Trailers in a caravan park.
OPINION
They say that desperate times call for desperate measures. But who exactly gets to measure that desperation?
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but New Zealand’s in the midst of a housing crisis. It’s been dire for at least half a decade now, by my reckoning.
Journalists have been reporting for years about the increasing cost of both buying and renting a home and the resulting shortage of homes available for renting and buying. And that has resulted in large numbers of people living in unstable housing situations.
There seem to be more traditional homeless people living on our streets; it’s not uncommon to see people sleeping outside shop doorways or to be walking near a park and see a tent hidden among the trees.
We also have the hidden homeless – the people who may have a roof over their heads, but that roof may be temporary, unsafe, unhealthy and/or overcrowded. They are couch surfing, living in their cars, cramming their families into relatives’ garages, or living in a caravan parked on a friend’s land.
Then there are the people living in motels and other emergency housing situations, at a sometimes ginormous cost to the taxpayer.
They’re all unstable housing conditions, even if these people technically have a roof over their heads.
There is work under way to alleviate the stresses of our housing crisis; there are new Kāinga Ora developments popping up all over the place, for example.
But the fact is that we don’t have enough homes for all our people. And building homes takes time, land and infrastructure. Don’t get me wrong, it is the right thing to do, but it’s a long-term fix for a problem that also needs short-term solutions.
What do we do in the meantime? Do we allow these unstable housing situations to continue as they are while we work on the long-term fix? Or do we find another way?
Tauranga iwi Ngāi Te Rangi has an idea to import and sell affordable three-bedroom transportable homes from the US and eventually build their own in Rotorua.
The homes would cost between $150,000 and $170,000.
If the iwi were able to build a factory in Rotorua to manufacture the buildings, it could construct about 45 homes a month, or about 540 a year.
That’s pretty amazing. It has the potential to alleviate a lot of pressure during this housing crisis. For example, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development said last month there were 500 households in the Bay of Plenty receiving support to transition into long-term housing.
Of course, not all those 500 households would be able to move into a transportable home, but those figures are enough to glimpse the impact transportable homes could have.
What I’d be interested to know is where these homes may end up being placed. Two or three on a section in town is one thing; a large “trailer park” is quite another altogether.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against the idea of a trailer park.
I’ve seen pictures online of some nice ones in America in which each mobile home is placed on its own (small) individually-fenced section of land at a reasonable distance from its neighbours. Some have even been done up to look like villages with paved roads and street lights. That actually sounds pretty cool.
A cluster of well-kept, well-maintained transportable homes on a tract of land is, to me, not a heck of a lot different than building a block of units or flats.
Ngāi Te Rangi has suggested parking transportable homes on Māori-owned land. I think that’s a great idea, particularly as a way to allow Māori of Ngāi Te Rangi to reconnect with their whenua [land], whakapapa [ancestry], and cultural identity.
It seems a neat solution.
But not everyone will see transportable homes as an affordable way to get people into the property market.
I fear others will simply see dollar signs – and I think that is a real danger.
Overseas, trailer parks are a profitable business.
There’s story after story in American news outlets of corporations buying existing parks and exponentially increasing rents. Tenants are then left with the choice of finding a way to make up that difference or finding another place to live. Hard when trailer parks are already the cheapest option.
I can easily see something similar happening here. We’d be at risk of trapping disadvantaged people into poverty forever.
But is it a risk worth taking?
We need more roofs over more heads - that’s a simple fact.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. But we need to ensure those desperate measures don’t breed more desperate times.
Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.