the government excluded Māori from accessing state homes. This was amended in the mid-1940s, but only as part of an effort to assimilate Māori into “the Pākehā way of living”, known as “pepper-potting”. Such is the racist history that we must never repeat. We are still playing catch-up.

For those with a comfortable home, it’s easy to forget about the housing crisis. Yet every day that homes are delayed, or stymied by opposition, is another day that families are living in precarious, unsafe, unhealthy and cramped places.

I’m talking about people living in cars, in motels, or packed in staying with relatives, while they wait for a home.

How long they wait is in the hands of Government, councils and communities’ reception to public homes being built by Kāinga Ora.

We all have a human rights responsibility to embrace suitable state houses and the people who will make them their home.