A haven for the lucky few

Is pensioner housing providing for the needy in Auckland and is the council abusing its most vulnerable people? JAN CORBETT investigates.

Maureen Alexander is at the front of her Freeman's Bay pensioner flat, watering her plants in the early autumn sunshine. The lemon tree she planted when she moved in 13 years ago is laden with fruit. The neighbouring olive tree has surpassed its height expectations. She will ask the council to move it out into the communal front lawn.

After all, for these past 13 years the council has been an excellent landlord, coming to fix faults as soon as they are reported and treating its tenants with dignity and respect.

Until now, that is. In the minds of its pensioner tenants, like Alexander, the council has assumed ogre proportions over its plan to gradually divest itself of its pensioner housing.

Alexander knows her tenure is safe. Her block is not one of those listed for immediate disposal. She will not have to face what the less fortunate will - of having to move from an area they are familiar with, where they know the shopkeepers and have friends, maybe family, nearby.

The council promises existing tenants a home for life, but as blocks are sold they may have to move, perhaps more than once. Alexander feels mightily for those who are contemplating that fate and because she enjoys good health and has had a bent for political activism, she is putting herself forward in the fight against the council.

Her story illustrates some of the circumstances that lead people into pensioner housing.

She owned a house once, and a business. At least she owned them with her husband. When she divorced him in the 1950s, there was no matrimonial property law. Her husband kept all the assets.

With no such thing as a domestic purposes benefit, she nursed and did laboratory work to raise and educate her two children who both went to university. But she could never earn enough for a house of her own. This was the time, too, when women needed male guarantors to raise a mortgage.

Alexander is not the sort of person to get depressed by her circumstances. She seized life, and still does. When her children were grown she went to Europe, living for two years in London before settling in Rome for 10. There she ran a playcentre and found among the Italians sympathy for her changed material values. No longer imbued with the New Zealand imperative to own property - which was beyond her reach anyway - she decided quality of life was more important. Music, books, friends and community involvement became more important. She returned to New Zealand close to retirement age. She taught Italian privately, and worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau. To be near family and live in a warmer climate she decided to move from Dunedin to Auckland.

But her only hope of affording accommodation in Auckland was to get one of the council's pensioner units where the rent was around 25 per cent of her pension. She has been paying weekly rent of $57.50 which has now been raised to $85. She has yet to find out if she will qualify for an accommodation supplement. She does not have a car.

Enjoying enviable good health for a woman aged in her 70s, she is living life to the full. She is taking up an opera appreciation course through the university of the third age. She has returned to Italy with her brother a couple of times over the years and is planning to go to Australia soon for a family reunion with her daughter.

If you are thinking that from a low-income background this sounds extravagant, try buying a flat in Auckland for the same price as a couple of trips to Europe and one to Australia. You couldn't even buy something as small as her pensioner flat.

The living area has space for three armchairs, a television and her loaded bookcases, a small CD player and a stand of CDs. Her Italian prints cover the walls. Her table seats one, and edges into the kitchenette, which has one small bench, a stove that the council provides and a refrigerator that is hers. Her single bedroom off the lounge also takes her writing desk. Although it is a tight squeeze, the adjacent bathroom houses the laundry. She knows she is lucky to have her own washing machine - in some pensioner blocks the laundries are communal.

It is essentially not the sort of accommodation many people would aspire to - rather the sort that people with no alternative would be grateful to have. For Alexander it is her palace and the block has been a happy place, she says, until the council made them all nervous.

The council estimates there are 260 elderly Aucklanders who are on the waiting list to get just such a unit. Probably now they never will.

No one would have imagined when John Banks was elected Auckland's mayor last year that his reign would be uneventful. It was only a matter of time before he and his political allies polarised the city and raised passions in a fashion seldom seen within council chambers. It could have been any area of budget cutting that would have brought shouting, placard-waving protesters into his realm. It just so happened it started with pensioner housing.

Undermining the more vulnerable people in your community - low-income elderly - is bound to ignite a philosophical flashpoint.

Councillor Bruce Hucker, who has been a champion of council tenants over the three decades of his political career, sees the right-wing's desire to sell the housing as driven more by philosophy than raw financial concerns. Yet the same can be said for Hucker's desire to preserve Auckland City Council's role in providing social housing.

Leaving political philosophy aside, consider the reality for Auckland City pensioners needing assistance with housing and compare that to what is available for their neighbours in Waitakere, Manukau and on the North Shore.

Auckland City is by far the biggest supplier of pensioner housing in the region with housing for 1600 pensioners, out of a total of 66,501 over-55s who live in the city.

Manukau, with 30,000 pensioners, houses 540. Waitakere has 13,300 of its people drawing national superannuation and provides 335 housing units. In Waitakere they deliberately call it housing for older adults and even list a separate phone number for the service.

On the North Shore where there are 20,172 pensioners, the council provides 458 pensioner units, as well as running a scheme where pensioners can own their own units, but have them maintained by the council in return for selling them back to the council for 20 per cent less than the market value. A very North Shore solution.

At around 250, Auckland has the largest waiting list. On average the wait on that list is 18 months. The figures are vague because people can put themselves on several lists for more desirable properties. Before this sale policy, if you were prepared to live in a less desirable block, you could have moved in straight away.

Waitakere has 25 to 30 people on its waiting list, but cannot say how long they wait "because vacancies will occur on an entirely random basis".

Manukau has about 40 on its waiting list for bedsits in more desirable areas like Pakuranga and Howick.

North Shore has about 50 on its waiting list. Again the length of wait depends on which area you want to live in. Property services manager Phil Evans says it is a constantly moving list.

Among its local body neighbours Auckland City might have the largest supply of, and biggest demand for, pensioner housing, but it also has the tightest eligibility criteria, and it just became tighter. Previously you had to be 55 years of age or older, be a beneficiary and not have assets exceeding $17,500 in value for a single person and $20,500 for a couple. Cars, furniture and personal effects are excluded from the tally.

Under the new policy, you have to be aged 65 or over, and not have assets of more than $8100 for a single person or $16,200 for a couple.

But says Cameron Parr, who manages the council department responsible for pensioner housing, they ask applicants about their asset backing but do not rigorously investigate it.

On the North Shore you have to be aged 60 or over. The asset barrier for a single person is far higher than in Auckland - $47,000 for a single person and $55,000 for a couple. Priority is given to people who have lived on the North Shore for two years or more and who have relatives there.

Waitakere is also comparatively generous in its asset allowance - up to $30,000 for a single pensioner and $45,000 for a couple. You qualify if you are over 55 and on an invalid's benefit, are over 60 and unemployed or on a transitional benefit, or are over 65 and drawing national superannuation.

To qualify for a pensioner home in Manukau you can have up to $35,000 in assets if you are single or $50,000 if you are a couple.

To qualify for a state house from the Government you cannot have more than $17,000 in realisable assets whether you are single or living as a couple.

In Auckland City the low asset-backing criteria means there will be a band of pensioners with too much money in the bank to qualify, but not enough to house themselves. They are a group, city missioner Diane Robertson says, will be living in deprivation to pay private market rentals.

Given women live longer than men, earn less and in these women's lifetime probably didn't work much outside the home, it is probably not surprising most of the Auckland City's pensioner tenants are women (52 per cent.) An even larger majority (67 per cent) are Pakeha.

Even in Manukau, the world's largest Polynesian city, most in pensioner housing are Pakeha (58 per cent) suggesting Pakeha are either more adept at accessing the system or more likely to live alone than in cultures that exalt the elderly and keep them within the family home.

The cornerstone of the debate about the provision of pensioner housing is social equity. But is it socially equitable that pensioners within the Auckland metropolitan area are subject to widely disparate financial criteria to qualify for ratepayer-assisted housing?

Is it fair that Auckland pensioners with $30,000 or so in the bank are forced to pay market rents in the private sector, albeit with limited help from the accommodation supplement, when if they lived within the boundaries of a neighbouring council, they would have the option of a council flat?

Equally, as Auckland's population continues to age - the 55-plus population will grow from around 69,000 to a projected 137,000 in 20 years' time - previous councils decided against increasing the supply of pensioner housing. Is it fair that a smaller and smaller proportion would have been accommodated under the old policy?

Bruce Hucker dismisses that argument as amounting to "if you cannot do it for everyone you shouldn't do it for anyone".

"You can either say you wash your hands of it because it's not equitable, or you can put more energy into it."

Politics, as Hucker says, is about the art of the possible. Remember Auckland City councillors with a bent for social spending, traditionally find themselves in the minority.

When it comes to social equity, Auckland's pensioners might argue that theirs is the only council in the country looking to abandon pensioner housing. Out of 74 local authorities, 72 supply pensioner accommodation.

It's a tradition, says Hucker, that goes back 50 years when the role of councils expanded beyond roads, rubbish, rats and rates to include community planning. Central government gave local councils cheap, 3 per cent loans, to build the pensioner housing to begin with. Since then Hucker believes central government has been too silent a partner in the social housing sector.

Hucker, who also lectures in the planning department at Auckland University, says the pensioner housing issue goes beyond right or left-wing political philosophy to questions, for example, of what a community should look like.

Already Auckland City Council has signed a policy of affordable housing within its confines so that low-income people can live in the city - important if you want to maintain services and industry within the city and avoid ghettos of poor people on the city fringes.

Why, he asks, would you take away one of the building blocks of affordable housing?

The premise for Auckland City getting out of the pensioner housing sector is that, according to the review of council spending by Sir William Birch which inspired the move, social housing is not core council business and is better handled by central government through the social welfare system. Certainly central government provides a nationally-consistent housing policy.

But will it take up the slack in Auckland and if it did would that be fair to the other councils who are not even thinking of selling their pensioner housing stock?

Housing Minister Mark Gosche was unavailable to comment. But a spokeswoman in his office says this government is keen to encourage local government to provide community housing. She could not say what form that encouragement might take.