Frustrated at seeing homeless Aucklander teenagers being put into emergency housing motels with little support, youth worker Aaron Hendry set out to build an alternative system, one home at a time. ALEX SPENCE reports.
Traffic was heavy on Auckland’s Western motorway, and now Aaron Hendry was late for dinner.
Arriving at his West Harbour home, Hendry opened the front door, stepped inside, and was quickly wrapped in bear hugs by two of his young sons. He dropped to the floor and wrestled with them. From the kitchen came the inviting smell of a cottage pie.
Hendry is a 31-year-old youth worker, activist, and commentator who tends to dress in a hoodie pulled up over a baseball cap, and ripped skinny jeans. On this Monday evening, he had just returned from meeting a potential donor about a hub for homeless youths that Hendry wants to open near Queen Street.
It is one of several initiatives Hendry is developing to resolve what he sees as one of the most devastating and overlooked consequences of Auckland’s housing affordability crisis: Hundreds, perhaps thousands of young people being forced to live in precarious and sometimes dangerous conditions because they have nowhere else to go.
Another of Hendry’s schemes was here in his own West Harbour home.
In the kitchen, Hendry’s American wife, Summer, 35, was serving dinner with an 18-year-old woman who was homeless a little over a year ago, until Hendry and his family intervened.
Mills (she asked to be identified only by her nickname, to avoid identifying her family) fled a difficult family situation in the central North Island and came to Auckland intending to live with a friend. When that became untenable, Mills had nowhere else to stay. A friend took her to a youth centre in Henderson, where a staff member called Hendry.
At the time, Hendry and his friend and housemate Joshua Taylor — their young families until recently shared the West Harbour property — had just launched a scheme they call “The Safety Net”. The idea was they would match homeless rangatahi with strangers in the community willing to temporarily put them up, so they wouldn’t have to go into emergency housing. And they had started the initiative using their own home as a testing ground.
Mills was anxious when she arrived at the property, not knowing what to expect. Growing up, she shared a bedroom with her mother and three siblings. Looking around Hendry’s house, bustling with four adults and four children under 5, she immediately felt out of place.
“I don’t know how I can live in this house,” she recalls thinking. Still, it seemed better than spending the night in a motel.
In her first week at the house, Mills mostly stayed in her room, too shy to interact. At night she waited until the kitchen was empty before coming down to eat. But she got used to living there. Days turned into weeks. She ended up staying and became part of the family — “Another aunty for the kids,” as Hendry puts it.
On this Monday night, it was Mills’ turn to cook for the household. She picked up the steaming hot cottage pie and carried it carefully to the dining table. The Hendrys and Taylors began the meal by saying grace, then went around the table asking each of the children about their days. How was playgroup? What did you learn? The boys clambered on their parents’ laps. It was an effortlessly cheerful scene.
Since last year, Hendry says they have sheltered eight rangatahi ranging in age from 16 to 20, out of 46 who were referred. One was a young mother with a baby. They stayed nine weeks on average. All are now in a stable housing situation.
Hendry says his objective is to provide a circuit break for young people whose lives have been thrown into turmoil, to give them time and space to determine their next moves. And it seems to have worked for Mills. She says having a comfortable place to sleep, her own private space, and people she could rely on to be there when she needed them has turned her life around.
Mills has a part-time job at McDonald’s, which allows her to make a small contribution to the rent. She has a boyfriend. She is participating in kapa haka, reconnecting with her Māori roots. She doesn’t have firm plans, but now at least she has the headspace to figure out her future without having to worry constantly about where to live.
“We didn’t know her from a bar of soap when she came in here,” Hendry says, “and she’s added so much to our lives.”
A stacked deck
Hendry, who grew up in West Auckland, began working with vulnerable youths about a decade ago, initially as a volunteer through the church he attended. His first major professional job as a youth development worker was at Youthline.
The young people Hendry encountered, mostly teenagers, had typically been through traumatic experiences: Family violence. Drugs and alcohol. Poverty. Parents and siblings in prison. Contrary to the stereotypes, they struck Hendry as mostly passionate and motivated, but “the deck was stacked against them”, he says.
Housing insecurity emerged as a common theme running through their stories.
Counting the number of homeless teens is an imprecise exercise. One government study based on the 2018 Census estimated that there were around 41,000 severely housing-deprived people in New Zealand, of which nearly half were under 25, with the highest rates among Pacific and Māori rangatahi. But that was almost certainly an underestimate, and it is thought the numbers have grown since the last Census.
Anecdotally, youth workers say youth homelessness in Auckland is a significant, persistent, and often overlooked problem — and one that is catastrophic for those who experience it, coming at a time when most people are forming the identity, values, and relationships that will shape the rest of their lives.
“Some of them right now are going through stuff that they’re going to spend their whole lives dealing with,” Hendry says. “Some of them won’t survive.”
Despite the magnitude of the problem, Hendry says there are usually few solutions he can offer to the young people who came to him needing a place to stay.
On one occasion early in his career, he recalls, a teenage boy arrived at his office late on a Friday with nowhere to go. Hendry says he phoned various agencies to secure the boy a bed for the night but was told there was nothing available. Eventually, he found a member of his church who agreed to shelter the young man.
In recent years, Hendry says his clients have often ended up being placed by government agencies in emergency housing motels. They are usually not safe and stable environments for vulnerable teenagers who are on their own, he says.
“I’ve had young wāhine come into motels and just be terrified by the environment,” Hendry says. “And they said to me, ‘How do you not have something better for us?’”
“And you know they’re right. I’ve seen the harm.”
Over the years, Hendry says there were numerous occasions when he thought of offering one of his clients a bed at his own house to spare them from emergency housing, but his wife Summer was not then on board.
“I was uncomfortable with it,” she says.
Summer, who grew up in a missionary family in the US and moved to New Zealand as a teenager, met Hendry through their church. They married eight years ago. She has also done volunteer work with young people, but, as many people would be, she was at first unnerved at the prospect of sharing her own family’s space with homeless teenagers.
Would the guests steal things? Would it be disruptive for their kids? “I wasn’t there yet,” she says.
But the concept stuck with Hendry. He and Taylor eventually formulated plans to launch The Safety Net through the Massey Community Trust, a small charity in West Auckland. “We started to think, ‘Surely there’s a way for us as a community to take over this issue,’” Hendry says.
Their concept was simple: When someone presented to a youth service without a place to stay, social workers would have the option of contacting The Safety Net. It would introduce the young person to one of the host families in the network. If both parties were comfortable after an initial meeting, the young person would stay with them, at no cost, until they could reconnect with their whānau or find a longer-term living arrangement.
The scheme formally accepted the first houseguest, at Hendry and Taylor’s own home in West Harbour, in May 2022. Since then, they secured seed funding from the Lotteries Commission, Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, and other agencies, which allowed them to hire a full-time co-ordinator — Hendry’s brother, Josh.
They have expanded the network to include three host homes, and are in talks with three others about joining, Hendry says.
It will be a slow model to scale, but Hendry and Taylor say it can grow into a replicable alternative to emergency housing for rangatahi who don’t need an intensive level of support.
There are risks involved, Taylor acknowledges. The teenagers are moving into unfamiliar environments; the hosts are not professional youth workers. He says The Safety Net is mitigating this by matching young people and host families carefully, with no obligation on either party, and providing a supportive infrastructure around them.
“It’s not always easy and sometimes we’re going to get burned,” Hendry says. But he believes the opportunity to intervene and change the trajectory of a young person’s life for the better is worth it.
“If no one’s going to step up and do this then nothing’s going to change,” Taylor adds.
Summer says she overcame her initial reluctance to host people in their home partly through the strength of her Christian faith. “I’m trying to be more loving and less judgmental,” she says.
She is frank about the trade-offs.
It can be awkward having strangers in your house. It takes time to build trust. Sometimes the rangatahi don’t turn up after a referral. Sometimes they’re so shy they don’t leave their room. Occasionally they break the house rules, vaping in their room or inviting visitors to the house without permission — they are teenagers, after all.
But Summer says the changes she has witnessed in the young people they’ve hosted to date, and the relationships she has developed, transcended her discomfort. “If they have a safe space at a moment of crisis,” Summer came to realise, “their whole life forward could be different. It could be positive. They could be allowed to be these wonderful young people that they are.”
‘Emergency housing isn’t working’
Several weeks later, Hendry took us to see another part of his vision for resolving Auckland’s youth homelessness crisis, at a former backpacker hostel near Queen St.
The 46-room, seven-floor building owned by a property developer is currently operating as emergency housing for adults and families. Hendry wants to reinvent it as a 24/7 hub for homeless rangatahi.
In Hendry’s telling, while there are various community initiatives to support people without housing, there are very few dedicated specifically to under-25s with high and complex needs. The facility he envisages — he calls it “The Front Door” — would provide short-term accommodation to around 50 people every night in that cohort, along with easy access to healthcare, counselling, financial advice, and other social services.
“We know that emergency housing isn’t working,” Hendry says. “Using hotels to put really vulnerable young people in is not a good plan. They’re being traumatised. They’re being harmed. They don’t have the support. Often, we see in those situations we’re sustaining homelessness rather than preventing it.
“We believe that by creating one space where young people can come and get full wraparound support and be held in a safe manner, we can disrupt that pathway into homelessness.”
Hendry reckons he could help 1500 youths every year at such a facility — all he needs is $2 million to get it up and running.
There have been promising conversations with potential donors, but raising that much money isn’t easy when you’re a fledgling organisation in an overlooked sector. “We haven’t had anyone come to the table yet,” he says.
For now, Hendry is talking to Auckland Council and local service providers about setting up a less ambitious pop-up space for homeless youths in the central city, without the accommodation facilities. And he continues to develop the Safety Net scheme in West Auckland, one host home at a time.
Not long ago, the Hendrys and Taylors moved out of the West Harbour property and into separate homes in West Auckland. With both families growing fast, they decided that each needed their own space — although for both that remains an expansive and fluid concept. Mills is still living with the Hendrys, now a permanent part of the family. And she is not the only one. Since moving they have already sheltered two other young people who had no other place to go.
Alex Spence is a senior investigative journalist based in Auckland. Before joining the Herald, he spent 17 years in London where he worked for The Times, Politico, and BuzzFeed News. He can be reached at alex.spence@nzme.co.nz or by text or secure Signal messaging at 0272358834.