Community group urges housing plan
Advocacy group Voice Nelson is urging the Nelson City Council ‘‘as voted leaders’’ to put a specific plan in place to address housing needs.
Voice Nelson member Kindra Douglas presented at a community services committee meeting last week, where she spoke about the difficulties many people were having finding housing in Nelson.
‘‘I’ve got a family of three going up the Maitai tonight.
‘‘They’ve been in the emergency housing for two weeks and they’ve got nowhere else to go,’’ Douglas said.
She said in working with the Victory Community Centre she had seen an increase in housing inquiries as a growing number of families had been asked to leave their accommodation, often because property owners wanted to do maintenance work.
‘‘I can name five off the top of my head in the last month who have had the same situation just prior to school starting, all have got children, and they’ve been given notice that they have to move on.’’
Douglas presented councillors with a housing strategy developed by Voice Nelson, which suggested putting together a dedicated housing advisory group to tackle the problem.
She said in 2004 a housing forum was convened in Nelson and met monthly until 2009, and in 2010 the council had assigned $40,000 to develop a housing strategy.
She said prior to the council election last year, the housing forum had been ‘‘resurrected’’ but just three meetings had been held.
‘‘At that stage, there was no councillor that was attached or particularly interested in this work,’’ Douglas said.
‘‘We’re here really to clarify, where is the council up to on this particular issue?’’
She said Voice Nelson was concerned about the lack of specific affordability criteria given to special housing areas.
Councillor Mike Rutledge asked Douglas why Voice Nelson would want to bring back an advisory group which had not achieved anything concrete in the past.
Douglas said the key would be to make sure this time around it included all key stakeholders, including builders, developers, and people from the rental sector, and it was up to the council to facilitate it.
She said the group needed to not just describe or monitor the problem, but actually work on fixing it.
Mayor Rachel Reese said she welcomed the group’s contribution and wanted to have further discussions with them.
‘‘What would be helpful is perhaps if the [council] officers could sit down and go through the streams of work currently in place across council,’’ Reese said, citing other committees and plans that deal with both urban development and housing.
She said it would be vital for the council’s long term plan to get housing development decisions right and there would be upcoming opportunities for more discussion.