Renting in Tauranga: Motel misery for nurse and young family who can’t get a rental

A nurse who works fulltime, a young family with two children aged under 4, and a 60-year-old who has serious health conditions. These are just some of the homeless who are trapped living in the same motel in Tauranga. Te Tuinga Whānau Support Service Trust oversees the facility and says rental demand is so high, it can’t find suitable accommodation for their next move, but it beats living in their cars or the streets. As part of Poverty in Paradise, a series on the trust, Carmen Hall reports.

“Living here you feel like a bottom feeder and scum.”

These are the words a nurse and mother uses to describe living in a motel. The Bay of Plenty Times has agreed not to name her, because her work colleagues and friends have no idea about her current situation.

The woman was too ashamed to tell them and said it was difficult to stay upbeat about finding a house for her and her children.

“You just have to trust the universe. The right thing will come around at the right time. I just try and focus on the positive side of it.”

She had been on the state housing register for two years and said she earned too much to qualify for the accommodation supplement and renting privately was too expensive.

The woman said her journey to homelessness began after she left her partner.

Motel living was depressing and isolating.

Sitting at a small table, there are groceries stacked high on a set of drawers. There is a double bed and one single bed. The room is modern but feels overstuffed with items that belong nowhere in particular.

The space felt claustrophobic, she said, and a lot of time was spent away from the room, at the beach or exploring the outdoors.

A nurse and her children have been living in this motel room for one year.

Every night she had to be back by 9pm because there was a set curfew, a no-visitor policy and she had to cook in a microwave.

But she was not complaining. She just wanted to shed light on the housing crisis and how anyone could become a victim. She had been at the motel for one year.

“Challenging” is how Selena Chapman describes living in a motel with her partner Jake Dent and their two young children.

The couple appreciated the accommodation and said the fellow residents were kind but the situation came with a lot of difficulties they believed people living in a house might not appreciate.

These included keeping the children, Juda and Jupiter, quiet and getting them into sleeping routines, as they constantly woke each other up because they all lived in the same room.

Escaping that room was also important.

“We go to the park almost every day, which our son loves. Children come with a lot of washing and due to not having washing facilities at the motel, we go to the laundromat down by the shops or to my nana’s.”

The daily free meal provided by the trust was welcomed but the no-visitor rule and limited cooking facilities made it hard.

Juda yearned for his old home and that was heartbreaking for them to hear. However, they were determined to stay on the bright side.

“Accommodation in Tauranga [whether it be emergency or renting a house] is hard to get into so we are very grateful to be living in the same town as our family, and to have access to that support. Our son says that everyone here is his friend and we love that,” she said.

“It does get a bit depressing but I’m just trying to remain positive because there is nothing else we can do.”

Selena Chapman and partner Jake Dent and their two young children Juda and Jupiter have been living in a motel for two years.

Chapman said it would be “life-changing” if a landlord gave them a chance.

A 60-year-old woman, who asked for anonymity because of her health issues, said she had nowhere else to turn and the trust had given her shelter since October last year.

She had lived in overcrowded conditions, including a house of 15 that was like “an obstacle course”.

However, it was not an ideal scenario, and although she felt grateful, the downside was being isolated from her whānau, and not having a kitchen had caused havoc with her diabetes.

She also had hypertension and nerve damage.

“It’s a blessing to be here but I just want my own home.”

Te Tuinga whānau/team leader Te Haringaroa Norris made no apologies for the rules at the motel, which has 22 rooms with an ensuite bathroom, fridge and microwave.

No alcohol was allowed on the premises and no visitors, no cooking facilities, and no washing machines. An evening meal was provided by Happy Puku, which was part of the trust, and there were 24-hour onsite security guards.

The social worker said a lot of those rules were for people’s safety, which was a top priority.

The trust tried to minimise the number of families staying and it was not ideal, however demand was relentless.

“Need is need and if we have to split families over two rooms, we will make it work. If we can help you we will but we have declined whānau for a variety of reasons - but there have been a lot of success stories.”

The motel initially became a refuge for homeless people in 2020 and since then the average stay in the motel was five months - but now some people had been residents for more than a year.

“It’s a waiting game for many of our whānau, which is frustrating. The ideal is more social housing but it’s not the reality.”

Due to the housing crisis, Norris had asked families if they would consider moving out of Tauranga, but it wasn’t easy and only a small number of people had taken up the offer.

“This is where they are from and this is where they live. How am I supposed to ask them to leave knowing they won’t get a house here?”

“It’s absolutely heartbreaking.”

Norris said, in her view, Māori, Pasifika and Indian families often found it much harder to get homes than others.

“That is the honest truth of it... if you like to say it or not, colour is a big thing out there.”

Te Tuinga executive director Tommy Wilson said the motels were a refuge and an unfortunate reflection of the reality faced by an estimated 400 families and individuals living in Tauranga.

“There are 200 under our care and 200 still sleeping out in the cold. So whilst it’s not ideal, we and our residents are so grateful that, unlike other cities and towns in crisis, we have contained the situation.

“We are very proud that the police have been called out no more than once a year [to the motel]. To contain trauma, you have to understand the whakapapa of that trauma.”

Ministry for Social Development data shows in the March 2023 quarter there were 762 people on the housing register, compared to 753 in the December 2022 quarter. In the March 2022 quarter, there were 856 people on the register, and in March 2019 there were 282.

A Ministry for Housing and Urban Development spokesman said that as of April 2023, there were 5910 places available for households receiving support to transition into long-term housing and 500 were in the Bay of Plenty.

Not all transitional housing places were in motels. The ministry contracts three motels in Tauranga: two for transitional housing and one for the Covid response. Te Tuinga Whānau Social Services Trust was the support service provider.

The median period spent in transitional housing for clients who left the service in the Bay of Plenty region during the financial year 2021/22 was 7.3 months.

“For the last three financial years, this measure has been steadily increasing.”

Transitional housing was diverse and included new-builds, residential homes, re-purposed and long-term leased properties.

Bay of Plenty Kāinga Ora regional director Darren Toy said the organisation was not the largest provider of social housing in Tauranga. But it had 437 one- to five-bedroom homes in Tauranga. Over the past three financial years, it had added 251 - including the acquisition of most of the Tauranga City Council’s elder housing villages. By the end of June 2025, there would be 190 homes of various sizes in planning or construction.

An Accessible Properties spokeswoman said it had 1196 homes in its public housing portfolio in Tauranga and Te Puke as of June 30. She said it had 20 new homes either under construction or coming through the consenting process and another three projects consisting of 19 new homes that were being designed prior to lodging for resource consent.

“We are planning and committed to delivering at least another 55 homes.”

Carmen Hall is a news director for the Bay of Plenty Times and the Rotorua Daily Post, covering business and general news. She has been a Voyager Media Awards winner and a journalist for 25 years.