MEDIA RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE USE
27/10/2018
AUCKLAND ACTION AGAINST POVERTY

KiwiBuild part of the problem, not the solution

The Labour-led Government ran a PR stunt today to celebrate the first few families that would move into the first 18 KiwiBuild homes. While the Government prioritises its flagship home-ownershp scheme, tens of thousands of people continue to be homeless in Aotearoa, with no hope of being able to ever afford living in one of these Kiwibuild homes. Auckland Action Against Poverty warns that the focus on building so called affordable private housing, subject to market speculation, will further exacerbate the housing crisis, instead of fixing it.

“KiwiBuild homes are out of reach for the working poor and the unemployed, who are the ones facing the real brunt of the housing crisis. With a price-tag of half a million dollars, KiwiBuild homes are a future speculator’s dream”, says Ricardo Menendez March, Auckland Action Against Poverty’s Coordinator.

“We echo the concerns of Monte Cecilia Housing Trust’s Bernie Smith, who calledKiwiBuild a ‘community trainwreck’. Displacing thousands of public housing tenants in order to build private housing in public land is a form of partial privatisation of public land, and will cause distress for the tenants evicted.

“The planned net increase to the social housing stock will only be marginal. In South Auckland, the Government is planning to build 10,000 new homes, 3,000 being state homes, which will be built after demolishing 2,700. This means that altogether only a few hundred additional state homes will be available for our fast growing homeless population.

“The Government needs to recalibrate its priorities and instead focus on building far more permanent social housing than it is currently planning. For that to happen, Housing New Zealand needs to be properly resourced and public land needs to be used to house people in public housing, not unaffordable private houses.

“In a few years time we’ll have state led gentrification, with middle and high income earners being able to access some of the KiwiBuild homes while those at the bottom continue to struggle with fast rising rents and lack of social housing.

“We are calling on the Labour Government to get its priorities right and focus on the creation of social housing, instead of entrenching housing unaffordability”.

© Scoop Media