Government plans to buy and rent about 800 more houses, and set up 'temporary housing villages' as part of $300m investment to reduce homelessness

“Motels are not a suitable environment for vulnerable individuals, families and whanau and they are also not cost effective.”

Not much fun for the holidaymakers and/or business travelers staying next door either. Antisocial behavior into the early hours of the morning.

Many of the homeless in Auckland aren't actually homeless; they have state housing but enjoy drinking in the streets with their mates.

Last year's homeless count turned up numbers well below predicted, even though we were led to believe there were thousands of kiwis sleeping in cars. It was all a beat up.

Trying to solve homelessness with state housing is like trying to solve drug addiction with prohibition. You're not getting at the heart of the problem of why people choose to live on the streets.

A trailer park coming to near you soon!

At some stage the media might like to ask some of these homeless what their track records are like as tenants.

If they rent or buy dwellings won't they just displace those already renting or looking to buy? As with all these things without increasing supply anything else is just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.

What????
Each one of those graphs from being relatively stable are now showing very, very significant increases since 2017 when the Labour Coalition came into power.
For a government that was going to address housing and poverty:
- emergency housing grants up from less than $10m to $48m
- food grants at least doubled
- transitional housing increasing six fold, and
- housing wait list from around 4,000 to 14,000.

The Labour coalition has been really successful . . . . . "NOT".

This all sounds reactionary and short term. Perhaps Ardern and the Labour-ites should take a leaf from Sinn Fein's book who are highly motivated to tackle Ireland's homelessness and housing issues.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-sinn-fein-ireland…

No one ever talks about preventing the issue, only ever about fixing the problem. Perhaps if we were to focus on preventing the issue in the first place, we might find we have more success.

Have they thought this through?
Buying houses on the private market and renting houses on the private market (can't see many landlords liking that idea though) will have consequences.
Clueless muppets.

said yesterday , could not agree more pity he has not done anything major to fix in two years
Now, one forgets how distorted National on the economy was and how rundown the social services were, and they had one plan and one plan alone: open the floodgates of immigration—and that's a fact. Between the 1990s and the 2000s, immigration was around 12,000 per annum, and then, under National after 2014, it massively exploded to 38,300. In the year after—2015—it was 58,300. In the year after that, it was 69,100, and by 2017, it was 72,300. They only had one part of the economic plan: just explode the population.

Now, everybody in Auckland knows what that meant, and everybody around the country knows what that meant: house prices going through the roof, a lack of housing, and a massive demand for schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. The stress was minus, and immigration explains the housing market distortion and crippling infrastructure deficit. Health, education, social services were run down. Evidence of neglect was everywhere, from people sleeping in cars to rotten walls in hospitals

Here we go again .....tax payer dollars thrown around by Labour "hoping" it will solve the housing problem, it's really just lip service and remember it's "election year". If any political party had any guts, they would stop throwing my tax dollars in the direction of landlords in the form of the "accommodation supplement" and employers with "working for families" who bleat and moan about having to pay increased wages, as it really means they can't upgrade their launch.

Let "the market" decide the rents and wages and keep government money away from market business ....or never use the term "free market" again, it's just BS.

Instead use this money for R & D, assisting new industries etc and then the employers will be able to pay a decent livable wage, while rents will find their place in the market.

As soon as NZ get off this "protect the property market at ALL costs" only then will opportunities arise, productivity will increase and everyone can go back to treating a house,as what it should be for - a home for families to live and work, not an investment vehicle creating a "one trick pony" economy.

so lets get this right -- after several years of talking about how bad the situation is -- its taken this government over two years in power to come up with we will buy and rent existing houses - displacing existing people - and put the homeless in them ?

All the graphs evidence -- is that as soon as Labour came in -- they started throwing money about like confetti - but paying twice the market rate for a motel room - -which is what they are doing -is so wasteful. It also shows that this group see labour as an easy touch -- massive increase in grants and people wanting a free state house -

And the only graph that stayed static for the first 18 months was the number of transitiona housing places which was growing and suddenly plateaued ! ie they cancelled exisitng planned responses whilst a workign group spent two years coming up with this !

Buying or renting existing homes does NOTHING to solve the housing shortage - its simply an election smoke and mirrors trick to pretend they have done something - each of those houses they buy - either have a tenant or were previously rented -- each one they rent -- would have been rented anyway --

pitiful response after two whole years of working groups !

Time to reduce demand ie allow less people in the country!

Renowned Japanese architect Ban Shigeru built temporary housing for earthquake victims all over the world. Extremely cost effective and aesthetically more pleasing that what you could waste a small fortune on in NZ.

Some great images here https://www.pinterest.com/pin/502362533412874180/?lp=true

Ban Shigeru has been to NZ but I would expect most of his fantastic ideas were ignored. I even think he met with the ogrish Gerry Brownlee.

This is just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Removing otherwise rent-able properties to provide emergency houses. What happens to the previous house occupiers? I suppose they will need emergency housing. - Mind numbingly stupid and totally consistent with the unbelievably incompetent performance of this government.
There is only one solution. Show some leadership. Make some hard decisions and get a lot of houses built very quickly and at the same time stop adding petrol to the fire and totally stop immigration.

The government will spend $175 million = you and I will pay $175 million through our taxes

What utter folly .

This half -witted bunch of loons masquerading as a Government, are now going to use taxpayers money to house everyone who cant find a house , instead of using private capital to do so !

Thats why we had incentives for private investors to enter the housing market and provide rental stock in the first place .

Just wait until the Government has to play hard with a tenant who defaults on the rent .............there will be no consequences as the Government will NEVER be able to evict anyone ..........

Figure 14b shows emergency accommodation increasing 7 fold, yep 7 times since the left government took office, from $7 million in December 2017 to $48 million in December 19. A truely catastrophic result

“Motels are not a suitable environment for vulnerable individuals, families and whanau…"

Vulnerable? Yeah right, more like drunk, lazy, dirty, conniving and dishonest. I own a motel and we don't want these "vulnerable individuals" anymore. We know first hand, we empty endless amounts of liquor and cigarettes from their stinky room daily, they "invite" the rest of the whanau to stay overnight sneaking them in at night, we know that when regular guests complain about excessive noise in the middle of the night. Towels, cups, cutlery regularly goes missing, the worst we've had was a 42" TV, a microwave, fixed wall heater stolen on top of bedding, paintings etc…

I would tender that if you have lost your home that you might have one or two things destabilising you in the background and people need help with that sort of thing or they just go into a tailspin. I would like to see our defense force engaged in a few projects around the country. I see that quite a few surplus patrol vessels and LAVS are currently being disposed of so you can't tell me all the troops are out on manouvres...practicing to invade Stewart Island perhaps...the engineers corp could start building these villages and would probably be able to make a highly valuable contribution to the repairs to our collapsing social infrastructure

So in summary, the government hands out more free money and the result is that more people want free money, who would have thought?

Is it not just bloody amazing ? .............so the hardship grants increase from $7m to $48m in the past 2 years , and they have the audacity to blame the previous Government .

Q .Who increased it ?

A. The COL

Simple this is a COL cock up .............they should all be forced to take their tops off in Parliament and take a long hard look at their navels .

The minute any Government starts throwing money around like drunken sailors , there will be string of prostitutes lining up for a slice of the action or taking advantage of the situation

It would be helpful if the Government had some kind of documented cohesive ( and most importantly , workable) Strategic Plan with regards to the so called "housing crisis"

This unco-ordinated shotgun approach which is a combination of wishful thinking and policy made up on the fly , is simply going to fail

Just Like Kiwibuild failed hopelessly