Auckland mayor Phil Goff says 190 people and families have been housed in just a few months under a housing first initiative run jointly by Auckland Council and non government organisations like the Auckland City Mission.
Mr Goff says high levels of homelessness can't be accepted as inevitable.
Housing first is a different way to approach the problem.
"What we are doing under this policy is accepting that people out in the street have problems in their lives but you can't address those problems until they have a stable home to live in so the first thing you do is find a permanent home. You then do a wraparound service to help them address the problems in their lives. It might be alcohol or drug addiction, it might be mental illness, it might be indebtedness, it could be any one of those things," Mr Goff says.
The council needs to bring central government into the initiative, because that is where a lot of the resources are.
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