Home is a tent on the front lawn
After the campaign for the living wage comes a movement calling for the right to a decent home. Dileepa Fonseka reports.
How does Pania Andrews know the housing crisis is getting worse? Because people have been sleeping on her front lawn.
‘‘I have a tent on my front lawn. I’ve had it there for two years, and we’ve housed people in it, people from our community, we’ve housed families with children from our school.’’
A nearby kebab shop feeds those who stay in her tent, or the families involved make do with toast and instant noodles. They shower by sneaking into the local church before school starts.
‘‘I’ve never told the families at the school who was in my tent, and I never will, because that’s not something they want made public. Who wants to say that they came in our tent and stayed, and that they had to shower up in the church before 7am so that no one would see their kids coming out of the shower to go to school?’’
But Andrews knows a tent on her lawn is not a long-term solution to the housing crisis.
Late on a Wednesday night in September, Andrews, Ibrahim Ali and Penina Ifopo are spending hours going over their speeches in a small room at a community hub in Mā ngere, Auckland.
Andrews, Ali and Ifopo all have something different to say on the housing crisis.
For Ali, it is that he and others in the Somali refugee community can’t settle in any one place and this locks them out from being a part of the community: ‘‘You have to keep moving around from one house, to another, to another.’’
Ifopo says there are just not enough houses available and the supply being produced is often not suitable or affordable for the people who most need housing. ‘‘You can’t even afford, for one single-income earner, to rent a flat because there aren’t any flats available’’.
‘‘The only way is, if family can’t take you in, sleep in your car close to a recreation [facility] with swimming pools and public showers, so you can use the showers there and then just go to work.’’
Andrews, Ali and Ifopo are practising what they are going to say to four mayoral candidates, Wayne Brown, Efeso Collins, Craig Lord and Ted Johnston, at St Matthew-in-the-City, where all candidates will have to either agree or disagree to four pledges around housing.
Councils have a lot of power over housing. They build the infrastructure to enable it, supervise the consenting around it and zone for more of it. They can also build and operate social housing stock of their own.
Andrews, Ali and Ifopo are making their presentations on behalf of a new organisation called Te Ohu Whakawhanaunga (TOW), an alliance of 30 community, faith, union and Mā ori groups lobbying for a housing strategy targeted at parts of the community they say are often ignored by policymakers.
TOW has close links to the living wage movement and the growth of a union-backed community alliance on housing likely owes its existence to a growing realisation that rising housing costs are gobbling up any potential wage gains.
Andrews is employed at the New Zealand Educational Institute, her partner has a reasonably well-paid job at the Ports of Auckland and her daughter lives with them and works at the port too. But they still struggle to pay the rent.
‘‘We’re on really good money, and we still are worried that if we get kicked out of this house where will we go? People are lying just to get into houses, saying ‘I have three children not five’ ... we probably would lie [about the size of our family] if we got kicked out of home and had to go rent another house.’’
When the day of the event at St Matthewin-the-City arrives, Andrews, Ali and Ifopo tell their stories from a lectern as the four mayoral candidates sit and watch from their seats near the altar.
Then, one by one, the candidates get up and say yes or no to a series of four pledges on housing:
One: Auckland Council adopting a right to a decent home.
Two: A co-ordination group to figure out how to implement that right to a decent home, along with progress reports on action taken by Auckland Council or its development arm Eke Panuku.
Three: Getting Auckland
Council to investigate and report on providing affordable and accessible housing alternatives in partnership with Kā inga Ora, community housing providers and developers, along with supporting Mā ori housing initiatives.
Four: Directing Auckland Council to investigate inclusionary zoning options that set aside a percentage of a development for affordable housing.
Ali tells the mayoral candidates the housing crisis isn’t a crisis, it is a disaster.
He and his son were shuttled between houses and emergency motels after he split up with his partner. Then, when there were no emergency motels to spare, he spent several days in his car.
Covid’s arrival turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Ali because it allowed him to stay in one place for three months. ‘‘They allowed me to stay in the motel because of the lockdown, otherwise they won’t let me . . . I was like ‘it’s a blessing’, can you imagine thinking lockdown is a blessing because they will let you live in there?’’
The four candidates sit on stage and listen to each of these stories, then they step up to the lectern and unanimously agree to all four pledges.
But, while they each make the pledge, they also emphasise different things while they do so.
Brown says housing intensification needs to be in the right location and wants to avoid it in the wrong places.
Collins places an emphasis on the need for inclusionary zoning and cites a later-debunked claim that there are 30,000 to 40,000 empty houses in Auckland.
Lord says he supports the pledges but wants Auckland Council not to do work central government is responsible for.
Meanwhile, Johnston wants to cut the focus on climate change in favour of a greater focus on housing. In the pledge, a decent home is defined as affordable, habitable, accessible, secure in tenure, culturally adequate, with access to services, and in a proper
location. As an aside the text adds ‘‘a house in the middle of nowhere doesn’t count’’.
In the statement accompanying the pledges TOW says: ‘‘This is new territory. All these asks are about finding out what’s possible.’’ Which means the exact method of how this ‘‘right to a decent home’’ will be provided has yet to be announced.
But there are overseas examples to follow. When
Ontario, Canada adopted a charter bearing a ‘‘right to adequate housing’’ it appointed a housing equity commissioner to examine housing policies through a human rights lens.
One suggestion advanced by TOW is that Auckland Council could appoint a similarly styled housing advocate to examine the impact different council proposals might have on the supply of affordable and accessible housing.
The solutions can’t come soon enough for Andrews, who had to stop allowing people to stay in her tent when winter arrived and the floor started to get boggy.
They tried lining the floor with pallets, but then the pallets just started sinking into the ground.
Andrews says the housing problems are still out there and getting worse. When a nephew of hers was looking for a house Ministry of Social Development (MSD) case officers suggested he could couch-surf with relatives.
She asked what couch-surfing meant and, after hearing the description, decided not to mince her words: ‘‘So, he’s homeless . . . he’s actually homeless.’’
Andrews found out MSD routinely gives this sort of couchsurfing advice to people under the age of 18 who have been kicked out of home.
MSD client service delivery general manager Graham
Allpress says the organisation works closely with community organisations, accommodation providers and other agencies to support young people in urgent need of housing.
Allpress says this could include financial support to allow them to stay with family and friends, or helping them find affordable accommodation options like flat sharing.
‘‘We are committed to ensuring people who come to us in urgent need do not have to live in cars or sleep rough’’
However, whichever way Auckland and other cities choose to provide decent homes,
Andrews is convinced housing is the key to everything.
‘‘The house is your base, it’s where you call your home, and it’s where you start your day off. And if you don’t know where you’re going to be tomorrow, how do you then get your kids to school? If you don’t sort the house, everything else crumbles.’’
‘The only way is, if family can’t take you in, sleep in your car close to a recreation [facility] with swimming pools and public showers.’ PENINA IFOPO