Hard knocks: living on the edge in the big city
Auckland will try to find out the extent of its homelessness problem when it conducts a rough-sleepers’ census next month. On one night in the city, Stuff reporters found the people – and their stories – of homelessness across the city.
Slumped in a shop doorway, on a brightly lit main street, plastic cup for loose change. There’s your stereotypical rough sleeper, right there.
If you had to do it, it makes some sort of sense to sleep rough in the city. Some sort of safety in numbers. Higher foot traffic for begging. More services – free food, voluntary agencies, hostels, night shelters – close by. A ready-made community.
And yet, in Auckland, it’s clear rough sleeping has moved well beyond Queen St and can be found many kilometres north and south.
Frontline voluntary organisations like LifeWise, VisionWest and LinkPeople have all noticed a surge in suburban rough sleepers – and their local communities have too, says Housing First Auckland’s project manager, Fiona Hamilton.
She says the city’s increasing poverty, inequality, and its hostile housing market are key drivers of the homeless spread. Difficulty accessing addiction and mental health services also contributes.
‘‘When you’re economically unstable it’s much harder to withstand knocks; the impact is so much harder,’’ Hamilton says.
The Salvation Army’s Alan Johnson says numbers of rough sleepers have worsened over the past three to five years due to Auckland’s housing market and drug proliferation. ‘‘The run-down and evertightening rental market literally squeezes people out of houses and on to the street,’’ he says. ‘‘Then there’s addiction to methamphetamine and synthetic cannabis – these drugs make people simply unable to sustain a tenancy, or even relationships with their families.’’
The spread has been enough to prompt mayor Phil Goff to sponsor a comprehensive rough sleepers’ count, something regularly conducted elsewhere, but not with such diligence or regularity in New Zealand.
Auckland Council estimates the number of homeless people in the city, based on figures in the last census, to have been 23,409 in 2017, while the 2016 Auckland City Mission count of rough sleepers within 3km of the Sky Tower found 177, and another 51 in emergency accommodation or hospital who would otherwise have been on the street. This is a rise of 50 per cent on the previous year.
Rough sleepers, of course, are just a fraction of those ‘‘precariously housed’’. To find a true figure you’ve got to include those in hostels, shelters, on mates’ couches or garages, in cars, vans and trucks. A 2017 study in Victoria, Australia, found just 6 per cent of the state’s homeless count were actually sleeping rough – and a much higher percentage of those were spread across the suburbs, not the CBD.
But rough sleepers are the public face of our growing homelessness problem.
The man whose time is up
Peter Kroon heaves himself down from the driver’s seat, and warns that he has a story, but it’s a long one. When he pulls off his beanie and eyepatch, it becomes clear he is telling the truth.
His tale combines inexcusable incompetence from medical authorities and unflinching parsimony from ACC – and it has left him here, in a hulking Isuzu truck, trying to contain his seething anger at the ‘‘audacity of ACC’’ and the ‘‘f...ing suits’’.
Peter was a roofer, earning, he says, about $200,000 a year, when they found a tiny cancer behind his right eyebrow. It was given the highest priority for treatment; but somehow his file got repeatedly shuffled to the bottom of the pile and five months later he had a golfball-sized tumour behind his eye socket. There’s no eye now, and no real cheekbone.
ACC said he couldn’t work again, and offered a full and final settlement of $131,000, a figure he bitterly regrets accepting: ‘‘It’s a miserable amount.’’
The deal meant he got no further compensation for the 15 further surgeries to come, the skin grafts, the headaches, the sinus pain, the post-traumatic stress, mental health issues, the chronic nerve pain causing blackouts, the morphine and opiate addictions (since kicked at a Nelson Bay yoga retreat).
It also meant no lawyer was willing to test it in court. ‘‘In America, I’d have lawyers banging down my door.’’
His five-year life expectancy postsurgery expires in December. He expects to beat it, and he’s still fighting, via various government bodies, a television appearance, a plan next year to walk the Te Araroa Trail for the Cancer Society and to publicise his story. It seems like something of an avenue for his frustration at not being able to work. ‘‘I come from the workforce; from real work with calluses on your hands.’’
One doctor asked him how it all felt. ‘‘Try to imagine yourself standing under a stormwater system,’’ he says, ‘‘and s... and p... poured over you all day and a Mack truck coming through every so often, bowling you over.’’
When Peter took the settlement from ACC, he had $60,000 of debt from a bad relationship hanging over him, and he was seduced by the chance to be free. What was left over bought him the truck.
Now he shuffles around each night; sometimes out west, sometimes in a mate’s driveway, sometimes where we find him, at Northcote’s Little Shoal Bay.
Amid a long list of places where locals have seen rough sleepers in the twin lower-shore suburbs of Birkenhead and Northcote, a few stand out for their beauty.
Whoever it was that pitched the little blue tent on the cliff face at Northcote Point, looking back over the harbour towards the Waitakere Ranges, found themselves literal multimillion-dollar views. Their nearest Queen St neighbour has a CV of $3.9m. The camper was there a few weeks, but gone shortly after a photo of the tent appeared on a local community Facebook page.
Around the coastline at Chelsea Heritage Park, someone has been seen camping in a field just before the bushline. All that remains was the ashes of a campfire, some empty Double Brown cans, and a sense that Goff’s rough sleep monitors will have a difficult task.
But at Little Shoal Bay, the night-time views of the harbour bridge are at their most magnificent, and the homeless are in full view – by 7pm, across the two car parks, five campervans of varying quality are already parked up for the night.
More will turn up later. Local board attempts to ban camping here have been futile.
Zee, two vans down from Peter, right beside the boat haulage yard, is affable, but whatever we are looking for, he doesn’t think he will fit the description.
He does accept he is among the precariously housed. Initially it was necessity – a relationship break-up left him homeless and penniless – but then, he says, he felt a sense of release, of freedom from paying bills, and now it is his choice. He has his thoughts about society, and our dependence on the money system, and he has a desire to be self-sufficient.
His new partner helped him buy his 4WD house-bus, and he is steadily upgrading it; solar power, a deep freeze, a chemical toilet.
Little Shoal Bay is a regular spot: quiet, convenient, no trouble. The boaties don’t mind him. ‘‘I am doing a service – of course, that’s the way I’d see it – because someone is camping here, and I am a bloke, and I am not small, so if anyone is causing trouble, I can make them scatter. I’d like that in the story – that responsible freedom campers are doing a service, because their mere presence stops trouble.’’
Zee knows some of the other regulars, though he mostly keeps to himself. From undoubtedly the best-appointed situation in the area, he can cast a practised eye over his neighbours.
‘‘Some are pretty rough: just vans, they chuck a sheet on the window and a mattress in the back. And with vehicles being as cheap as they are, it’s no surprise.’’