State home boost ‘a start’
Nelson will get seven new state houses but social agencies say many more are needed.
Housing Minister Phil Twyford has announced that up to 155 new state houses would be built across New Zealand’s regions by June this year.
The top of the south will get 20 new state houses, with 13 in Marlborough and seven in Nelson.
Nelson Tasman Housing Trust director Carrie Mozena said while she applauded the new Government for paying more attention to housing, the new houses on the way for Nelson wouldn’t make ‘‘enough of a difference’’.
She understood the government intended to increase Housing New Zealand funding.
‘‘On the one hand that’s helpful to, over time, grow the supply of social housing, but it does nothing to address the need for more affordable rental housing for people who struggle to pay rental costs but who don’t qualify for social housing,’’ she said.
‘‘We need the focus to be not just on social housing, but also on affordable rental housing.’’
Mozena said those more affordable rentals were needed, particularly for seasonal workers in the Nelson area.
In 2017, the Nelson Tasman Housing Trust received more than 300 calls and inquiries from people seeking both social and affordable housing.
The trust has 44 houses, some allocated for social housing and the remainder as affordable rentals, and Mozena said they had ‘‘ maybe six’’ vacancies each year.
Nelson’s new homes, to be built by Housing New Zealand, include a mixture of one and two-bedroom homes on Kawai Street South, Waimea Road and Kawai Street.
Housing New Zealand spokesperson Paul Clearwater said the new initiative would make better use of existing land.
‘‘This involves building a number of ‘infill’ houses in Nelson and Blenheim, which are homes that are built on existing Housing New Zealand properties that have sufficient space,’’ he said.
‘‘We are also building on one vacant land site in Nelson, Kawai Street, which is owned by Housing New Zealand.’’
Nelson Salvation Army Captain Kenneth Walker said it was ‘‘good news’’ for the region as the need for state houses wasn’t getting any less.
‘‘We would be encouraging the Government to invest more into that sector because it’s been a long while since we’ve seen movement on that sort of large scale,’’ he said.
‘‘Regions like ours haven’t seen a lot of money into that sort of infrastructure,’’ he said.
The Salvation Army worked with people on a ‘‘daily basis’’ who had diffi- culties finding suitable accommodation, so there was evidence Nelson could use even more state houses.
‘‘But the new houses will make a difference to seven families, so think about that, that is a big difference [to those families].’’
Former Labour candidate for Nelson Rachel Boyack, who has been recently elected to the Labour Party’s Policy Council, said Twyford was ‘‘slowly putting his foot on the accelerator’’.
Nelson should expect more announcements over the coming year.
‘‘This is a fantastic start, but it still is just a start,’’ Boyack said.
‘‘We’re going to need more, but I think it’s extremely exciting that within four months of Labour taking office, we’ve already announced new builds in Nelson.’’
She said the Labour government had promised a thousand state house-builds for each year of their first term in government, and this was just the first 155 to be rolled out nationally.
There was also work being done behind-the-scenes on Labour’s KiwiBuild programme aimed at increasing affordable housing stock.
‘‘We should expect some KiwiBuild houses in Nelson. We’ve got to tackle the housing issue from multiple angles, it’s not just one silver bullet,’’ she said.
Nelson MP Nick Smith, former Housing Minister, said while he welcomed the investment of seven further state houses in Nelson, the Government could not claim they were new.
Smith said some were already ‘‘in the pipeline’’, with the units on Waimea Rd already ‘‘ticked off’’ by the previous National government.
‘‘It’s also a bit of an overstatement to claim they are new when, for instance, those on Waimea Rd are just replacing a house that recently burnt down and was always on the schedule for replacement,’’ he said.
‘‘What the new government has turned into an art form, is repackaging previous government programmes as though they are new.’’
However, he said he was ‘‘not sensitive’’ about whether the homes were ticked off by National or Labour.
‘‘The important thing is that more houses are being built.’’
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