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Overcrowding is on the rise again in Auckland as sky-high housing costs force families to double up or live in garages to make ends meet.
An analysis by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet has found that the region's population grew 12.4 per cent in the
five years up to the 2006 Census, but the number of homes grew by only 11.2 per cent.
The result was a shortfall of 4202 homes compared with the number that would have been needed to keep the average 2001 ratio of 2.6 people in each home.
Manukau City alone accounted for more than half the total shortfall, bringing an abrupt end to a long-term trend towards reduced overcrowding.
Social agencies said rent increases, which averaged 7.1 per cent across the country in the past year in a Massey University survey published on Tuesday, were driving families to stay with relatives or live in garages.
Mangere budget adviser Darryl Evans said some families were paying rents of up to $495 a week for a three-bedroom house in Mangere.
"We have so many families where there are multiple families in the home," he said.
Salvation Army social worker Esteban Espinoza said rents for three-bedroom houses in Manurewa were now running at $400 to $450 a week.
"It's just become a pretty sad joke, the amount of people unable to pay their rentals, even with all the subsidies - especially if they have children," he said.
"We keep coming across overcrowded housing that is the signal of people trying to stay off rentals. They have to think of at least $1500 to be able to move into a place."
Elaine Lolesio of Monte Cecilia House said she was finding three-bedroom homes in Mangere and Otara for clients at $350 a week "in areas that are unsafe".
"When you have no options for housing in the state housing sector, that's what you are forced into.
"The tenancies are often for a very short time because they can't pay the high rentals," she said. "They then move into garages or overcrowding. It's almost the same as we saw in the 1990s [when Housing NZ charged market rents for state houses]."
Mr Evans will chair a housing workshop at a "South Auckland community forum" to be chaired by Prime Minister Helen Clark at the Tongan Methodist Church in Mangere today.
Housing Minister Maryan Street and four other Cabinet ministers are also attending.
On a national basis, Census figures showed a steady reduction in the proportion of people living in overcrowded households, based on a Canadian measure of a healthy number of people per bedroom, from 13 per cent in 1986 to 10 per cent in 2001. The improvement stopped in 2006 when the figure stuck at 10 per cent.
Manukau City now has by far the country's highest level of household crowding, at 14 per cent in 2006. The next highest is Opotiki (10 per cent), followed by Auckland City, Porirua and Kawerau (all 9 per cent).
Crowding levels actually stayed the same or continued to fall in 63 of the country's 73 local body areas in the five years to 2006, including Waitakere and Franklin in the Auckland region.
But overcrowding worsened in the other five Auckland districts (Manukau, North Shore, Auckland City, Rodney and Papakura) and in five other districts (Christchurch, Dunedin, Hamilton, Queenstown-Lakes and Ashburton).
Official figures for average rents, based on tenancy bonds lodged with the Department of Building and Housing in the five months to the end of February, show three-bedroom houses now average $340 a week in both Mangere and Otara and $320 a week in Manurewa, compared with a national average of $300.
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