Vic Crockford
Vic Crockford is chief executive of Community Housing Aotearoa, a top body for New Zealand’s community housing sector.
housing
$1 billion has been spent on emergency housing in the past five years. While families with access to these grants have been kept off the streets, the lack of affordable housing remains a serious problem.
“Ka mua, ka muri” is a whakatauki that many will know means “to walk backwards into the future” – and it conveys the idea of looking to the past to inform the future.
Following the news that more than $1 billion has been spent on emergency housing subsidies in the past five years, it is clear that the future looks bleak for many families if we don’t find better solutions to the ongoing housing crisis in New Zealand. Zealand.
Not only is it an increasingly expensive challenge, but there are also social costs: 4,500 children are among the 8,000 families currently living in unsafe emergency shelters – many of these placed in converted motels.
So as the whakatauki says, if we want to leave a better housing sector for the next generation, maybe the answers can be found in the past.
Where do we come from?
At Community Housing Aotearoa, we don’t have to look far for these answers. Many of our community housing society members have been working to address housing needs for decades, with Dwell Housing Trust in Wellington celebrating its 40th anniversary last year.
Dwell provides social housing for people on the Housing Register, affordable rental housing below market price and has a shared home ownership program.
The Trust is home to over 200 people, is currently building 19 new homes and has the capacity to develop a further 124 over the next three years if the right mix of financing and financing can be secured.
Reflecting on her recent appointment to the NZ Order of Merit, Dwell CEO Alison Cadman noted that community housing providers embody “the pioneering, exploratory innovative spirit”. Born at the dawn of our housing crisis in the early 1980s – in direct response to the needs of local communities seeing significant gentrification and the knowledge that a ‘third sector’ was needed to provide the range of options that households needed – community housing providers have shown they are tenacious in their commitment to the people they serve.
What they’ve also demonstrated over 40 years is that they are adept at creating intentional communities and enduring the housing bust and bubble, as well as navigating political and planning cycles, while providing thousands of high-quality, affordable and provide safe homes.
Where are we going?
As we move past the $1 billion barrier for emergency housing grants, we really need to see this as a wake-up call to put as much emphasis on the policies and practices that make organizations like Dwell increasingly important.
There are several ways we can make this happen, including providing government bonds to guarantee lower-cost financing for housing providers in the community, and ensuring that the RMA reforms ensure permanent affordable housing among all the new supply they need. create through inclusive housing and by ensuring that the Progressive Home Ownership Fund is secured for the long term.
In general, what we need is the long-term policy settings and the capital investment that needs to be at the scale needed to really boost the industry’s growth.
Beyond the policy levers is the importance of building and maintaining strong, lasting relationships. In a crisis as great as ours, solutions are more likely to last and benefit communities through true collaboration between all parties.
Given the community housing industry’s ability to provide tailored, targeted housing solutions in truly cost-effective ways, which can undoubtedly ease the strain on a social housing system moaning under an avalanche of distress, we know this is a critical part of the equation. .
This collaboration is not nice to have, it is essential for the well-being of our society.
It’s about the generation of young people growing up in temporary housing, without the ability to anchor in a community, which we all know is so essential to a child’s development.
We must work together – because our children deserve it.
This is the second in a series of Partnership Content articles with Community Housing Aotearoa. Read part one here†