Sue Bradford: Hikoi for Homes - time for action on housing

Real estate data just out shows house prices in our city rising by $345 a day.

Some Aucklanders watch with quiet delight as million dollar homes become the norm. Others subsist in constant anxiety as to whether they can make this week's rent. Increasing numbers of people including pregnant women, families with children, and people with sickness and disabilities have nowhere to live at all.

Almost every day people come through our doors at Auckland Action Against Poverty with no place to sleep tonight except a car or a park. Like many other frontline church and community agencies across the city, we are a destination of last resort for the homeless or those about to become so.

Yet there is little we can do. Emergency accommodation in Auckland is bursting at the seams and fails to meet anything approaching real need. Tough allocation criteria make it near-impossible for most people to even get on the state house waiting lists. The private rental market is a tough place to enter when you're down and out, not only because of staggeringly high deposits and rents but also because poor credit, tenancy, health and criminal histories have a tendency to see doors slam shut at every turn.

State house tenants in Glen Innes have fought a long rear guard action against the intensification project forced upon them, moving them from their homes and breaking up longstanding bonds of family and community.

At the same time an ever increasing number of low and middle income people feel locked out of the home ownership which many consider a birth right. They resent the prospect of life as renters without secure tenure, subject to the constant restrictive nitpicking of landlord control.

This crisis in insecure, unaffordable and inadequate housing has brought together a coalition of groups determined to take action.

The Child Poverty Action Group, Auckland Action Against Poverty, FIRST Union and Unite Union are organising a Hikoi for Homes on Saturday, November 21.

Starting in the heart of Glen Innes at midday the hikoi will proceed on a long march through to the rich eastern suburbs, finishing at Okahu Bay at 3.00pm. There will also be marches in Wellington and Christchurch on the same day.

The Hikoi for Homes has seven clear demands:

• An immediate stop to the sell-off of state and council housing
• A $1 billion annual budget for the provision of more public and other not-for-profit housing.
• Setting minimum standards for all rented housing
• Greater tenure protection for tenants
• Rent freeze for five years
• A statutory right to be housed
• State subsidies for modest income home ownership programmes

The groups organising the protest believe it is time to collectivise the voice of those affected by the current housing crisis and the inadequate Government response.

We believe that housing is a basic human need and that access to quality, affordable and safe housing should be seen as a human right.

Everyone deserves a home - hence the call to change the law so that there should be an obligation on the state to provide housing for those in need, just as there is in countries like the UK.

We hope many of our fellow-Aucklanders will join us on the march.

Sue Bradford works with Auckland Action Against Poverty and is a spokesperson for the Hikoi for Homes coalition. For more information, see www.hikoiforhomes.co.nz