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“We can’t fail,” says Toitū Tairāwhiti Housing’s Annette Wehi. “Our people are desperate and the longer we wait the longer they suffer.”
Wehi is talking about the innovative work of a multi-iwi effort to get houses built quickly, affordably, and where they are needed in the Tairāwhiti region.
Toitū Tairāwhiti has gone from a standing start two-and-a-half years ago, to pumping out houses two dozen at a time from an offsite building facility in Gisborne.
Four iwi came together in the early days of Covid to form Toitū Tairāwhiti – Ngāti Porou, Rongowhakaata, Ngai Tamanuhiri and Te Aitanga a Mahaki – to support whānau with food and hygiene supplies, and running vaccination centres that have delivered 64,000 doses.
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At the end of 2020, the group moved into housing, inspired by work going on in the rohe of Te Whānau a Apanui on the East Cape. There, Māori land advocate and widely-respected treaty negotiator Willie Te Aho was leading efforts to address the plight of whānau living in decrepit houses and severely crowded conditions.
Te Aho laid down the challenge – and what Wehi calls “crazy timelines” – at hui held at a rural marae around Tairāwhiti. Wehi says everyone understood that “the longer we leave it, the longer our people suffer in disgraceful conditions”.
“It’s very normal for our whānau to bring out the mattresses at night, and the whole sitting room is full of bodies,” she says. “And in the morning before the kids go to school, those mattresses get put away. And they’ve lived like that since they were born – and now they are in high school…
“Then there’s the phone calls to ask: ‘Auntie, is anyone living in your shed? We’re losing our rental, can we move in until we get a place?’. And they move in and never leave because there is nowhere to go… there was a whānau living in a cave in Te Whānau-ā-Apanui. People are in lean-tos and decrepit houses with black mould in them.”
Wehi and other volunteers – most of them leaders in their local marae and kohanga reo – swung into action under Te Aho’s guidance. Wehi – now managing director of Toitū Tairāwhiti Housing Ltd – had never worked in the housing sector before; she’s a lecturer and her family is prominent in the world of kapa haka. But her first task in late 2020 was to track down five “pre-loved” houses and get them relocated into the region for Te Aitanga a Mahaki.
In mid-2021 the group was funded by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and Te Puni Kokiri to build 23 houses; at the end of that year they were contracted to deliver a further 28.
Then in mid-2022, Toitū Tairāwhiti Housing was selected by the Government as one of four iwi-led housing prototypes, with $55 million to build 150 new homes.
A team of volunteer kaitakawaenga – whānau supporters – works with families to understand their housing needs, their financial situation and their capacity to support repayments on a first home and identify suitable land where new builds could be located.
Often whānau have access to ancestral whenua, and with the consent of the owners or governing trust can go to the Māori Land Court to register a licence to occupy.
Wehi says the relationship between kaitakawaenga and whānau is direct and honest. “They can’t pull the wool over my eyes because I grew up with them. People know they can trust us because they know us. In small places, everyone talks, and everyone knows everyone’s business. But the other part about it is that we love them because they are us. We’re not blind to the other stuff that’s going on in their lives, but also we don’t let them get away with stuff because that’s central to the integrity of our kaupapa.”
With ongoing supply chain problems, Wehi says the decision was made to significantly beef up local building capacity. Toitū Tairāwhiti Housing had worked with offsite housing manufacturer Builtsmart in Huntly, and in 2022 got a $4 million loan from MBIE to build their own Builtsmart facility in Gisborne.
Named Te Wharau o Hineakua, that facility opened in October last year. It includes six huge dome ‘smart shelters’ where houses can be built in six to eight weeks, with 24 under construction at any one time when the facility is operating at full capacity. From there they are put on the back of trucks and transported to their permanent sites – and to the often-tearful reception of whānau whose once-impossible dream of housing security has been realised.
“This brings the economic development back here to Tairāwhiti,” says Wehi. “We get the employment here, we get to upskill our own people.” The facility has created jobs for 18 construction workers, plus work for sub-contracting firms – Māori and Pakeha – providing services such as transportation, gib stopping, painting, electrical and plumbing.
Wehi says Toitū Tairāwhiti has so far focused on first-home ownership, rather than rentals. It is building two-, three- and five-bedroom houses for between $238,000 and $325,000. Applicants secure the land (worth on average $200,000), and Toitū Tairāwhiti Housing Ltd funds up to $100,000 per home for infrastructure such as driveways, water tanks and septic systems. Whānau borrow from Toitū Tairāwhiti Housing interest-free for first 10 years, after which it’s expected that the remaining loan will be small enough to be refinanced with a mainstream lender.
Toitū Tairāwhiti has had to contend with frequent heavy rain events disrupting the region’s fragile roading network. Cyclone Gabrielle, says Wehi, was “just the latest punch in the stomach”.
By the time of the February disaster, they were in a position to immediately start pumping out emergency housing for communities – including the stricken village of Te Karaka, inland from Gisborne, where 400 residents fled for their lives in the middle of the night and were left to fend for themselves for 48 hours before help arrived.
There were 64 whānau members still living in the classrooms at Te Karaka Area School when Wehi’s team, under subsidiary company Toitū Tairāwhiti Builtsmart Limited, went in to discuss emergency and temporary housing. The whānau would not move to emergency housing in Gisborne, 32km away, because they had no certainty about when they would be able to return and when their homes – 44 of which were uninsured – would be repaired.
Te Aho was appointed by Wehi to lead the housing response. He reached an agreement with the whānau sheltering at the school that they would be back in Te Karaka in temporary housing by 31 May 2023.
All up, 100 transportable houses have been delivered across Tairāwhiti and Wairoa for people displaced from their homes by cyclone damage.
The next phase is repairing uninsured houses, with the aim of having this work mostly completed by August. Thirty-seven insured families (Māori and Pakeha) are also being supported, with the aim of having claims settled and repairs done by March next year; there’s a determination that the long and acutely stressful insurance delays following the Christchurch earthquakes will not be repeated in Tairāwhiti.
“We are ballsy,” says Wehi of Toitū Tairawhiti’s hunger for solutions to the housing crisis. “Our catch cry is: ‘We must disrupt to make change’. These are our people. They are depending on us. We are their hope.”
In turn, there are expectations on whānau to serve the collective by deepening their connections within their communities and contributing to the work of their marae, kohanga and kura.
Yes, she says, it’s about putting secure roofs over heads, but it’s also much more than that. “This is about way more than overcrowding. It’s bringing the intervention that’s needed to keep kids safe, to keep the next generation safe.”
