Auckland Council has put a deadline on new weather-impacted property owners applying for categorisation as government funding looks set to run out.
Councillors have voted to support a deadline of September 30 for property owners who haven’t accessed support to come forward and engage with the council’s recovery office.
It comes more than a year on from last year’s extreme weather events, which have so far seen more than 800 properties given a categorisation for council.
Around a third of those were given a full buyout, while others have been deemed to have a less than intolerable risk to life and have either been funded to make flood mitigations or left to deal with insurance companies.
But even while this complicated process has been lumbering on across the flood-ravaged reaches of the region, there are still people falling through the gaps.
Group recovery manager Mat Tucker said there were still an estimated hundred or so properties yet to opt in to the categorisation process that probably should have.
This, combined with government funding for full buyouts set to run out in June of next year, means time is running out for people yet to begin the often lengthy process of receiving a categorisation – never mind the time they may need to dispute decisions.
Property categorisations completed in Auckland as of 26 March, 2024
Tucker said the recovery office would put new energy into door-knocking over the next few months, and asked for volunteers from the council’s governing body to help reach out to affected wards of the city.
“My suspicion would be a high proportion of those will be renters and that’s why there hasn’t been an opt-in from the landlord,” he said. “The door-knocking should pick up a whole bunch of those too.”
Albert-Eden-Puketāpapa councillor Julie Fairey questioned whether door-knocking would be enough to reach landlords.
“We are still going to be talking to potentially the wrong person,” she said. “The person who lives in the house, their ability to contact the owner might be quite limited.”
Linda Greenalgh, community and social recovery lead, said the council would be contacting property management companies to get their help in making sure any distant or non-communicating landlords understood the stakes of this new deadline.
Greenalgh provided an update to the council’s governing body on the long and slow road to full recovery, which she said was about more than just making sure people were financially supported.
She listed a litany of social and psychological problems that have been brewing, picked up from the programme of interviews and community engagement she led.
“Recovery is much bigger than the categorisation process,” she said. “There’s often about a five to 10-year tail on recovery after events like this.”
She said about 40,000 different households across the region needed some kind of support following the flooding and the cyclone – and still do.
Part of the issue was timing: long Covid lockdowns were still in the rearview mirror when the clouds opened up, and a burgeoning cost-of-living crisis was already putting the squeeze on the average household budget.
“People were already struggling and those who were already struggling have been hit hardest by this,” Greenalgh said. “We heard from our engagement that the destabilising effect of ongoing uncertainty about the future was a key issue. Trying to deal with the recovery process in itself is a challenge, and that there’s a fundamental fear emerging about the future.”
Greenalgh spoke of grief over lost family photo albums, overcrowded homes and people returning to houses that were unsafe or unhealthy.
Plus the disaster’s particular impact on the biggest asset many own, the house, meant the financial hit could be felt across generations, particularly for the uninsured.
“There is a real fear that we are hearing around the potential for intergenerational impacts as a result of these weather events, where people are losing their most significant – or one and only – family asset,” she said. “They are not able to repurchase a home and therefore their children and their children’s children’s ability to get back on the housing ladder is going to be significantly impacted.”
Greenalgh indicated there was some uncertainty in the future of government funding for the social response of council’s recovery office:
“There is no funding allocated beyond this financial year to support the implementation of the social sector recovery plan, and that is where we would expect to see funding following a disaster and in recovery,” she said. “We are having active conversations with Government.”
Council staffers said residents in homes not in the categorisation process might be tenants, or stuck on the other side of the language barrier.
Manukau councillor Lotu Fuli said there were a high number of affected residents in Māngere.
“It’s an area of high deprivation that was devastated by the weather events and where many of the homeowners there who were affected are less likely to have the resources to respond on their own,” she said. “But I’m hearing more recently from the community that very few of them are being offered the buyouts or being categorised as Category Three. So I’m keen to hear…. how we are prioritising Māngere if the result is actually very few will be offered buyouts?”
Tucker said the recovery team had been working closely with Kāinga Ora, the landlord of many of the affected properties in the Māngere area.
While the deadline is now set for September, an allowance for special exceptions is expected to be in place on the say of Council CEO Phil Wilson.
