Natalia Albert falls down a rabbit hole whilst trying to establish how many public houses New Zealand has

By Natalia Albert*

I am drowning in 7,078 New Zealand housing-policy documents published between 2000 and 2025. So, despite trying to engage with the current political news cycle: the Luxon-and-MMP debates, whatever Winston Peters said, Helen Clark weighing in, I could not look away from the data.

So my obsession this week has been: how many public houses does New Zealand actually have? And trying to answer that basic question sent me down a very painful rabbit hole. 

The problem is that New Zealand has changed who owns, manages, and reports on its state’s homes. Which means that keeping up, or following or even wanting to compare simple figures by government is a nightmare. Nobody can tell you, term by term, how many state houses a government built, owned, leased, or needs. It's like asking four successive flats how many spoons they own, when one of them counted teaspoons, one counted tablespoons currently in the drawer, one renamed them "cutlery units," and nobody can find the 2003 spoon register that was made. Sigh. 

Since 1937, when the first state house opened in Miramar, New Zealand has argued about whose responsibility it is to house and support people who are homeless or struggle to rent or even own a home. That deep seeded political debate is still going.

SO in a nutshell, there is no one institution whose record answers any questions related to this topic. The maze you must go into is not for the faint hearted. Housing is now delivered by a mix of government agencies and charities, and no single set of numbers tells you how it is going or who is doing what.

For the Clark years I could find new-build figures for one year out of nine. The rest sit in annual reports that were never made public. For the John Key years, the figures were never published at all. They are public only because somebody asked for them under the Official Information Act (OIA) in 2022 and the first year of the term came back saying "data unavailable." 

The waiting list cannot be compared across 2014, when it moved from Housing New Zealand to the Ministry of Social Development and was cut back to two priority categories. The stock figures count different things depending on the decade: owned homes, then owned-and-leased homes, then "funded social housing places." Three names for the landlord, three names for the measure, two breaks in the queue. Every party campaigned on this. None of them can be checked. Double Sigh. 

The landlord 

In December 2017, the incoming Labour government announced that it was stopping the programme of selling state houses to community housing providers, set in motion under the John Key government from 2010. Labour had campaigned against those sales. Housing New Zealand's next annual report records the decision: "The Government announced that the stock transfer programme would stop in December 2017 and we would only continue with appropriate business-as-usual, small-scale sale."

Over the six years that followed, the share of New Zealand's public housing held by community providers roughly doubled. Labour stopped the transfers. The community housing share more than doubled anyway. Working out how both of those things happened is the rabbit hole I went down so you don't have to.

This matters because housing is a major election issue, and every party claims to have an answer to the crisis. But as more public housing has moved into the community-housing sector, it has become harder to see who owns, manages and is ultimately responsible for the homes those parties are promising.

When the landlord is a Crown entity, responsibility is comparatively visible: Parliament, ministerial oversight, official-information processes, complaints mechanisms and public audit all leave recognisable traces. When provision sits with a community housing provider, accountability still exists, but it is distributed across contracts, regulators, charitable governance, and funding arrangements. That makes it harder for an ordinary observer to see who is responsible for what.

Then the two institutions that came and went. The two institutions built to run all this have come and gone. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Development was created in 2018, and Kāinga Ora – Homes and Communities followed in 2019, both under Phil Twyford.

Kāinga Ora has since been through an independent review, with a proposal to cut more than 600 roles. The housing ministry no longer exists as a housing ministry, it now has been sucked into the new Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions, and Transport. Eight years, two institutions, and the only thing that has proved durable is the change in who owns the houses and how hard it is to find any information on the data.

This is not an argument for or against one type of landlord or another. It is simply something worth understanding as we head towards an election and hear competing claims about the housing crisis. I have already written about how we have no way of knowing how many private landlords New Zealand has. When that problem is combined with state owned homes with unclear definitions, changing ownership arrangements and inconsistent reporting, it becomes difficult to judge whether a party’s housing claims are accurate, or even understand what they mean.

Recognising that might help us have more mature political debates about housing.

The numbers and the money

The shift is visible in the state ownership figures. In June 2017, community housing providers held about 7 percent of New Zealand’s social housing. Kāinga Ora held the rest. By June 2026, community providers held about 17 percent, or roughly one in six.

The change was not simply a matter of Kāinga Ora handing over existing state houses. Between 2018 and June 2023 the total system grew by 12,174 homes. Community providers accounted for 6,936 of those additions, more than half of the growth.

And the shift continued after the change of government. In the year to June 2026 Kāinga Ora's stock grew by 178 homes, while community providers added 1,448. So the question is threefold: who owns theM, who is providing them, and who is paying for them.

Community housing providers are not independently funded charities. Their tenants pay an income-related rent, generally 25 percent of net income, and the government pays the provider the difference between that and the market rent. It is the same subsidy Kāinga Ora tenants receive, extended to registered community providers in 2014, and it is the main mechanism behind all of the growth above. The subsidy bill has gone from $890 million in 2017/18 to $2.07 billion in 2025/26.

None of this changed anyone's rent. A tenant who moved from a state landlord to a community one paid the same 25 percent of their income the following week, assessed by the same ministry. What changed was everything behind the rent: who owned the house, who you complained to, and who had to tell the public about it.

So the state did not stop paying for social housing. It stopped being the landlord in a growing share of it while continuing to fund the rent. And the dashboard that publishes that $2.07 billion does not break it down by provider. You can see what the country spends. You cannot see how much of it goes to Kāinga Ora and how much to everyone else. Or at least, I couldn't find it.

The mess

Take a single date: 30 June 2017. The housing dashboard says there were 66,146 social homes in New Zealand. Housing New Zealand's annual report, for the same day, says its managed stock was 63,276. The Ministry of Social Development's report on the same system says 64,416. None of them is wrong. They are counting owned homes, owned-and-leased homes, and occupied homes. No document tells you that. You have to work it out.

Now try to follow the houses themselves. In 2016, 2,800 state houses left Housing New Zealand's books and went to the Tāmaki Regeneration Company. The only place I could find that stated is a letter written to a member of the public in 2022, answering an OIA request. The Tauranga transfer of 1,138 homes is in the annual report, dated 2017, and in that same OIA letter, dated 1 April 2017. One of them is wrong and I can't tell you which.

The measure keeps moving too. In 2023 the government counted "public homes." In 2024, "social homes." By 2025 it was counting "funded social housing places," which is not a number of houses at all. It is a number of funded placements. Its so confusing! 

Kāinga Ora's stock is public in remarkable detail: every quarter, by region, by district, by number of bedrooms fastest-growing part of public housing is the part we can see least of. The downside of community housing providers is that they are accountable to different institutional forces and have less capacity to provide the reporting and transparency an agency like Kāinga Ora can provide. They are institutions that were not designed to be publicly accountable.Community housing providers, now one in six of the entire system and the part that has grown fastest, appear as a single number per quarter. 

Meanwhile the reporting is being wound back. The Public Housing Quarterly Report stopped after December 2023. The best-documented period in the history of New Zealand state housing may turn out to have lasted about six years. Came and went. Anyway, back to swimming in the 7,078 policy corpus. Send help! 

*Natalia Albert is a political scientist specialising in New Zealand politics. She is a regular contributor on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan, Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan and writes for interest.co.nz. Less Certain is her weekly newsletter. Albert stood as a TOP candidate in the 2023 election.