Homelessness in NZ: Advocates call for better solutions to tackle a national crisis

trying to tackle this crisis, turns three years old. But that's just one location in one city trying to get on top of a national problem. Later we'll speak to ends at Herald senior writer Simon Wilson about Home Ground and how it's working. But first on the Front Page, we'll talk with University of Otago research professor and co leader of hey Kyanga Uranga Housing and Health Research Program, Nevill Pious, about how we could solve this crisis. First off, Neville,

how bad is the homelessness issue in New Zealand. It's pretty hard to kind of get concrete numbers, isn't it.

females as we have males. We have more children homeless than most other comparable countries, and we have a hugely disproportionate number of Maori homeless. We have homelessness up and down the country, but it's particularly acute in our main metro areas, so I'd describe it as it's not unknown,

it's a crisis. I can see people, unfortunately on my way to work, living on the street, and there are lots of people in emergency housing, lots of people who need to be in emergency housing, but all of those people need to be in permanent shelter. So we have a homelessness crisis in your deal.

You have no control over where you're going to be living long term. You have no ability to kind of set down permanent routes. In academia, we call it a sense of onological security, but it's that sense of this my home, this is where I am. If you don't have that, you're homeless, and unfortunately far too many people have that in New Zealand. The answer to homelessness, I suggest, is housing people and giving them that sense of security.

So having some ability to have some choice in where you stay and what your home is, so as you can put down routes there, you feel stable there and you can go on with building the other things in your life that you need to build on. If you're worried about the roof over your head and where you're going to be tonight, next week, or in a few weeks time, or even a few months time, then if that's the major stressor, then you're homeless. That's the New

Zealand definition of homelessness. It's a pretty internationally accepted definition of homelessness. I think we know how many people are homeless then, so we break it down. Our responses are broken down into categories, and that's how the categories come about. In New Zealand, we have a scheme for emergency housing, which is where we put people up for a few weeks. In some places we still have night shelters where we

put people up for a night. We have transitional housing, which is really just housing people for a few months, and then we have permanent social housing, which is mostly Kayango Aura but also with a community housing provider system. We have the Accommodation Supplement, which subsidizes people's rental housing and tries to make people afford the rental. Unfortunately, a

lot of those don't work. The system doesn't work in the system has quite a few gaps in it, but we do know that the answer, and a lot of my research has focused on, Hey, when we move people into the permanent end of that. Where we move people so is that they're permanently housed in either Kyang or Aura with community housing providers or in the private rental sector, then you start to start to see dramatic improvements. So from people who've been sleeping rough with mental health and

other problems. You see that you see over twelve months. If you can get people well housed, permanently housed and supported, you start to see this dramatic improvement in mental health, with their need for mental health services going down about sixty to eighty percent. You start to see how people improve in their lives. Their income starts to go up. Firstly, we get them on the right benefit and they're getting all the benefits they're entitled to, so their income goes up.

Then their interactions with their police offending goes down, their interactions with the criminal system goes down, and finally, after five years later, we start to see dramatic improvements in health as they are stably housed and get to deal with all their issues. But it is that the answer

to everybody is long term sustainable housing. Unfortunately, many of the categories we try to put people in are coming from our responses that are for short term, limited stays that don't really solve the problem.

permanent housing, that's there. If that need is to sustain your tendency so as it doesn't break, then they'll solve that. If the need is the underlying need is a mental health crisis, they'll put you in touch with mental health and get that. But we do have we have a very broken housing market and we have a support system with a lot of gaps in it and a lot of holes. We're not so in Finland they've gotten up to twenty five percent social housing in New Zealand where

sing along at four point two percent social housing. So we just we we're not building enough social houses. We've gone from playing or recently under the previous government was building about fifteen hundred a year, which probably wasn't enough, and now they're talking about getting it down to zero as a total. So we need to We do need to build more houses. We need to think long term

about it. But we also need a system that works, and we need to make sure that when people go to support for MSD that that support is it is appropriate for what their need is, and that they're treated. They're treated for what the people they are. Everybody's a person, they need to be treated as such and that they're given good advice.

housing support. Now, is there a misconception that, Okay, yay, it's gone from four thousand to five hundred, But where of those yeah, where have those three thousand, five hundred people gone?

with friends or family. So I need has been so the emergency housing was is a temporary trying to have a solution. But rather than reducing the wait list by reducing the amount of people in emergency housing by getting people into permanent housing, we've just said we've just made it much harder to get the emergency housing benefit. There are much newer emergency housing beds available and ms D is treating people much worse as they come into MSD. It is much harder to get through the MSD system

to get an emergency housing benefit than it was. And those are the policy choices that have been enacted by the government, and they're very clear about it. It's a policy choice to reduce the emergency housing and to make it much harder to get.

forms when I'm trying to help people. It's really tricky, and there the help that's available to do this and to get the information right and to assess people's need isn't there. The emergency housing wait list is separated into categories. It's ABCD are the top level categories, and those are what we try howse so are what theoretically we could house. And then within that you're given a grade, so from a twenty one all the way down to a one.

So a twenty one is the very highest need with no income, sleeping on the streets for a long time, or very high history of mental health needs, several children, dependence in utter prices of life and debt, and so we've gone from housing from a we used house pretty consistently A twenty one to about a thirteen, and now we're only housing A twenty one through a seventeen. So we're of those people that are that we'd like to be supporting on the wait list all the way from

A twenty one down to D one. We're only housing that really tiny fraction in that real crisis. And that's the only way you get on the weight lift. That they've restricted access to getting on the weight list because there isn't enough housing, but also by making it trickier to get people on and to get your assessment needs so high that you're clearly an utter crisis.

eight percent. When we looked at a cohort of people who were sleeping rough on the street and were housed by the People's Project, most of those had been paying taxes in the years before they were homeless, and after they were housed, about five years later, they were paying substantially more tax To be honest with you, I kind of go we're always all of us are only one

big mental health crisis away from being homeless. Whether that's a trauma where you get hit in the back of the heads, something falls out of the sky and hits you in the back of the head, it can be enough to throw your life out and if you were we have a related mental health a shortage of mental health services. If you I think life is tricky enough and most people are tight enough that if things fall over you will wind up homeless in New Zealand and it is a really we make the system really hard

to navigate. So yeah, I feel it's unfair to those people and those individuals who are homeless to blame them when the system is so badly set up and it doesn't do what it should what it should be trying to do. It's not achieving what it's what we should be achieving.

If we are able to help people ensure people aren't living in an emergency, that they don't trans and beck into emergency house in which, as you know, in my view, very catastrophic for they are in health or being, but it's also quite costly.

We're relying on the Salvation Army and other NGOs to pick up a lot of slack that's made by a decision to reduce emergency housing in MSD and to make that git harder to get through. We have a very hard gate to get through for that permanent housing that we know really really works and really impost people lives and is most cost effective on that weight list. And of course getting on the weight list isn't the answer. You need to get off the weight list and be

permanently housed. We are investing more money in transitional housing, but transitional housing to where our private rental market is broken to make up the gap. The accommodation supplement is woefully inefficient and the ineffective at making up that gap for those who could be in the private rental sector

but aren't. So the government isn't doing enough. They don't have their systems talking to each other, and particularly around MSD, who controls a lot of this system, and they don't really they don't have a plan that they're trying to implement. We have what we still haven't right now, but the government isn't listening to the previous Homelessness Action Plan, which is all about getting people into permanent stable housing. So

we know what the answer is. We're just don't seem to be working at it, and we're making it harder for people to get in the gate. That's why some of those lists are going down. It's not because we're seeing less people homeless or that the NGOs have to help less people. It's because we've made the system harder to approach. We've made a system more complicated.

What used to happen is that social services would say to them, if you stop drinking or if you stop doing the drugs, we will find somewhere for you to live now, but you've got to be clean and you've got to look after yourself, and on it goest it didn't work because these are very traumatized people and very often their substance abuse or their mental health issues are a product of the trauma, and they're the hardest thing

for them to deal with. So housing first says, but if we give people something somewhere that is safe to live, it's warm and dry, then with that housing need taken care of first, we can then wrap the services they need around them in order to rebuild their lives. So we can provide medical help psychological help. We can feed them, we can do we can give them vocational training, we can do outreach program so we can do all sorts of things.

and me ordinary people. So I interviewed three of them for a story I've got coming out in the Herald, and the three I interviewed one of them as a PhD. Very bright guy. Obviously, he's contributed to social research in New Zealand. He is now at homegun. He's eighty two years old now. Lovely, lovely man, very smart, very dry wit. When you're talking to him, he throws jokes at you to see if you get them. That kind of thing.

It's fantastic. So that was terrific to meet him. I met a couple of women who were very close friends and had known each other for thirty years. But apart from that relationship, they neither of them had women friends. They just weren't interested in having women friends. Didn't trust them, and they were both had a history of being abused physically abused by their partners, and also a history of drugs.

They both left home when they were teenagers and got seriah actually into a drug culture and didn't quite manage to get themselves out until much much later, decades later. I had somewhere. They said, look, I'd be dead, I'd be dead if it wasn't for this place. And you kind of believe them. It offered them a way to sort themselves out, as they say, and that was working.

But there are others, so a lot of those people will be and might find a common in those other places boarding houses or whatever, or they are sleeping rough. City Mission runs a facility that's only for women, so for women who basically just are traumatized by the presence of men. Now it's been so bad for them, so they secure there and gradually they'll kind of move into a more mixed society if you like they as they heal themselves. Homelessness comes and goes with the economic times.

One of the ironies for Auckland, as for cities all over the world where there are facilities, is that homeless people will migrate to that city. If you're homeless in fung Erra, it's harder than if you're homeless in Auckland, because there are social services to help you that are better developed here than they're just not say they're not developed there. So that's an issue. I would say that the days of walking down Queen Street and feeling that, gosh,

is this safe places? Is the clean place? Is this okay for all of us, I'd say that that's much less issue now than it used to be. That's my perception of it. I don't have any statistical evidence for it, but I go there a lot, and I go there in the evenings and an item as well as the day, and it does seem to me that it's a it's a better place all round now because there are more people doing all sorts of things.