Homelessness in NZ: The Christmas reality is there’s no room at the inn for Kiwis needing help

Rotorua homeless couple Elaine Sawyer and Anaru Hauiti have been sleeping rough this year. Photo / Andrew Warner

THREE KEY FACTS

• At the time of the 2023 Census, 112,496 people were estimated to be severely housing deprived, Stats NZ figures show.
• This was an increase from the 99,462 people estimated in 2018.
• 61.3% of those living in severe housing deprivation were in uninhabitable housing.

Central to the Christmas message is that everyone needs a home – an article of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Yet as Christmas approaches this year, the coalition Government has announced that to meet their target for reducing Emergency Housing Special Needs Grants, the number of people in emergency housing will be reduced.

Also, the availability of transitional housing will possibly be cut. It’s hard for anyone to know the number of people and families affected for sure, because they aren’t collected or reported.

Moreover, the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), which manages the public housing waiting list and the Emergency Housing Special Need Grants, are placing barriers in the way of those who are urgently seeking housing.

There are credible reports that to verify applicants seeking housing because they are victims of domestic violence, staff at MSD Community are encouraged to phone the abusive partner to confirm that their partner did not contribute to the violence. Community advocates report that the criteria for state housing help are becoming less and less transparent and people are increasingly having to reapply.

Community providers are increasingly having to turn away applicants, who are desperate for sustainable housing, but not counted in formal statistics as in need of housing.

Meanwhile the Government does not have an alternative housing policy and keeps no record of housing need.

There is no plan for providing alternative state or community housing elsewhere, at the scale required.

Despite its record of significantly upscaling the building of high-quality housing in sustainable communities, Kāinga Ora - Homes and Communities has been denied any further capital funding. It has been directed not to do any further developments, and to restrict its scope to being a landlord only.

Housing Minister Chris Bishop. Photo / Mark Mitchell

To the dismay of community housing providers, Housing Minister Chris Bishop made it clear at the recent Community Housing Aotearoa Conference that the Government is not going to underwrite most community housing providers to build more community housing.

Their capital in most cases will need to come from private equity, perhaps overseas investors like BlackRock, which has summarily liquidated SolarZero, despite receiving a large capital injection from Government.

Frontline community staff are now increasingly having to help people – both adults and children – who are homeless and living in cars, or on the streets.

Homeless numbers have increased, as the recently released Severe Housing Deprivation Study, based on the 2023 Census, showed.

By contrast, in a recent evaluation of The Housing First policy, it was shown to be the most effective way to help people back into stable housing. It enables them to re-enter employment, and for their children to be registered with a GP and immunised, prosper at school, keep well, and turn up less frequently at accident and emergency departments.

Most dispiritingly, we have seen this cycle before: we know what the outcomes will be.

When Sir Bill English was the Minister for Housing New Zealand Corporation, the precursor of Kāinga Ora from 2014-2016, he called himself “the largest slum landlord in New Zealand”.

Between 2013/14 and 2016/17 the Minister began the sale of state housing, which led to about a 5000 fall in the number of state houses, without any serious consideration of the consequences.

Unsurprisingly, this led to a major increase in homelessness. He established Emergency Housing, which mainly used temporary accommodation to house the growing numbers of people left homeless as a direct result of the lack of new public houses.

For all too many people — children, adults, single people and families — this Christmas there is still “no room at the inn”.