“You’re treated like second class citizens, your mana trampled on, treated like you’re to blame, the whole blaming people for being born poor and treated like you’re less than,“ a wahine described the downsides of her experience in emergency housing.
From today the government has promised to prioritise whānau with dependent tamariki who have been in emergency housing for longer than 12 weeks, with the aim of returning emergency housing to its intended purpose - a last resort for a short period.
Te Ao Maori News spoke with talked to a wahine from Hawke’s Bay, one of the areas most affected by the housing crisis in Aotearoa.
Prioritisation doesn’t mean housing
Applicants on the social housing register are given a number based on their housing need and there are two priority groups - A meaning ‘at risk’ and B meaning ‘serious’. Within the group there are numbers between 1 and 20.
A20 is the highest need and B1 is the lowest. The wahine we interviewed is considered A19 - high risk, top priority, yet has been in emergency housing and transitional housing for two years with a toddler. Another wahine in the same complex is on her fourth year.
“You can’t have guests, so I can’t bring whanau over. It’s isolating and you’re living in conditions that make you feel powerless. Where you have no privacy because the workers walk in whenever they want.
“You’re walking on eggshells because, if you step out of line, you can be evicted in 48 hours, or less in emergency. If you decline accommodation you’re offered because of whatever reason, you get punished. Threatened to cut me off and told me find my own accommodation,“ and again she said, “people treated less than just because homeless“.
“And my mum had a completely different experience in temporary accommodation because her house was damaged in Cyclone Gabrielle. They were homeless but they weren’t treated less than. Their voices were heard. They trusted them like adults, because it’s like they weren’t seen as to blame; not like me.“
She says this is the reality of the lives of people with dependent tamariki, high risk, and top priority.
Emergency housing: What went wrong?
The 2016 National government created the emergency housing plan and the current National-led coalition intends to bring it back to its intended purpose. It was designed to last up to seven days of emergency accommodation but turned into years.
Both Labour and National have said they care about the housing crisis.
Te Ao Maori News talked to Tamatha Paul (Ngāti Awa, Waikato, Tainui) - housing spokesperson for the Green Party - asking what she believed went wrong with emergency housing.
“Emergency shelter from the beginning is designed to fail people and whānau because of the way successive governments, both National and Labour have been unwilling to do the hard but necessary work in the housing space. Labour did not build enough houses and National will not build enough houses. Neither of them are willing to crack down on landlords, who are having a great time right now with all of their tax that they’re raking in from the government and in my view neither of the major parties are willing to take the housing crisis seriously because they’re scared of landlords,“ said Paul.
Do we have enough houses now?
“No,” Paul said, “there aren’t enough houses to accommodate all of the people living in emergency shelter and so this move really means nothing in the essence of it.”
Paul said the focus on eligibility process and reviewal of tenants meant the government was making it easier to kick people out of emergency shelters.
“Basically, everything you’ve heard from different ministers’ announcements are trying to dress up these changes that they’re making to housing, to distract from the fuel that they’re adding to the fire in terms of the housing crisis. So, they’re making it easier to kick families out of emergency shelter and making whanau homeless. We will see more homelessness on our streets, we will see more kids sleeping in cars, and we will see the real impacts of the housing crisis but what you see is ministers distracting from that fact.”
“We saw that recently with change of tenancy laws for renters. You have all of these policies that they’re bringing back around no-cause evictions and tipping the balance even more in the favour of landlords but then introducing things like pet bonds to distract from the fact that this government is fueling the housing crisis because the housing crisis is profitable for a very small part of our country.”
Housing is a human right and not a business opportunity.
— Tamatha Paul
What should government do to solve the housing crisis?
“If the government was serious about solving the housing crisis, instead of fueling it because it’s profitable for their voters, what they would do, is they would build more public housing, instead of selling it off, which we know they’re gearing up to do, protect the state houses we do have available. They would control the out of control rents that are being experienced all across the country and they would get serious about a capital gains tax, to ensure we could put more money into building more houses rather than filling the pockets of landlords and property developers who treat housing as a commodity when it should be treated as a human right,” Paul said.
In an announcement yesterday, Associate Housing Minister Potaka said there would be more houses built as part of National’s Going for Housing Growth initiative and a goal of reducing the of households in emergency housing by 75% by 2030.