This World Homelessness Day Monte Cecilia has 279 families who have been approved to be housed but who are waiting, possibly indefinitely, because we have no new homes to house them in due to the Government scrapping redirect contracts.

Monte Cecilia Housing Trust is a community housing provider (CHP) that has provided transitional and community housing in South and West Auckland for almost 40 years. A key tool it has used to do this has been redirect contracts, where CHPs arrange to lease houses from property owners with the cost being split between the government and tenants.

“What makes it even more baffling is that 240 of the 279 approved families are Māori or Pacifica - New Zealand’s most vulnerable groups who together represent 65% of the NZ Housing Wait Register,” Monte Cecilia CEO Bernie Smith says. “The New Zealand Housing Wait Register has grown to over 30,000 but for some reason the government is jettisoning a key tool at a time when the need for it has never been higher.

At the same time the Government announced $55million for Community Housing Providers (CHPs) to use as capital to build homes, but crucially not in Auckland City – only the regions.”

This all comes as Monte Cecilia is anticipating a surge of families coming forward as Auckland eases out of lockdown. While level 3 and 4 lockdown rules have been in place Monte Cecilia’s housing pipeline has been effectively frozen, as we have been unable to move families into new housing even when private rentals, transitional or community homes have been available.

“The past weeks have been difficult for our staff to see families struggling and not be able to move them into new homes,” Bernie says. “We’ve seen instances where entire families have been forced to shelter in single-room motel units or where more than 20 people are crammed into a three-bedroom house. That kind of thing has a real impact on families’ mental health as well as potentially their physical health, since there’s no way to isolate if someone in their household catches Covid - there’s nowhere they can go to escape it.”

“We celebrate and acknowledge various world days, but on World Homelessness Day we can only acknowledge that as a nation we have not been able to house our most vulnerable.”

Monte Cecilia is calling for help from members of the public in the form of donations and volunteer time as we ease out of Auckland’s lockdown. We also encourage people looking to lease newly built homes to consider Monte Cecilia as a potential transitional housing option.

To find out how you can help, go to https://montececilia.org.nz/donate-volunteer, or if you have a new build you would be interested in leasing to us, call us on 0800 624 848.

www.montececilia.org.nz

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