Auckland councillors are calling on the government to take action over the growing homelessness problem in the city.
Outreach providers say there has been a 90 percent increase in homelessness in Auckland since September last year, after the government tightened up emergency housing eligibility rules.
The council’s Community Committee wants the government to work with frontline agencies and make sure they are using up-to-date data when dealing with the issue.
“No one I know wants to see Kiwis living without shelter, and we’re very concerned with the level of rough sleeping and people in cars, and in tents and other things, including in Auckland,” Associate Minister for Housing Tama Potaka told Morning Report on Wednesday.
Community Committee chair, Councillor Angela Dalton, told Checkpoint on Tuesday recent government policy changes had “made it harder for people to access emergency housing”, as had declining people deemed to have contributed to their own lack of accommodation.
“I think there’s some policies that have been changed that show a lack of compassion because they are making assumptions that people are not trying hard enough.”
Potaka said there were “a lot of contributing factors and causes” behind the rise in homelessness.
“There’s a number of things that this government is doing, whether or not it’s the build program, making sure we build another 500 social homes in Auckland, Māori housing, Kainga Ora, 1500 new homes with chips, resetting the housing system. You would have heard us talking about granny flats and enabling those… and I look forward to the council actually supporting those actions.”
Potaka said he had “directed officials to identify some potential target interventions and understand the utilisation rates across transitional housing first, and other support programmes, to make sure we’re getting the right utilisation of programmes.
“We’re also liaising with a lot of those providers like Strive, Auckland City Mission… and a whole range of others in Auckland.”
He said there was “different data”, and “a bit of ambiguity” around how a recent Salvation Army report came to the conclusion there had been a 386 percent rise in people denied help because they had contributed to their own homelessness.
“It’s very hard to attribute one particular cause… You can’t attribute [the rise] just to a policy change. There’s a range of causes, and one of the biggest ones, of course, is disconnection with families and with whanau – and that’s one of the biggest contributors to people sleeping rough.”
Ministry of Social Development (MSD) said in June 36 percent of applications for emergency housing were declined, mostly often “because their need can be met in another way”, according to group general manager enablement Karen Hocking.
Of those declined emergency housing because it was deemed they had contributed to their own homelessness, Potaka said two-thirds still got some form of assistance.
“Overall, the vast majority of people, between 85 percent and 90 percent who apply for emergency housing, get some sort of support for emergency housing.”
He would not detail what actions could be considered as contributing to one’s own homelessness.
“There could be a range of circumstances. I’m not going to go into the various types of circumstances that can emerge, but sometimes people do that…
“There’s a responsibility framework that goes with emergency housing. People who have a genuine need for short-term temporary accommodation in most big towns and cities in New Zealand, there is support, but there is a responsibility framework that goes with it.
“For example, you have to undertake some training when you’re in emergency housing around budgeting and other things, or getting ready to rent. There’s a whole bunch of programmes within the emergency housing framework that are in place to support people to transition out and get to a place which they can stay in a more enduring manner than emergency housing – a catastrophe we all know about.”
MSD’s Hocking gave some examples, however.
“We have some concerns that the data used by the National Homelessness Data Project does not adequately reflect the support we are providing New Zealanders,” she added.
Potaka said rather than just government, it was “actually a whole lot of society that’s responsible” for solving the issue, including “councils, whanau, iwi Māori, charitable organisations”.
“We’ve got a huge build programme that’s in place right now around community housing providers, and a range of others who are actually building homes that hopefully will be suitable for those that have got serious housing deprivation – whether or not that’s on the street or people on the social housing waitlist, which, by the way, has come down about 5000 families since we got into administration.”
Opposition parties have blamed the rise on homelessness on the government’s policies.
