Significant investment in social and affordable housing is crucial to solving New Zealand’s housing crisis and ending homelessness, a new report says.
The report by Community Housing Aotearoa warns homelessness has reached its highest level ever, with a shortage of affordable housing compounding the problem.
Chief executive Paul Gilberd said New Zealand had the “programmes and the capacity” to end homelessness if there was political will to do so.
“We can solve it as a nation here in New Zealand. It really is a political choice,” he said.
I sure am glad they didn’t build apartments in my neighbourhood. It would have destroyed the aesthetics really.
It’s hard to argue with the aesthetics of people living on the street. I love to look out the window at poverty.
Sucks for sure.
How many households are one working income away from default on their mortgage I wonder? Od last about three weeks.
I reckon we’d add 50-100k people without the “working for families”(tax money to landlords) initiative.
I reckon we need more angry people with nothing to lose before the changes we desperately need will happen.
It’s a hard problem to solve. People don’t have enough money, but if you give them money then they just have to pass that money on to people who already have plenty. A realistic solution is to tax existing wealth and then pass that money back to people, but the people with the substantial share of the wealth stand a lot to lose so they lobby like crazy to stop it happening. And much of it is never declared, e.g. donations to the Taxpayers Union, NZ Initiative, etc.
What we need is a mandatory public register for lobbyists.
https://www.transparency.org.nz/blog/industry-code-of-conduct-for-lobbying
However, lobbying in Aotearoa New Zealand is unrestrained and opaque, with neither professional standards nor a public register of lobbyists and the clients they represent.
So organisations like the Taxpayers Union already register as a political organisation so they can run election ads and that sort of thing. I wonder if declaring who they represent would work, I suspect they would just say they represent the average tax payer even though that’s not true at all.
Are there other countries that have properly solved this problem? I suspect not since (before this government) we were ranked high on the low corruption list, and we have this problem.
In surprising news, government that significantly cut access to social housing has caused highest level of homelessness in history.
