Have your say on housing
Better for council to focus on our retirement housing
Arguably the biggest topic in our draft Three-Year Plan, currently out for public consultation, is housing. Napier City Council has 377 units in 12 villages. This housing is for people on low incomes with few assets and special housing needs.
Nine villages — 304 units — have tenants who are over 65. Broadly speaking, this is our “retirement” housing.
The other 73 units, mainly in three villages, are what is known as “social housing”. These tenants have low incomes with few assets, and some have accessibility needs that can’t be met through private rentals.
In the last five years, Napier has paid $3.5 million to help fund our housing units. This amount includes rent subsidies, maintenance, insurance, and renovating units between tenancies.
This isn’t the end of the spending, either. This obligation towards upkeep will continue every year. Our housing stock is ageing, with an average age of around 50 years, and maintenance is costing more. The way we provide housing has become financially unsustainable for our ratepayers and community.
The conversation does not start or end with money — there are many factors important in this conversation.
We want to make sure there is as little financial pressure as possible on our community and on our tenants, and we want to be able to invest in our housing portfolio to make sure it’s fit for our tenants now and in the future.
We believe the best thing for us is to focus on our retirement housing, potentially even increasing it, but to move away from social housing. We think it’s better for those with specialist skills to look after social housing in Napier, rather than us as the local council.
We also want to honour our current tenants, whether they are in social or retirement housing, and help make sure they always have a home.
Back in 2022, we agreed to keep our housing portfolio intact and we increased rent in the hope that would be enough to maintain the units without having to put additional costs onto the rest of the community.
It didn’t work. Costs have gone up too much: cyclone recovery is costing us, materials are getting pricier, the costs of labour and insurances are increasing. We need to keep talking about housing because we need to find a new way to manage it in the future. It’s a fine balance as we look after our tenants’ interests and the interests of our whole community.
Make sure you have your say on the future of our community housing through sayitnapier.nz.