The government’s public housing agency, Kāinga Ora, has been in the news this week – for all the wrong reasons.
First was the controversy about the agency apparently not having evicted any of its tenants for at least three years, despite reportedly frequent complaints from neighbours about unruly and anti-social behaviour from some tenants. Even the public housing minister, Poto Williams, has seemed at a loss to explain coherently what has been going on. Then came reports that Kāinga Ora had turned down a developer’s proposal to build 5,000 new solar-powered homes in Papakura, because it considered the plan did not fit the provisions of the new Urban Development Act.
Taken together, the two unrelated issues gave off the strong impression of an agency that thinks it knows what is best for its clients, and is not all that willing to engage with either its tenants, developers, or even its minister, about its intentions. At a time when the country is facing a major and growing housing shortage this is not the way one would expect the public agency charged with housing the most vulnerable people to be behaving.
Public housing has a proud tradition in New Zealand. The first public housing programme was established by Seddon’s Liberals in the early years of the 20th Century. From about 1910, local councils, principally in Auckland and Wellington, followed later by Christchurch and Dunedin, began small public housing programmes of their own to supplement what central government was doing. There are currently around 8,000 local authority-owned housing units.
But the biggest and most well-known expansion in public housing came after 1937 when the first Labour Government launched its state housing programme, under which 30,000 houses were built by 1949. Today, Kāinga Ora is responsible for the management of around 63,000 homes, housing about 184,000 people.
Over the years, successive governments have differed in their level of support for public housing programmes, and various policy changes have been introduced, such as allowing tenants the right to buy their homes, or basing rents on market rates, rather than the tenant’s income level. While these have been the subject of political and public controversy, with some changes being more short-lived than others, the principle of the government having some responsibility to provide housing for its most vulnerable citizens has never been seriously challenged. There is now a broad consensus in politics and the community on this central point.
But, as the controversy about Kāinga Ora’s non-eviction policy shows, that consensus does not mean there is a similar broad acceptance of the way things are working at present. It poses the further question of whether, in these challenging times, there is more that the agency and the Government could be doing to assist.
At the core of this is the role of public housing itself. Should it be transitional, helping people through difficult periods of their lives by ensuring they have adequate, affordable and secure places to live? Or is it more about helping those who might never be able to afford to buy a home of their own into a place they can nevertheless call their own, and afford to rent for as long as they wish?
Either way, what reasonable expectations should Kāinga Ora have as landlord regarding the behaviour and conduct of its tenants, including the way they treat the property and interact with their neighbours? And what relationship, if any, should there be between central government-provided housing and that provided by local government to prevent a revolving door approach?
These are difficult questions to which there will not always be easy answers. So it is perhaps no surprise that Kāinga Ora’s, and its predecessors’ approach has generally been a “live and let lie” one. The present Sustaining Tenancies policy continues the past theme of public housing being available for everyone who needs it, regardless of circumstances, which is why it is so loathe to evict unruly tenants.
Although that might be the most pragmatic response, it is not always the best one. While it may well encourage tenants to feel a greater sense of certainty that they have security of tenure, which is a positive, it also makes it very difficult for the agency to deal with tenants when they breach the terms of their tenancy. Or when their individual family circumstances change (and the household no longer needs a four bedroomed property, for example). But with the waiting list for state houses rising more than 300 percent to nearly 25,000 people in the last three years, the pressure is going on Kāinga Ora to be more proactive and responsive.
The political balancing act for the Government is even more acute. Elected in 2017 on a policy of addressing New Zealand’s housing shortage of affordable homes, Labour has so far failed to deliver – spectacularly so. Kiwibuild, lauded as the answer to getting more New Zealanders into homes of their own with its planned intention of building 100,000 affordable homes over 10 years was an abject failure. Instead of the more than 16,000 new homes projected to have been built by now, the actual number has turned out to be well under a thousand. At the same time, while the public housing waiting list has been soaring, house prices have increased on average by more than 50 percent.
While all this will have disillusioned many who had placed their hopes of getting a home of their own under Labour’s policies, but now see that prospect becoming more distant than it ever was, the impact has been even more devastating for those on the bottom of the housing pile. They probably never had a real prospect of ever being able to buy a home of their own, but were looking forward to the possibility of getting into a quality public rental property. They, too, will feel their hopes have been dashed.
The last thing Labour needs is for its public housing agency to be seen to be acting against the interests of the most housing dependent, arguably one of the most core of Labour’s constituencies. Yet that is precisely the message Kāinga Ora is sending those families on the ever-burgeoning waiting list both through its unwillingness to evict anti-social tenants, and, unwillingness, because of an apparent technicality, to support innovative new affordable housing initiatives like that it recently rejected in Papakura.
After some painful initial indecision, and seeming unwillingness to accept that there could be a case for evicting even the most egregious of state house tenants, the minister now seems to be steeling herself for a discussion with Kāinga Ora about how to handle such situations. But whether anything changes as a result of any discussion that may occur remains to be seen.
Labour is understandably desperately keen to protect its state house legacy, which may explain the minister’s caution. Senior ministers have not been bashful previously about invoking the name of Michael Joseph Savage as their inspiration when talking about housing plans. So, it is therefore unsurprising that the Government is wary of doing anything that might be perceived to negatively impact on that legacy. It most likely sees the potential eviction of anti-social state tenants in that light.
But such a nicety will be of little interest to those on the waiting list. They are just looking to the Government providing them with a house through Kāinga Ora, as soon as possible. As far as they are concerned, the Minister needs to act, and the sooner the better. The last thing they want is more of Labour’s now classic stalling tactic – the promise to “look at” the situation.
