Warm beds for rough sleepers

One of the best things is that it’s not party political

There was excitement at the Auckland City Mission on Wednesday and it wasn’t all because Jacinda Ardern had turned up to announce more beds for drug and alcohol detox.

Those beds will be on the third and fourth floors of a building that doesn’t yet exist. But it soon will. More than 10 years after City Missioner Diane Robertson unveiled her dream of a new multi-storey block on Hobson St to cater for people living on the streets, it’s finally about to happen.

This is great for Auckland’s rough sleepers and it’s great for the city, and not just because of the extra beds. The project will allow the mission to provide integrated, wraparound services for some of the city’s most vulnerable people. There’s good science behind the approach and the outcomes are likely to be long term.

Stevens Lawson Architects won a competition to design the Mission HomeGround complex on Hobson St back in 2007. But the global financial crisis got in the way.

In 2015, after years of slow funding progress and no building progress at all, Robertson retired from the mission. There were fears the project would disappear with her. But architect Nick Stevens was at the po¯whiri for the new city missioner, Chris Farrelly, next door at St Matthew-in-theCity, and he got in Farrelly’s ear.

It wasn’t a hard sell: Farrelly was keen to get the thing built and told him so. Then in August 2017 the National-led Government pumped in an extra $18 million and the City Mission felt confident enough to announce the project would start by the middle of the following year. But they were still $40m — more than half — short of the estimated $75m cost. Foundation North was the next to sign up, with a $10m grant, the largest in its 30-year history, announced in October last year.

The new detox beds have added a floor to the design and that’s helped push the cost to $85m. But with Ardern announcing an extra $16.5m for the detox unit, Farrelly says the mission now has $66m committed. A new campaign to secure the balance will be