The faded hotel in Kaitaia that's become a 'dumping ground' for the homeless

Friday, 2 August 2019

The Northerner used to be the hotel of choice for business people and travellers, now it's used to house the homeless.

Once upon a time it was the premier hotel in the Far North, the place to stay for tourists and business travellers. Now, it's described as a dumping ground for the down and out. Tony Wall and Florence Kerr reveal the secrets of The Northerner in part one of 'No place to live/Kāore te kāinga, kāore te ora', a Stuff investigation into a housing crisis in the Far North.

As night falls over Kaitaia, The Northerner comes alive.

At one block, people are busy doing various domestic chores, while two women huddle by the entrance sharing a roll-your-own.

A teenage girl pulls a hoodie over her head and scurries towards a waiting car.

A Toyota Surf parked nearby isn't going anywhere - two of its tyres are flat.

A man is looking intently at the ground. He bends to pick up something, studies it for a few seconds and whips it into his pocket - his search for smoke butts continues.

Inside, people flit between rooms along burgundy-carpeted, wood-panelled halls that hint of a grander past.

Some doors are shut, others wide open.

In one room, a teenager sits on a duvet on the floor, his face illuminated by a TV screen; lost in a video game.

'There's a lot of people here that are drinking, smoking marijuana - I can see some tell-tale signs that a few are on the meth,' says a man in his 50s who's been living here for a couple of months.

Police are frequent visitors, he says.

'They'll be here two to three times a week. But when there's domestics and parties happening, they're here four or five times.'

Residents at The Northerner hotel have one thing in common - nowhere else to go.

NO PLACE TO LIVE/KĀORE TE KĀINGA, KĀORE TE ORA

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has said she has a 'real aversion' to the use of motels for vulnerable families, but it continues.

In the first three months of this year, the Government granted $23m for emergency housing in motels and hostels - $88,613 of it in Northland.

An additional $50m was allocated in the Budget for this financial year.

The Northerner provides a microcosm of the social deprivation afflicting the Far North.

You'd think there'd be plenty of accommodation in small-town New Zealand, but the housing shortage has bitten as hard here as anywhere as people come back from the cities in droves to their whenua (land).

The waiting list for state housing here has tripled since 2014, with about 150 families or individuals on the waiting list.

At night, people wander the halls of The Northerner, 'like zombies,' according to one resident.

During our investigation we found people, most of them Māori, living in cars, caravans, cowsheds and structures that could best be described as shanties.

TOURIST MAGNET TO HALFWAY HOUSE

In the 2000s, when tourist buses stopped coming through Kaitaia on the way to Cape Reinga, routing through the Bay of Islands instead, The Northerner's bread and butter business vanished.

Then in 2016, when the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) introduced emergency special needs grants for people who had nowhere else to go, it found a new lease of life as a kind of halfway house.

Between September 1 2016 and April this year, MSD paid $357,000 for more than 100 clients to stay at The Northerner, some for several months.

But there were no support services in place and the hotel quickly became a hotbed of crime and family violence, with gang members, recently-released prisoners and drug users sharing the facility with young families and the elderly.

Parents would sit around during the day taking drugs, while their kids played around them.

Between April 2016 and September 2018, police recorded 33 incidents at The Northerner, including 14 'family harm episodes'.

Other crimes included disorderly behaviour, assault, theft and drug possession.

Over a similar timeframe, Oranga Tamariki received 40 reports of concern regarding children, where The Northerner was recorded as a family's address in the agency's records.

The Northerner was once the premier hotel in the Far North.

But it wasn't until members of Kainga Ora, a multi-agency trial initiative working with at-risk children and families in Northland, noticed that The Northerner was regularly cropping up in reports, that anything was done.

MSD documents obtained under the Official Information Act reveal that a manager from Kainga Ora wrote to Eru Lyndon, the ministry's regional commissioner for Northland, on May 17 last year warning that 'significant risks' had been identified at The Northerner.

There were 16 families there at the time; some had been there more than 23 weeks.

Eru Lyndon, MSD's regional commissioner for Northland.

The email included a spreadsheet with the names of the families, how long they'd been there, the number of reports of concern and police call-outs.

'This document demonstrates significant risk and we cannot identify any direct engagement by agencies to mitigate this risk,' the manager, whose name was redacted, wrote.

'We have [concerns] raised to us by the community … that The Northerner appears to be a 'dumping ground' where whanau are left alone without support.'

Reception at The Northerner - it's now used as a motel and short-term accommodation facility.

Lyndon was dealing with his own frustrations. On May 22, he emailed someone else in the ministry saying he was putting half of his time into housing issues and there was no emergency housing available across the region.

'We need to respond to the call for wrap around support for MSD clients in The Northerner and elsewhere, including homeless on the streets of Kaitaia, particularly where there are family violence issues,' he wrote.

'[The] proposal was sent to us, and your team, months ago. It's time to get on with it.'

In a candid email to senior MSD manager Kay Read in Wellington, Lyndon said progress had been made on emergency housing but 'it's unfortunately not as a result of our MSD housing team'.

Many times his efforts had been thwarted, he wrote, including 'lacklustre' attendance at housing taskforce meetings, a lack of response to the unsupported clients in The Northerner and 'poo-poohing' of a report on the drivers of housing demand and supply in Northland.

Eventually some MSD clients considered unsuitable for The Northerner - mostly single men with criminal backgrounds - were moved to other emergency housing.

In June 2018, MSD paid local agency Waitomo Papakainga $50,000 to immediately provide wrap-around pastoral care services for clients remaining at The Northerner.

This Northerner resident describes himself as a stranger in his own whenua.

Lyndon says his staff have visited The Northerner recently and have no concerns.

'The hotel provides warm and safe accommodation. The new owners have recently installed a new security system.'

The Northerner was taken over in October last year by Hibiscus Coast property investor Robert Reeves.

'I know there'd been quite a few incidents and damage - all sorts of drama - police were there regularly,' Reeves says. 'It was a mess really, the whole place.'

There had been cases of residents - even staff - dealing drugs from the hotel in years gone by, he says.

Reeves stopped accepting emergency housing cases, deciding instead to turn over 50 of the 75 rooms for short-term accommodation at about $250 a week, depending on what people could afford, and running the rest as standard motel rooms.

'People turn up and want accommodation. We turn away half a dozen people a week who just aren't suitable - addicts, wasted,' he says.

'We have strict rules. We don't tolerate threatening behaviour, people dealing drugs, anyone with gang affiliations.

'We've installed about 30 security cameras. We've tried pretty hard to clean the place up and get a better reputation.'

At one point, Reeves says, they had a teenage boy who was on suicide watch.

'We were asked to take him … he seemed OK - he was there about six weeks. Staff [would watch him] and he had a carer who stayed with him. It's a lot to put on moteliers.

'The real issue is why there's such a housing shortage and successive governments have failed to recognise it.'

Stuff spoke to a young mother staying at the Northerner who freely admitted dealing drugs to make ends meet.

She can hook people up with methamphetamine, but only if the supply is good.

Mostly she sells weight loss tablets and medication for brittle bones as cheap highs.

'I sell Duromine, it's a weight loss tablet, you get it from your GP, it has amphetamines. I sell them for $10 bucks a pill.

'MSM is a pill you take for brittle bones. If you crush it up and smoke it in a pipe you get an alright trip. It pays the bills, eh.

'Would I rather be doing something else? F… yeah. But this is me at the moment and I gotta do what I gotta do.'

The Northerner Hotel in Kaitaia, which is being used as short-term accommodation for people who have nowhere else to go.

Inspector Riki Whiu, Far North police area commander, says drugs are rife through the community.

'Daily, we're dealing with issues both of a drug and family harm nature,' he says.

'Alcohol is still a huge driver of family harm and meth is certainly there - it's a different beast, it has no religion, it has no culture other than destruction.

'Unfortunately, those that are peddling it have no conscience around the impact it's having on our people in the Far North.'

Washing hangs outside one of the suites at The Northerner, home to people who have nowhere else to go.

Whiu is one of the leaders of Whiria Te Muka, a police-iwi initiative aimed at reducing family harm in the region.

A lack of housing is one of the main drivers of family harm, he says.

'When you know you haven't got a place to stay … or a young family that is just getting bounced from emergency accommodation to emergency accommodation … you tend to struggle.'

The Northerner came to police attention around 2016, he says, and Whiria Te Muka staff tried to engage with residents to offer support.

'We ended up with a whole lot of diverse type of people getting access to that type of accommodation. Absolutely it's the wrong concoction to have in the midst of other people suffering the social harms and ills of the world.'

The single man in his 50s who describes The Northerner's hallway walkers as 'zombies' says it's the best of a bad lot when it comes to emergency accommodation in the Far North.

He'd been living in Australia for seven years but lost his job and decided to return to family in Kaitaia.

But he fell out with a sister who thought he had come back to try to grab the family land, and had to move out.

'There's nothing to rent in Kaitaia. I have land here from my mum, but I can't afford to put a house on it.

'This is the fifth place I've been to under emergency housing in the one year and six months I've been back.

'This is the only place that I like because it has a toilet and shower and if I really want to keep to myself I can just shut the door.

'Sometimes I do that … because some of the other residents are pretty hard to get on with … a lot of them do meth here. I can smell it.'

He's considered moving to Auckland.

'My people up here are less caring, more greedy. It's because they have been subjected to so much s… up here that they just don't give a s… anymore.

'It's like the Far North is separate from the rest of New Zealand. It's unreal man.

'I'm a stranger on my own whenua.'