KEY POINTS:
The Government is leveraging reports about "squalid" conditions in two Mangere lodges into a new push to regulate all "slum landlords".
Housing Minister Maryan Street emerged from an urgent multi-agency meeting in Manukau yesterday to announce a "90-day plan of action" for South Auckland and a new effort to push through a new law for boarding houses, which has been blocked in Parliament since 2001.
She praised one Mangere boarding house, Gadsby Lodge, which is part of the same block of nine private boarding houses, carved out of the old Mangere Psychopedic Hospital, which includes the Kiwiana and Abiru Lodges where the Listener recently reported whole families living in small single rooms.
Families in Gadsby Lodge, which Ms Street visited yesterday, are living in similar 10-square-metre rooms, but in a cleaner environment.
Part-time packer Edward Nathan, 24, and his partner Missy Wi, 35, told Ms Street they were happy staying in a single room with their seven-month-old baby Violet and did not want a Housing NZ house.
"Housing NZ is all right but then you have to pay for power and water rates, and you don't pay that here," Ms Wi said. Their room costs $180 a week.
Ms Street said officials at the multi-agency meeting told her that there was no "universal crisis" in South Auckland housing.
But they agreed on a 90-day plan comprising:
* Analysis of the scale of housing need in Manukau.
* A register to be drawn up by Manukau City Council of all boarding houses in the city, believed to number 24.
* Inspection of all boarding houses to see whether they comply with health and overcrowding codes.
* Consultation with voluntary agencies.
* A "no wrong door" policy under which people approaching any state agency will be directed to Housing NZ if they have housing needs.
She said the Government would also revive a new version of a Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill, which was originally introduced by former Housing Minister Mark Gosche in 2001.
The original bill would have made boarding house owners subject to many of the same rules as other residential landlords, such as giving reasonable notice of evictions.
"We have been trying as a Government to get these boarding houses covered by legislation," Ms Street said.
"We have the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill due to come to Parliament again. I think this is the fourth or fifth time we have tried to get this through Parliament.
"We can't have overcrowding. We can't have substandard conditions in any private boarding house that would seek to make profit out of the most vulnerable people.
"If there are slum landlords out there, we want the Residential Tenancies Act to be able to get them."
National Party housing spokesman Phil Heatley said he had never seen any proposed amendments.
"There is no doubt we have to come down harder on bad-news landlords, but the minister should be looking at her own backyard in Housing NZ where a lot of people live in squalor," he said.
Green Party spokeswoman Sue Bradford said the Greens supported the original bill and she never understood why the Government allowed it to lapse in 2006.
