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 Te Ao Maori News 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.
“(They) threatened to cut me off and told me find my own accommodation.”
She said people were treated “less than” just because they were 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.”
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.
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,” Paul said.
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.”
“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.”
What should the government do?
“If the government was serious about solving the housing crisis ... 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 Tama Potaka said there would be more houses built as part of National’s Going for Housing Growth initiative and a goal of reducing households in emergency housing by 75 per cent by 2030.
