Significant investment in social and affordable housing is crucial to solving New Zealand's housing crisis and ending homelessness, a new report says.
The report by Community Housing Aotearoa warns homelessness has reached its highest level ever, with a shortage of affordable housing compounding the problem.
Chief executive Paul Gilberd said New Zealand had the "programmes and the capacity" to end homelessness if there was political will to do so.
"We can solve it as a nation here in New Zealand. It really is a political choice," he said.
The organisation, which represents community housing providers, is calling for 3000 new social and affordable homes to be built each year over the next decade.
Gilberd welcomed the government's moves towards social housing reform but said politicians needed to be "far more bold" in addressing the housing crisis.
"We're still tinkering around the edges," he said.
"There are some very, very significant gaps which people fall through when they're navigating their way around the complexity of different systems and different agencies. If we just worked together better and started closing some of those gaps that would deliver really tremendous outcomes."
Gilberd wanted to see significant investment in affordable and social housing in Thursday's Budget, arguing housing should be treated as core social infrastructure.
"What we really need to do is get inside the minds of the people in Treasury and question that philosophical position that they seem to have that it's a bad idea to borrow money to build houses to house our people," he said.
"We say it's the best investment you can possibly make.
"You not only have an asset on your balance sheet, which if you need the cash back you can sell it's reasonably liquid, but you also have an asset with a use value of 10, 20, 50 years where you are adequately housing all our people. That saves us as taxpayers billions of dollars on Corrections, on health, on mental health and all the goodness that comes from people having a safe, warm, accessible home."
Gilberd labelled the accommodation supplement a "spectacular failure" saying too much money had ended up in the pockets of private landlords.
He said New Zealand had faced a "cumulative undersupply of affordable housing" since reforms in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
"For 40 years now we have not been producing enough homes in the lower quartiles by value," he said.
Community Housing Aotearoa's report said homelessness could also be reduced by intervening earlier, including stopping people being released from hospitals, prisons and psychiatric care into homelessness with no housing arrangements.
Gilberd said one size did not fit all, advocating for more tailored and locally-led housing solutions including Māori and Pacific led approaches.
The report said 28.8 percent of people experiencing homelessness in Aotearoa were Māori despite Māori making up 17.1 percent of the total population.
Pacific people made up 22.6 percent of those experiencing homelessness, despite being only around 8 percent of the population.
Women made up just over half of those experiencing severe housing deprivation.
The report also highlighted the number of young people experiencing homelessness with more than half of all people under the age of 24.
"Youth homelessness is not separate from adult homelessness - it is the pathway into it. Early, age-appropriate responses are needed alongside removal of structural barriers including tenancy age limits (16-17 years), restrictive succession rules, and exclusionary criteria around past evictions, lack of ID, or criminal history," the report said.
Gilbert said while the findings were confronting, the sector remained optimistic homelessness could be reduced.
"We're never going to give up, not until everybody's housed," he said.
This story was first published on rnz.co.nz |  |
