Sorting Rotorua's homelessness problems will take 'longer than anybody thinks'

Thursday, 29 July 2021

Sorting out Rotorua’s homelessness problems will take “a lot longer than anybody thinks”, according to the Ministry of Social Development regional commissioner Mike Bryant.

He made the admission when addressing a meeting of Rotorua Lakes Council on Thursday in response to a question from councillor Raj Kumar.

“People want to know when this [motel use] situation is going to change, they want to know long-term - this is still a short-term situation,” he said.

“Any idea of the timeframe?” Kumar asked.

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“A lot longer than anybody thinks,” Bryant said.

“The shortfall [in social housing] is really large. It’d be naive to think it’ll be solved any time soon.”

Bryant said he was actively lobbying other Government departments on the issue and said figures from some were “too slow and too low”.

However, he did say Kāinga Ora – which recently spent $8.1m to acquire a Rotorua Motel – has made “more progress in the last six months than I’ve seen in a long time”.

Bryant also spoke about the underlying challenges facing the ministry in Rotorua.

“Rotorua has a lot of long-term underlying social issues. Gangs, drugs, crime, family violence,” he said.

“Rotorua appears in the top five for just about every negative social indicator, often first, second, third in terms of those negative indicators.”

He said 100 family violence cases a week take place in the city, and 6000 children are in benefit dependent households.

“Things we’re trying to deal with and work on every day.”

He said at present, 700 people were looking for a social housing place in Rotorua.

He said the ministry had now contracted 12 motels in Rotorua for whānau use that would provide 200 rooms, and that as of Wednesday 175 families had been moved into those facilities.

Work was also under way to encourage employers to create pathways for getting the unemployed into work, something he described as a “circuit breaker'.

Bryant said they were in talks with as many as 15 employers about creating a pre-employment training pipeline “that has the employer directly involved” and said MSD would welcome additional employers.

He also said the number of people in Rotorua on a benefit had decreased from 9600 at December last year to 8700.

“That’s a huge reduction.”

Bryant also took several potshots at media coverage of Rotorua’s homelessness problems, something he blamed for the “confusion” around the issue.

“It must be quite difficult always finding the most negative things to report on, then reporting as inaccurately as possible,” he said.

“I’m sure because it’s in the papers it’s not true at all … unfortunately it does create perceptions that people believe, it’s done that on the housing space.”

He also appeared to take aim at the wider public at one point, noting “people complained about parks use [for homeless people], then the night shelter, now we’ve got people on motels and people are complaining about that”.

“We’ll have people complaining about where the social houses are too.”

Councillors’ were also handed a written report from MSD, which Stuff has requested.