Councils in towns and cities all over New Zealand are grappling with the tension between CBD retailers and people living on the street - especially those places where the weather is nice and the housing too expensive and scarce.
Lots of solutions are being trialled or bandied about. Take Rotorua, for example. In the last few months alone, NZME revealed the Government had spent $3.3m in three months on emergency housing, an election candidate suggested sticking homeless people in a barn and the council parked a security camera outside the local homeless shelter.
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But trying to ban people from doing such an innocuous thing as sleeping in a public place has always felt like a desperate move to me, one made by a council rushing to be seen to be tackling a social issue it is not equipped to solve.
I'm not unsympathetic to people trying to ply a trade in a CBD. It's tough out there, and businesses are under pressure from a multitude of trends they can do little to control.
Some retailers have horror stories of intimidation and threats. But these are criminal matters for the police, not the council.
Setting aside criminal activities, what are we left with? Begging and rough sleeping is a bad look. Not nice for the tourists. People don't like seeing it, they feel intimidated and uncomfortable.
That's a weak reason to strip other people of their rights to use public spaces. Well, some public spaces. In other public spaces, it was all good, apparently.
Some people find teenagers intimidating. Shall we ban them? Others feel uncomfortable around buskers, petitioners and donation seekers. Guitar/clipboard/collection bucket 5m to the left, please?
The bylaw route taken by Tauranga is not the way to go.
Not only was it likely to end up in a court case that, in my view, would deliver little value to ratepayers for the cost of the fight, it penalised vulnerable people.
People are quick to say that the bylaw worked, that the beggars are all but gone from Greerton, but are our leaders asking whether it helped reduce the number of people living on the streets? Did it increase the number of struggling people who found housing? What are our end goals here?
Let's ditch the punitive regulations and put our energy into measures that put a roof over people's heads.
