KEY POINTS:
Housing Minister Maryan Street is calling an urgent meeting in Manukau on Thursday to tackle a desperate shortage of emergency housing.
The cross-agency meeting at the Manukau City Council offices follows revelations in last week's Listener that families unable to get housing were living in rooms in two Mangere lodges described as "squalid and crowded".
"The meeting will talk about the Mangere boarding lodges in particular, but emergency housing needs in general in South Auckland because it's difficult to know exactly what the scale of the problem is," Ms Street said.
The manager of Mangere's Monte Cecilia emergency housing trust, Elaine Lolesio, said last month that rising private sector rents had created a housing shortage that was "almost the same as we saw in the 1990s", when Housing NZ rents for state houses were raised to market levels.
"We have many families that are waiting to come to Monte Cecilia, and if we have a full house our housing workers have to look at advocating on their behalf with Housing NZ or the private sector," she said.
"For Housing NZ it is a very long wait."
But Ms Street said she had ordered Housing NZ to be "proactive" in housing families who had ended up in Mangere's Kiwiana and Abiru Lodges.
Housing NZ Auckland operations director Celia Patrick said the corporation was aware of two women who had been evicted from the lodges after reports tenants had been threatened with eviction if they talked to media.
She said both women had now been given Housing NZ houses - one in Otara on Friday after she was evicted from Kiwiana, and the other on Friday after being evicted from Abiru.
The woman in the second case is understood to be an unnamed mother, referred by Women's Refuge, whose 9-month-old son was described in the Listener as having his chest and stomach covered in sores, showing the signs of ringworm and with his face and arms covered in flea bites.
Ms Patrick said the woman requested a Housing NZ home last May but did not attend an appointment to assess her housing needs.
The Herald was unable to contact the manager of Abiru Lodge, but the manager of Kiwiana, Aroha Thompson, denied that any tenants had been evicted for talking to the media.
She said she had evicted a woman who had just come out of jail because she was behind with her rent, and a man "because he told a lot of lies".
Manukau City Council building compliance manager Kevin Jackson said he visited both lodges last week and yesterday and found that both were within their allowable limits of 45 tenants at Abiru and 35 at Kiwiana.
Ms Street will meet Manukau Mayor Len Brown in Wellington today to plan Thursday's meeting.
Agencies invited include Work and Income, Housing NZ, the Department of Building and Housing, Counties Manukau District Health Board, the Ministry of Health, the Fire Service and the city council.
