Rough river sleepers spark woman’s housing crisis fix
Meet the Taumarunui woman who was so shocked to find people sleeping in cars she has spent a chunk of her life savings to help them out. She talks to Richard Walker.
‘‘We need to be able to look after our own, but how can we look after our own when we have no land?’’
Kids have learned to swim in this bend in the river, close to town. Not on Tuesday this week though, with a chill wind blowing and the water churning brown from recent rain. Sometimes youngsters also chose to sleep by the river, maybe do some fishing, as the fancy took them.
But today’s parents, those who remember swimming and sleeping on its banks, don’t want their own kids swimming there because they’re concerned about the state of the water. The Whanganui River, recognised as a living entity, was returned to the people in 2017 broken and dammed, says local woman Riana Brown.
In March, Fiona Kahukura Chase, who manages the nearby campground, came across something new here. Four cars were parked up on the river bank, squeezed in near the council toilets.
It was a shock. The kids might choose to spend a night by the river from time to time, but she had never seen people sleeping there in cars.
So Chase did something about it. She and her wife bought a caravan for one of the women, and that was followed in turn by three more as they spent a chunk of their life savings to play a part in tackling what amounts to a housing crisis in her home town.
Taumarunui. A good place to stop for a cuppa if you’re driving through, an hour from Te Kū iti, an hour from Ruapehu. Gateway to the Whanganui River, and to the Forgotten Highway. Well enough known that Peter Cape could write a folk song in the 1950s about Taumarunui on the main trunk line.
Taumarunui. Farming, freezing works, forestry, the railway – the living was good back in the day with plenty of employment. Back in the ’80s, the town had 54 softball teams and one of them was handy enough to make the nationals. Chase was a rep in those days, a pacey outfielder. She remembers a town with jobs and with houses, the latter often supported by Mā ori Affairs.
That was then. New Zealand’s economic river cut a new channel, and left towns like Taumarunui behind. There are no softball teams now, not many netball teams, Chase says, and the living can be hard.
Chase returned from Australia to Taumarunui about four
Syears ago, and what she saw disturbed her. She found her whā nau in a worse situation than she had seen, or than her mother had seen. Things were worse than during the Depression and war years, she says. Hers may be the last of the lucky generations, and even they are not unscathed. heep are plentiful on the rolling, tree-studded farmland around Taumarunui and the shearing sheds have always been a place to make some decent money. That’s what Maria Harris did. But she had to give up the sheds about three years ago because of asthma. Things got hard. She and a friend eventually found themselves in transitional housing, and then she says she got asked to leave, for reasons she doesn’t want to go into. She and her friend moved in with another friend who was due to leave his rental, the idea being they would stay on once he’d gone. But ‘‘out of the blue’’ he handed in his notice.
‘‘And we were back out there again.’’ With prices skyrocketing and housing stock tight, they couldn’t find another rental. Forty-eight years after Harris arrived in Taumarunui as a 6-year-old, she was homeless in her hometown.
She says she had been couch hopping since late last year, and then she and her friend took to their cars and parked up beside the river. One night became two, two nights became a week, a week stretched out to nearly three. They would drive up and down parking at various spots near public toilets. They used the showers at the town’s information centre.
‘‘It was all right but then it wasn’t all right, if you can understand what I mean. You know, you kind of make it work for yourself,’’ she says.
‘‘Yeah, it was hard. It was hard. But like I said, you make do with what you’ve got. Honestly, we were lucky enough to have our vehicles because we both own a vehicle. My mate had his car and I had mine and then another friend, she was sleeping in her car also, and we just all hooked up together.’’
That’s when Fiona Chase found them. Harris is now living in the caravan provided by Chase, paying $100 a week in rent. Her friend is staying in a caravan at Ō hura, and she’s unsure what has happened to the other friend who had joined them. ‘‘I haven’t seen her for ages. I hope she’s all right.’’
Chase has the statistics at her fingertips. Mā ori in Ruapehu have an average wage of $18,500, she says. ‘‘I don’t know how anyone can survive on that.’’ And the eastern end of Taumarunui has a 66% Mā ori population. She is seeing poverty. ‘‘Things have become acute beyond a crisis.’’
Meanwhile, house prices have done the New Zealand Covid thing, but even more so. Kelvin Davidson, chief property economist at CoreLogic, says the median property value in Taumarunui is $353,000, according to the company’s computer-based model. That’s very low compared to many other parts of the country. ‘‘However, the change has been pretty dramatic.’’ The figure is 110% higher than it was three years ago, meaning prices have more than doubled in that time. Over the same period nationally, the change is about 50%, Davidson says.
The median rent, meanwhile, is $363. That is low by national standards, but has also grown quickly – up 25% in the past year.
‘‘There’s certainly been a lot of growth and when you see that type of thing you see hardship start to become an issue.’’
Horizons regional councillor Weston Kirton says the town’s housing stock has been ageing, with some houses well over 100 years old. The declining stock has relied heavily on Housing New Zealand and its equivalents, he says. Under a previous Government, about 50 state houses were ‘‘shipped out’’ and not replaced.
‘‘It was fair to say that the population of this area was declining. You saw urban drift from the rural areas so it wasn’t such a concern then. But in recent times, like many other rural areas, we’re seeing a resurgence of population.’’
In the Ruapehu district, that is partly due to tourism which he says is taking off.
Kirton is seeing people from the likes of Auckland, Wellington and Australia coming into the area, buying up housing