In Auckland, there has been a 53%
increase in rough sleeping since late last year.
Manaaki Rangatahi aims to end youth homelessness in Aotearoa New Zealand.
CEO Bianca Johanson told The Front Page that young people don’t have any front-facing information available to them at the moment.
“If you are a young person in Aotearoa tonight, and you’re homeless, there is nowhere for you to go. There’s no housing, there never has been,” Johanson said.
“You can’t actually have a tenancy agreement if you are 18 and under. Many of our rangitahi [youth] who come into supported youth housing, and youth housing specifically, are under 20.
“If you’re a young person, say you are in Auckland, there’s an MSD [Ministry of Social Development office] on Queen Street. For you to make it to Queen Street, make it to the reception desk, they’ll ask you to go to a youth payment provider. Those are the people who usually pick up young people who are experiencing their first bout of homelessness or housing insecurity.
“The nearest youth payment provider to Queen Street is in Epsom. So they’re expected to, without any income, without usually an AT [Auckland Transport] Hop card, to go all the way to Epsom to get that kind of support.
“There are a lot of gaps in the system that rangitahi can fall down and this is what we are very, very concerned about at Manaaki Rangitahi.
“Too many of our young people are falling down the gaps, and while they’re falling down the gaps, they get into really unsafe situations because they are the most vulnerable out there in that kind of street community.”
Johanson said there needs to be a national, cross-party youth strategy.
“I had one of the ministers say to me, ‘If I gave you $30 million, what would you do?’. It’s not just about increasing the youth housing supply, because we could build 5000 more houses tomorrow, and that’s not going to do everything.
“Yes, the housing supply is really important, but we need to have a strategy as a country. We need to look at putting funding into prevention. We need to have research and data. There are a whole lot of things that we could do in terms of healing for our young people,” she said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
- Barriers to accessing help;
- The lack of youth housing and shelters;
- Cuts to funding;
- The policy and legal changes needed.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
