Alison Mau: Prepare to be shocked by homelessness figures

Thursday, 21 June 2018

A homelessness census will be conducted on September 17.

OPINION: Prepare for a shock when the numbers come through from Auckland's first homelessness census. It could be worse than anyone suspects.

Housing Minister Phil Twyford didn't bother sugar-coating it when he spoke about the issue a couple of months back – it'll 'get worse before it gets better' was his dark (and no doubt realistic) prediction.

But it's hard to know what the picture is – whether we're improving, or spiralling towards another winter of disaster – because you can't know what you haven't measured.

In 2013 a study showed just shy of 800 people living rough in the region. That was long before housing prices hit their peak.

A homeless person sleeps with their belongings in Auckland's Queen St.

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Alison Mau says we can't solve homelessness until we know exactly how bad the problem is.

Some great stuff is being done. The government, Auckland Council and NGOs seized on a terrific idea last year, the Housing First model, which has in the short space of 12 months been a stunning success.

Housing First sorts out a stable roof over the homeless person's head as a priority, and then delves into the extra help they might need for addiction, legal or other issues.

When it was launched the Housing First Collective aimed to find homes for 472 Aucklanders in its three-year pilot period. It's already hit 420 people housed within the first year. You'll see very few pilot programmes with that kind of strike rate.

Some (most?) of those people will be the inner-city rough sleepers so loathed by business owners, who wish they'd just choose someone else's doorway to crash in.

You can understand where they're coming from up to a point. As business owners, they're the ones who pay rent or rates for the property and dollars to marketers to make sure people visit their shopfront. Mess, obstruction and intimidation, they claim, are sabotaging their profits by driving customers away.

Some, who have better PR instincts, are reluctant to put it as baldly as that – they'll tell you it's a 'very bad look for our city' instead.

Fortunately for our reputation as a city populated by decent human beings, few have actually launched open hostilities on rough sleepers. Aucklanders were outraged a couple of years back when a central city building was found to be dousing homeless people with water via a custom sprinkler system in its foyer.

No-one's yet suggested we go as far as the 100 American cities which have criminalised sitting or lying down in public or the idea of using robots to clear homeless off the streets (like the SPCA in San Francisco has).

Naked aggression (that's how I'd interpret it if I were trying to take a kip in a doorway or a park, wouldn't you?) is not the answer. Counting the number of homeless in Auckland is not the whole answer either, but it'll give us the information we need to tackle the issue.

There are cities that have reduced their homeless population to net zero. It can be done.

To make the count, 750 volunteers are needed on September 17. Perhaps the very first in line should be those city business owners who are so keen to see the back of the homeless looking for shelter in their doorways.