November 20, 2023
Heretaunga tackles emergency housing
Ngāti Kahungunu chair Bayden Barber is hailing the success of a pilot project in Hastings to reduce the number of homeless whānau.
Between March 2022 and September this year this number of whānau in emergency accommodation such as hotels has gone from 117 to 39, a decrease of 77 percent.
Seventy percent of those were Māori.
Mr Barber says iwi, the Hastings District Council, and government agencies including Te Puni Kōkiri and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development took a team approach.
“The hotels are small. Get them out of that. Get them into some independent living. Then it’s about giving them the tools and tautoko to their own home ownership or going papakainga home equity type product. Some of our whāqnau are on that journey so that is where we are trying o get our people, home ownership,” he says.