Michelle Pyke
Good news since the CHAT (Community Housing Action Team) rally on August 6- all the major political parties, including the National government, are now finally agreeing that more State housing must be built.
And Hawke's Bay has been promised up to 200 new builds, 125 in Napier and 75 in Hastings.
The difficulty is that even if those new houses started to be built today it will not help all those who need a house right now or in the next year at least.
Further good news from CHAT are our ongoing conversations. Several with Housing NZ, who started from an original position of "... no more new builds ...", to now "... reviewing the need for new builds..."
The numbers of people on the Housing Register (the waiting list for social housing, HNZ and community providers) has significantly increased, in particular over the past year, and the numbers of people crowding the private rental market viewings is also growing - the elderly, the ill, the under-employed, those in work, those who have multiple or complex issues, anyone and everyone these days. And landlords are often solely choosing those with higher incomes rather than those who would be great tenants.
The majority of renters DO look after their properties, DO pay their rent on time and DO want to stay where they are for the long-term - children in particular NEED that stability as it's the foundation for their education, their health, their sense of belonging in a community.
The other positive conversation I had last week, on behalf of CHAT, was with Mayor Bill Dalton.
Mayor Dalton, like all of us, wants all our homeless to be homed and looked after properly, not just shuffled from temporary to transitional back to temporary housing situations.
The council's difficulty is in balancing those issues - which are firmly a central government responsibility - with the needs of presenting the city in it's best light, especially in the CBD.
Mayor Dalton was genuinely horrified when I informed him of the various unprovoked violent attacks that have occurred against some of the "rough sleepers", committed by "fine upstanding citizens" who, after swallowing whole the recent media reports and whipping themselves to a frenzy on social media, decide they are perfectly entitled to beat up these most vulnerable citizens!
I am ashamed of those people and it typifies the moral underbelly that exists in our fine city, an underbelly I myself have been on the receiving end of too in the past few years - ill-informed, mis-informed, ignorant, non-questioning people are everywhere these days it seems.
The difference is, the rough sleepers have nowhere to retreat to, nowhere to escape the bullying and their already vulnerable situation is made so much worse when they're being made to feel "less than" - less than human, less than deserving of a life, less than the self-righteous cowards that are out there looking for all intents and purposes like "good people".
So, now that central and local government recognise the need to partner up, how about a formal plan to regularly undertake a regional housing needs assessment, able to be included as part of the Heretaunga Plains Urban Design Strategy (HPUDS) data-sets, complementing the existing data that multiple agencies hold at the high-end "big picture" level but which currently has a scarcity of any real data from the ground-floor level, the people themselves.
All very well to have a strategy about where and what type of developments HB will have but the people it will house over the coming years currently are not a part of that strategy and must be included in a meaningful way.
In the meantime, CHAT does not see any new or permanent housing coming on the horizon any time soon so we put out the plea to all people, and the media in particular, to please stop focusing on the narrow-ended lens of the plight of our homeless - you are literally endangering them.
CHAT members have been actively supporting these people to keep them safe, advocate for them with MSD/HNZ and basically show them that not all people are judging them, some of us are genuinely able to be trusted, to allow us in to help restore them.
More of that is needed, not less.
Michelle Pyke is the spokeswoman for the Community Housing Action Team (CHAT). Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz