Homeless New Zealanders are spending longer living in motel emergency housing than ever before, with some staying in what is meant to be short-term accommodation for months, or even years.
Figures released to the opposition National party show the average number of consecutive weeks’ stay in the accommodation has increased from three weeks in the quarter ending December 2017 to 21 weeks in the latest quarter – a nearly seven-fold increase in five years.
“New Zealand families are spending longer and longer in emergency housing, unable to escape,” National’s housing spokesperson, Chris Bishop, said. As of April, 63 households had been in emergency housing for more than two years.
“I am told that there are children born in emergency housing motels who have had their second and third birthdays there,” he said.
The use of motels for emergency accommodation began in 2016, under the previous National government. It was intended to be a stop-gap, but as the country’s housing crisis worsened, the need for motels swelled. In 2020, when international borders closed due to Covid-19, the government used newly empty motels to move people off the street as the country locked down.
There are now more than 26,000 people waiting for social housing, nearly 21,000 more than five years ago. The Guardian recently spoke to tenants – some of whom had been living in motels for more than two years – about the toll living in such accommodation can take.
“Emergency housing started as a short-term measure but has now become a permanent and institutionalised part of government machinery, with thousands of Kiwis stuck in squalor and misery for longer because of Labour’s failed housing policies,” Bishop said.
In further comments to RNZ’s Morning Report, Bishop said the solutions were multi-faceted, but the first should be to “stop the war on landlords” to ease pressure on the rental market. He also accepted that National’s record on housing was poor, and committed to building “enough state or social houses so that there is no social housing wait list”.
More than NZ$1bn had been spent on motel accommodation since the government took office in 2017, Bishop said, and after accounting for those demolished, Kāinga Ora – the public housing agency – had built just 2,600 homes since Labour came to office.
But a spokesperson for the housing minister, Megan Woods – who is overseas – said Bishop’s claims about housing increases were wrong because he was “cherry picking the statistics”.
Public housing stock is calculated by counting new builds, leases and buy-ins, and are offset by sales, lease expiries and demolitions. There were 2,836 demolitions from October 2017 to July this year, to make way for new developments.
The spokesperson said Bishop was choosing to include some numbers in his calculations, such as lease expiries, but not others, such as lease renewals, and that “isn’t a correct way of calculating the net change of Kāinga Ora’s public housing stock”.
“Kāinga Ora has delivered 6,716 newly built public houses from October 2017 to July 2022 with a net change of 3,649,” the spokesperson said.
Community housing providers – which are partly government-funded – had built another 8,451 public homes, bringing the net change over that period to 10,216, the spokesperson said.
The minister for social development, Carmel Sepuloni, told RNZ on Wednesday that National’s criticisms of motel stays were “incredibly disingenuous” and showed a “shocking level of hypocrisy”.
“This goes back to the housing crisis that we inherited,” Sepuloni said. “We picked up that challenge, we’re running with it, we’re doing it as quickly as we can, but this is a result of decades of neglect.”
Helen Robinson, the missioner for Auckland City Mission, told the Guardian this month that living in motels was “revolting for families” and people should not be staying in them beyond a few days. But that was “just not realistic in the current system”.
“The government recognises New Zealand is caught in a tricky position where we need to look after our people today – with a safe, inside place tonight – but houses need to be built or acquired at a very fast rate,” Robinson said.
The rate of build was not fast enough to keep up with the growing demand, she said. “We’re playing catch-up on a 30-year problem.”