A recent article A BBC News Australian correspondent's report profiled a “frail 71-year-old” woman in Perth who has been homeless for months, living in her car with no hope of a warm, safe place to call home. Since her landlord (legally) evicted her to rent out her small apartment for holidays, she has been unable to find an affordable place to rent, and a Western Australian government report estimates that 40 percent of low-income renters are now at risk of homelessness.
For long-term Waiheke residents, this situation is not new. Over the past 10 years, Waiheke residents have increasingly been forced to live in cars, damp caravans or overcrowded homes, just to stay where they have lived for decades. And increasingly, it is the island’s poor over-65s who are being hit, with some resorting to street advertising.
How overtourism is causing a housing crisis
Homelessness on Waiheke is the highest per capita in the Auckland region. And that’s not because of poverty or unemployment; it’s a direct result of overtourism, as homes in Waiheke have been snapped up by absentee owners looking for capital gains and rented out for short stays.
Waiheke's Golf News reported that Trade Me rental properties for Waiheke in early April contained just nine properties seeking long-term tenants, while “Airbnb is groaning with 698 Waiheke listings”. It highlighted the harm to the island's community, “whether it's a tradesman paying a mortgage, a single mother renting out the room downstairs, or a chef sleeping in a car. Waiheke's housing crisis affects us all.”
The problem is even greater in the summer, when employers in the tourism sector take up rental properties en masse for employees in the hospitality industry and vineyards.
This ongoing trend has been raised with Auckland City Council for over six years by the Waiheke Local Board, the Waiheke Community Housing Trust, the triennial tourism impact survey by Waiheke community research organisation Project Forever Waiheke (PFW) and even by the council's own research teams.
In PFW’s 2021 resident survey, a third of residents reported difficulty finding long-term accommodation. In January 2024, more than a third of residents reported losing friends, family or colleagues from Waiheke in the past year alone, primarily due to the lack of long-term accommodation.
Locals are particularly concerned about the creeping erosion of community capacity, cohesion and resilience on Waiheke, as so many long-term residents – those in stable employment – are being forced to relocate and displaced by ‘ghost houses’.
Waiheke’s plight is a familiar phenomenon in tourist hotspots such as Greece, Italy, France, Portugal and Japan. In Spain, locals are shaming short-stay landlords, while local governments are limiting the number of short-term rentals and raising taxes on tourists to prevent communities from collapsing completely due to the displacement of locals.
So far, the only significant initiatives to address homelessness on Waiheke have come from a local community housing trust and a church group. Residents (up to 10 percent) are converting garages and even garden sheds into accommodation to keep family and friends on the island.
Overtourism seriously disrupts the daily lives of local people
Auckland City Council’s tourism strategy – Destination AKL 2025 – recognises the “carrying capacity constraints of … destinations such as Waiheke Island…” and “growing concerns that tourism is impacting the quality of life for Aucklanders”. [in] bottlenecks such as Waiheke Island”.
But none of the council’s tourism or housing strategies support “liveability” for the tiny Waiheke Island community of just 9,700 as it tries to cope with ever-increasing tourist numbers – 1.3 million a year in 2016/17, according to the council, and now more than 900,000 a year post-pandemic. Daily visitor numbers are often four times the island’s population, creating massive congestion and competition for services, making daily life increasingly unliveable in a community reliant on rainwater, essential ferry travel to jobs and medical appointments, limited food suppliers and dwindling numbers of locals willing to take on the unpaid kaitiakitanga of Waiheke’s natural environment.
PFW’s tourism impact research since 2018 has repeatedly identified pervasive harm to the Waiheke community from the continued growth of tourism – not just a housing crisis, but also major disruption of tourism to local people’s daily lives, through ferry congestion, noise pollution, irresponsible visitor parking, litter, overcrowding in recreation areas and increasingly, as in overseas hotspots, rude and drunken behaviour by tourists, as well as harm to native wildlife and the marine environment. As essential services have increasingly been prioritised over tourist consumption, 83 per cent of locals in PFW’s 2024 survey each reported multiple disruptions to ‘liveability’, including difficulty getting to work, school or hospital in Auckland (72 per cent), finding parking (61 per cent), unsafe road use by visitors (45 per cent) and even delayed access to health and ambulance services (12 per cent), and having to wait weeks for essential water deliveries as hospitality services are prioritised. A fifth of islanders (21 per cent) experienced significant emotional distress as a result of overtourism.
Local residents working in tourism were consistently less affected than other residents by the various problems resulting from overtourism. The view within the sector that tourism was necessary, or a benefit, was not shared by other residents, nor supported by Auckland Council’s 2022 economic analysis. Only 3 per cent of Waiheke residents not directly working in tourism saw any economic benefit to them in 2023/24, highlighting the inequity of the island’s infrastructure maintenance burden falling entirely on taxpayers, not the tourism industry or tourists themselves.
The failure of 'destination management' planning
Tourist numbers are not driven by visitor demand alone. Over the past decade, the council's economic development agency – Tataki Auckland Unlimited (TAU) – has aggressively promoted tourism on Waiheke, positioning it as the 'jewel in [Auckland’s] crown'and its enormous value to the economy of the supercity is emphasized.
In 2021, TAU identified overtourism as a major problem on Waiheke and commissioned a Sydney-based tourism marketing company to develop a “destination management plan” for the island.
The Waiheke DMP design, which has been on the table at the TAU since May 2023, clearly focuses on growing tourism, despite consistent feedback from the community that there is an urgent need to restrict tourism.
A 2023 New Zealand Geographer The article described the council's failure to address the damage caused by overtourism to the Waiheke community as follows:Picking the goose that lays the golden eggs – alive – when the local population, who manage the island’s natural environment, is ruthlessly displaced by tourists who deplete the island’s limited resources and make no contribution to its sustainability. The researchers proposed a co-governance model for managing tourism on the island, similar to successful models for Rottnest Island in Australia, Salt Spring Island in Canada and now Rekohu Chatham Island.
Internationally, tourism experts are now stressing that the only way to prevent irreparable damage to so-called 'destination communities' from overtourism is for governments to regulate and restrict tourism activities. A majority of Waiheke residents who responded to PFW's 2024 survey agreed, calls on Auckland City Council to take urgent action to prevent the collapse of a unique community whose kaitiakitanga is essential to the preservation of the island's natural treasures.
Following international examples, councils in Nelson, Christchurch and recently Rotorua have tackled homelessness caused by an oversupply of short-stay rental properties by imposing higher rates for such properties.
The council's tourism strategy fails to propose limiting unmanageable tourist numbers to Waiheke, even when the council's own research suggested that limiting visitor numbers was crucial to the sustainability of Waiheke's increasingly damaged natural environment and its eroded community. So why is Auckland Council failing to act when the problems are chronic, acute and confirmed by the council's own research?
It's high time Auckland City Council starts 'turning the story around' in tourism – reversing the focus of tourism management from prioritising the demands of tourists to supporting the rights and needs of local communities to survive and thrive.