Human Rights Commission gets tough on housing crisis that has people sleeping in laundromats

Wednesday, 19 October 2022

When Covid-19 hit hard, Rotorua’s famous gateway, the motels of Fenton St, went from holiday to emergency housing.

Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt admits the commission has failed to hold successive Governments to account for their failures over housing but says it is launching a big push now.

Cameron Redley is one of those people Hunt thinks the system has failed. At 3am on Tuesday he is in his car outside a laundromat in Manurewa, Auckland, waiting for his washing to finish its cycle.

Redley recently found a private rental to move into but before that he and his son spent two years in emergency housing on a social housing wait-list.

“You go on the waiting list and your number rises, and the higher your number the closer you are to getting it [a house] – for about two years my number never changed.

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“I was in and out of motels for two years. I was on the waiting list for Housing New Zealand [Kāinga Ora] and I ended up going flatting because I was just over the motels.

“Two years of being in a motel, living out of a bag, everything was in storage and that was costing me ….ing $400 a month.”

Redley says in recent weeks he has seen something different – people he thinks might be sleeping at the laundromat itself.

He is not the only one who has seen them. Penina Ifopo has too.

Ifopo is part of Te Ohu Whakawhanaunga, an alliance of 30 community, faith, union and Māori groups who successfully lobbied Auckland mayor Wayne Brown to sign up to support the right to a decent home.

Paul Hunt says the Human Rights Commission has failed to hold successive Governments to account.

“I go to the gym at 4 o’clock in the morning and along Sykes Rd, Mountfort Park, same cars you see – people sleeping in there.

“You go to laundromats in Manurewa … in the middle of the night and then you see families sleeping there.”

On Wednesday, the Human Rights Commission launched a new section on its website dedicated to educating the public on what the “right to a decent home” means: habitability, affordability, cultural appropriateness, accessibility, location, infrastructure, services and security of tenure.

The website asks people to share their housing experiences too, part of the commission’s push to explore human rights issues related to emergency housing, the rental system and the transitional housing system.

Next year the commission will also look at whether local governments are doing all they can to ensure people have access to a decent home.

“Are their district plans up to date? Are they reflecting the right to a decent home? Are there fast-track procedures for consents with the right to a decent home?

“What I want to emphasise now is that local government does have obligations under the right to a decent home and until now that has not been widely recognised.”

The recognition of housing as a human rights issue has been steadily building since UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing Leilani Farha visited New Zealand in February 2020 and called for a rent freeze and a capital gains tax.

In August 2021, the commission released its framework for what the right to a decent home meant, including in the context of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Since then the commission has compiled statistics from already-available data to help the public judge whether the Government has made progress in providing access to decent homes.

Numbers like state houses per head of population have improved in recent years but others, like deprivation, have declined.

Often the numbers show no great decline but no great improvement either.

Paul Hunt says the right to a decent home was practically invisible in New Zealand, despite promises made by politicians.

“I do want to emphasise that this Government, more than any other Government for decades, is taking the housing crisis seriously and it really does deserve credit for a number of housing initiatives.”

Hunt believes the housing problem reached crisis proportions because governments were not held to account for delivering on housing – and he traces that lack of accountability back to the abolition of the Housing Commission in 1988.

“The Human Rights Commission should have done more, and sooner, but nobody was holding Government to account for its promise to do everything it could to deliver the right to a decent home.

“Nobody held Government to account, the human right was just about invisible, and that is inconsistent with the promises New Zealand was making in Geneva, in New York, in the United Nations.

“And that is why I call it a democratic failure, because our democracy – the media, human rights commission, judges, Parliament and so on – they failed to hold Government to account in relation to this human right. “

The right to a decent home is recognised in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. New Zealand has signed up to the declaration and maintained a Human Rights Commission since 1977.

But social rights like the “right to a decent home” are not separately codified in statute the way civil and political rights are in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

Paul Hunt says the right to a decent home requires Governments to take all practical steps to provide decent housing.

Hunt says there have often been major misunderstandings about what the “right to a decent home” means.

The biggest misunderstanding is that the right means everyone is owed a house to live in tomorrow.

Hunt says human rights law includes a concept called “progressive realisation” which recognises countries have to make regular progress in delivering on rights in line with the resources that are available.

“The right to a decent home requires the Government to take all reasonable steps towards realising the right to a decent home for everyone.

“It can be achieved by public housing, or private housing, or mixed public-private housing – that is up to the Government – but the Government does have this obligation to do everything it can to progressively realise this human right.”

But housing as a right progressively realised over time has never been a reality for people like 20-year-old Unite Union co-president and chair of the Te Ohu Whakawhanaunga housing workstream Xavier Walsh.

Walsh grew up in a state house that was falling apart – much like many of the others in the same area that were built several decades before – and has never really seen the overall housing situation improve.

“[The state houses] were so run down by the Government not putting enough into housing and not enough into infrastructure that we started getting mushrooms growing in our laundry wall.

“My younger brother, he was a toddler, but he developed bronchitis and had to be hospitalised as a result of a Housing New Zealand house.

“We were told to be grateful for what we had, because we were in a Housing New Zealand home and the wait-list was so long at that time, but the housing was not up to scratch – it was not habitable.”

Walsh says something needs to change with the housing system because everyone deserves a suitable home where they and their children can live and thrive.

“When we hear these stories we kind of become a bit desensitised to them unfortunately, and we need to ensure that people are at the forefront of this issue and not just the politics.

“Because there are real people with real stories and real lives who are suffering at the end of the day, and it is really important that we ensure that everyone is better off.”