Kāinga Ora told to crack down on unruly tenants
The Government has instructed Kāinga Ora to make it easier to kick out tenants displaying “persistent antisocial behaviour”, as it claims the social housing provider receives more than 300 complaints a month about its tenants.
And following Stuff’s reporting that hundreds of state homes were sitting empty in Wellington - with a backlog of 1000 empty homes to fill in June and August - Housing Minister Chris Bishop had also instructed the social housing provider to fill the empty homes as “quickly as possible”.
About 20% of properties had sat vacant for more than a month; meanwhile, the waitlist for a home was 25,000. Rental debt had grown - from $1m in 2017, to the now $21 million owed by Kāinga Ora tenants.
Bishop said the Sustaining Tenancies Framework “has allowed tenants to stay living in a Kāinga Ora home no matter how threatening or disruptive their behaviour, or how much damage they cause to the property”.
The previous National government launched a pilot of the Sustaining Tenancies Initiative early in 2017 in an attempt “to address the underlying causes of eviction, leading to better outcomes”.
“We know that steady housing helps provide stability and security. However, some tenants face eviction from their home for anti-social behaviour or financial issues, only to end up in need for emergency housing,” then-Social Housing Minister Amy Adams said.
Yesteray, Bishop said Sustaining Tenancies “has had exactly the effect you’d expect”.
“There is no incentive for tenants to improve their anti-social behaviour or to stop deliberately damaging their taxpayer-owned house. There are hundreds of serious complaints every month – the most recent stat has been 335 serious complaints per month – of things like intimidation, harassment, threatening behaviour and worse.”
He said only three tenancies had ended last year due to disruptive behaviour.
Bishop and Finance Minister Nicola Willis sent a letter of expectations to the Kāinga Ora board, wanting it to address rental arrears of tenants by strengthening their approach to tenancy terminations for continued failure to meet repayments, “as well as for non-payment of rent when tenants refuse to engage and make no efforts to reduce and repay their rental arrears”.
The letter set out an expectation of accelerating tenancy termination for severe and persistent cases of disruptive tenants.
A 2022 document released under the official information act from Kāinga Ora described eviction of a customer due to behaviour was “a very rare occurrence”.
At the post-cabinet press conference yesterday, neither Bishop nor Prime Minister Christopher Luxon could answer how many children in social housing might be affected by the instruction.