March 27, 2024
Public housing under attack
A housing advocacy group says stigmatisation of state house tenants is being used to lessen support for public housing.
Public Housing Futures has looked at the performance of government housing agency Kainga Ora and found New Zealand lags well behind other OECD countries.
Spokesperson Vanessa Cole says public housing makes up about 3.8 percent of all homes, compared with an OECD average of 7 percent, including 17 percent in the United Kingdom and 34 percent in the Netherlands.
She says public housing in Aotearoa New Zealand is now seen as only being for those most in need rather than being a public resource like hospitals and schools.
“There’s been a lot of stories in the media recently about public housing and public housing tenants that tell a particular tory and I think there’s another story to be told about public housing and its important role in providing really stable, secure housing for people in our communties,” Ms Cole says.
The Government is pushing the idea Kainga Ora has too much debt, whereas successive governmens hve starved the agency of the capital it needs to build housing on the scale the country requires.
report calls for a massive increase in public housing stock with the demand for public housing far beyond the number on the current wait list.
She says the true demand of people living in housing stress includes the 350,000 people who access landlord subsidies in the form of accommodation supplements because they cant afford they cant afford housing costs without that support.
As New Zealand has the highest number of low income households paying more than 40 percent of their income on rent in the OECD.