It’s the playground of the rich and famous - a bolthole for American billionaires and a luxury escape for visiting celebrities.
But for the locals who pull pints, wait tables and keep Queenstown’s tourism businesses running, the resort town’s rental crisis is growing more desperate by the day.
Residents are sleeping in their cars while business owners house their staff and homes in the area lie empty “for months”.
The mayor says the council is working as fast as it can to help, adding it will have to “step up” to help fix the immediate need.
Protests formed at the start of this week, putting names and faces to the claims that finding a rental is proving more challenging.
One hundred people gathered at the waterfront last Tuesday, rallied by Lindsay Waterfield and Hannah Sullivan - who is also homeless, and wanted residents to realise they were not alone.
“There are hundreds more, this is not okay,” said Waterfield.
Among the “hundreds more” is Jacob*, a tourism worker in the heart of Queenstown who sleeps on memory foam in his car and cooks his meals on a gas cooker.
Jacob had spent a year living in the town before flying to the UK for a month, returning to find he’d been handed a nine-day eviction notice for his rental.
“They said they wanted to do renovations, but instead, they moved a whole family of eight into the house,” he said.
For the past three weeks, Jacob has lived out of his five-seater car while he tries to find long-term accommodation. Attempting to do this while working full-time is proving a challenge.
And at 1.8 metres tall, sleeping on outstretched memory foam in his car isn’t easy.
Overnight temperatures in Queenstown recently plummeted - he bundled up in layers as the mercury dropped to 0C on Tuesday night.
“I have a friend who’s been living out of his car for three months. He has a camping table to eat off and camps off the side of the road,” he said.
“It affects your mentality and work ethic. You want to give 100 per cent every day, but you can’t do it without knowing where you’re going to cook or shower - you feel worthless.”
The average weekly rent in the Queenstown-Lakes District, according to the latest data from economists at Infometrics, is $527 - compared to $501 across the whole country.
And rental prices in the area have been growing more than the national average nearly every year since 2014.
Average rents were up by 10.8 per cent in 2016, 16 per cent in 2017, 7.4 per cent in 2018, and 9.6 per cent in 2019, before Covid lockdowns and border closures hit the tourism hotspot. When New Zealand began courting international visitors again, rents jumped back up by 6.9 per cent - more than the 6.6 per cent national average.
But it’s the lack of supply that has made life so tough for Jacob, who says he applies for accommodation almost daily - without success.
Hostels were supposed to be entering a quiet season for the year, but many across the town still have no occupancy, and those that do will only allow up to four days of housing at a time.
“You’ve got to stay positive, but it’s hard to constantly message about rooms when [the landlords] have hundreds of messages to look through,” said Jacob.
“When you send something, they tell you they’ve got 400 messages to look through first. Everybody is in the same situation.”
As Jacob reflects on the city-wide crisis, his mind casts back to the suburb he used to rent in, full of homes that, according to him, were usually seen unoccupied.
He said roughly half of the houses in the surrounding areas would lie empty for the bulk of the week, while others, he said, would be vacant for months without use.
Census data in 2018 showed 27 per cent of homes in Queenstown Lakes District were marked unoccupied, according to local MP Joseph Mooney.
“You walk past these houses and ask yourself if there’s somebody we could speak to about all their empty properties,” he said.
“But they’re probably on the other side of the world. So something needs to change.”
Rental availability is also putting the squeeze on businesses operating out of the town.
The lack of housing options for visa workers or those relocating for work leaves employers vulnerable to their staff walking off the job after merely months of work.
When Geoff, the manager of a franchise restaurant in the town centre, discovered this issue, he was forced to welcome two of his staff into his home.
“It’s the only way to retain staff,” he said.
“It intrudes on our home life and it’s hard on the workers, living with their boss - it’s a bit of a squeeze in our three-bedroom home.”
The restaurant manager cooks dinners for his homestay employees and has toyed with the idea of buying a campervan to house more staff.
But Geoff accepts the ridiculousness of the situation.
“You train them, spend money on them and go through the onboarding process, but they’ve got nowhere to live,” he said.
“The first question every employer in the city asks now is, ‘Do you have a place to stay?’, as it’s just too much of a risk taking on anybody who doesn’t.”
Limited housing choices have caused staff shortages, which Geoff said depletes local businesses from giving tourists the New Zealand experience they deserve.
“The service is poor, tourists complain, so it gives Queenstown and New Zealand a bad name. Some businesses can’t provide service after 10pm because they don’t have the staff numbers, which is detrimental to everyone.”
Desperate workers in Queenstown have also resorted to asking real estate agents if they can stay in vacant houses the agents are marketing for sale.
Tall Poppy Queenstown owner and real estate agent Keeley Anderson said she was receiving daily calls from people asking if they could stay in the vacant properties she was selling.
“People are seeing the listings on Trade Me and are so desperate, they’re getting creative in figuring out how to try to house themselves.
“They see photos of a vacant home and try their luck by asking. I can understand why when people are living in tents or in emergency accommodation.”
The Queenstown Citizens Advice Bureau has fielded visits from residents citing rental problems “every day”.
Half of the respondents to a poll released by the bureau said they’d had their rent increased between 20 per cent and 40 per cent in recent months, and chief Tracy Pool told NZME the number of car-dwelling residents is significant.
“One of our volunteers went to dinner, and the waitress she was served by was living in her car, coming to work and showering at the restaurant,” she said.
“They’re not insane stories, it’s just what’s happening. It’s really sad.”
Weighing hard on Pool’s shoulders is the short-term issue of climate, as March turns to April and the winter chills begin to approach.
Asking what happens when winter arrives and people still can’t find places to live, Pool would like a shelter for the winter.
She claims the thought might be from “la-la land”, but knows the working homeless don’t have access to critical winter needs.
“I want them to have a hot shower, be fed a meal and have a mattress on the floor, marae-style,” she said.
“Do I think that can happen in this sort of town? No, I don’t. Because nobody will put up their hand and admit there’s a problem.”
National MP for Southland Joseph Mooney blamed policy settings that made it “unattractive to be a landlord”.
He said the rental price dilemma is not unique to Queenstown, an area that he said has struggled with renting issues for decades.
“The Government has waged war on landlords, which had exacerbated the problem. It’s less attractive to be a landlord as a result.
“Twenty-seven per cent of homes in the Lakes District are unoccupied. If just some became available to the rental market, that could be 800 beds. Changing some of what Labour has done around landlords would definitely help.”
Minister of Housing Megan Woods hit back at Mooney’s “war on landlords” claim, calling it a “nonsense slogan”.
She agreed with Mooney that the rental crisis was decades in the making, but said the Labour Government was delivering new homes.
Labour had built 300 new homes in Queenstown while in office, including 105 for first-home buyers.
“While there is much more work needed to solve the crisis, we are seeing green shoots of change,” Woods said.
Queenstown Mayor Glyn Lewers said the rental crisis is high on the council’s agenda.
The Lakes District Council is busily trying to work out how to free up available rooms or properties.
“We’re one of the very few districts in the country that has grown during the pandemic, and now with the influx of more people coming in, plus the bounce-back of tourism being quite pronounced, the rental tightness of the market is probably more to the forefront than ever,” he said.
“As a council, we are definitely working on medium to long-term solutions, we’re just going to have to step up on that immediate need.”
The Queenstown Citizens Advice Bureau’s Pool said change couldn’t come quick enough for the people of Queenstown, but admits the full extent of the city’s homeless population is still unclear.
Getting employment in the area is easy, but finding a place to live... “not so easy”.
“We don’t know the numbers of people [who are homeless], so we have to start - not door-knocking, but car-knocking - to work out how bad that problem is,” she said.
“Or, we wait until somebody dies in their car.”
Additional reporting from the Otago Daily Times. Name* has been changed for privacy reasons.
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