Massey University’s latest rental report for rental properties in Tai Rāwhiti shows Gisborne’s rental costs rose by 32.3 per cent over the year to September 2021, well ahead of the average annual increase for that period of 5.6 per cent.
Tuta Ngarimu, a housing advocate at the coalface of Tai Rāwhiti rental problems, says the numbers that have been reported are not surprising.
And it’s not just Ngarimu’s advocacy group that is dealing with this rental runaway train for the past five years.
"We’ve been watching this space getting worse.”
Ngarimu says some living situations in Tai Rāwhiti are desperate, with overcrowding, squatting and rough sleeping by whānau.
He says some people are in a dire situation where children have been born into emergency accommodation and are still there two years later.
“We have different dynamics here. We have whānau, single looking for accommodation and there is one other group that has more of a challenge finding accommodation- our whānau that have a disability.”
Ngarimu says that, even with the prices fleecing the locals, not a lot of them can leave as they don’t have enough resources to be able to pick up and move out of the region. “A lot of them are tangata whenua here and it doesn’t make sense to leave the region.”
“There was a report of a three-bedroom house with more than 30 adults living there and they can’t even make it into the emergency accommodation because all of that is jam-packed.”
Ngarimu says they are moving whānau around just to get them comfortable but says there are houses with a large number of people with newborns under the same roof and living pretty roughly.
He says the obvious solution to the problem is “more money and more building”. He says there are many more problems driving the crisis such as land availability and "building materials are just ridiculous to get a hold of". "There are just too many drivers that have gotten us to where we are now.”
