Video: Sustained effort over four years has seen dramatic drop in emergency housing in Hastings
A sustained effort by central and local government, iwi and other partners has seen a dramatic drop in emergency housing in the Hastings District, Council CEO Nigel Bickle says.
According to Ministry of Social Development figures, at the end of March 2022, 285 people in 117 Hastings households were living in emergency accommodation, namely motels.
At the end of September 2023, that was down to 66 people in 39 households - a 77 per cent drop.
Bickle told Hawke’s Bay App that the drop was a result of the district’s place-based housing strategy, which was introduced as a pilot project in 2019. This came about after a reported two-thirds of the district's motel rooms were being used for emergency accommodation.
“It's a result of a pretty sustained effort over the last four years across a whole lot of partners, government, council, iwi, to make that happen.”
At a full Council meeting at the beginning of the month, Bickle presented a report entitled The Story of Hastings Place Based Housing Approach Four Year Check In.
In the report Bickle told how in early 2019, the Hastings District Council and its Mayor Sandra Hazlehurst were increasingly concerned about what appeared to be a housing crisis. “The public housing register was growing rapidly, more people were being housed in motels as emergency housing, Recognised Seasonal Employees (RSE) workers were putting stress on housing and the demand for Council’s senior housing places was growing. There was a small but growing homeless population. Ngāti Kahungunu were concerned that the housing situation was having a disproportionate impact on Māori whānau and were advocating that the Government’s ‘kiwi build’ needed to be more ‘Iwi build’”.
The report said that on 18 April 2019 the Council and the Iwi presented a proposal to the then Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern at Waipatu Marae about a new approach to tackling the housing crisis.
“At its heart it was a proposal to take a place-based approach in a collaborative partnership between central and local government, Iwi, mana whenua and community.”
“Council outlined what it saw as some of the potential problems and opportunities and asked to combine our collective resources to develop a plan. The Council executive committed to develop a plan and present it to government, Council and Iwi within 8 weeks. The Prime Minister agreed and Council and its partners got to work.”
In an interview with Hawke’s Bay App recently, Bickle said that in 2019 the Government was spending nearly $10 million a year on emergency housing in Hastings alone.
“We'd seen the public housing register in Hastings grow from less than 50 in 2015 to over 600 in 2019. And we were seeing issues around a small but growing number of homelessness, and generally the housing market not appearing to work. So that was the situation in 2019.”
Bickle says the pilot project that resulted from the discussions with the Government had to tackle a number of problems facing the district.
“We didn't have enough public housing, but the Council hadn't zoned enough land for housing. We had problems with our senior housing portfolio, had a waiting list of hundreds. We had RSE workers coming in greater numbers that were also putting pressure on the housing market. So we said, ‘look, we're going to need to have a really good plan here that's tackling multiple things’.”
“But our short-term focus was about getting people out of living in motels, which is just not good for the individuals or for the community as a whole. And we'd ended up with this really wicked dynamic where nearly two-thirds of our motel accommodation was either being used for emergency housing of families or RSE worker accommodation. And in a visitor economy, we'd seen a whole lot of houses converted to Airbnbs. So we set about a plan that had a number of dimensions to it.”
Bickle says there was a need for more public houses to be built.
“The government committed to building 221 public houses within 18 months. The Council changed the district plan to allow the horticultural industry to build RSE properties on orchard and industrial areas. The government announced $9 million to build papakāinga housing, so finding iwi multi-lead housing solutions were important.”
“We had situations with at-risk children from a health perspective living in substandard housing. So, we had a million dollar investment improving healthy homes. So that's where it started.”
“Four years on, we've almost eliminated emergency housing.”
Watch the accompanying video to see the full interview with Nigel Bickle.
