'I don’t want my kids seeing me like this’: The homeless mothers trying to maintain their mana

Friday, 27 November 2020

A stopgap attempt to plaster over the housing crisis has become a monster, with thousands of families now living in transitional housing. Michelle Duff talks to the homeless mothers trying to keep their mana while raising children in unsafe situations, amid the constant threat of the streets.

The special investigator from the United Nations who visited New Zealand in February said there was a dark shadow hanging over the country. She spent ten days here, finding mums and babies squashed into tiny, dank rooms, fearful of being kicked out, treated with disrespect and suspicion by authorities, barely scraping by. In her initial report, she said the “housing crisis,” was more than this. It was a human rights crisis.

“The right to housing means much more than four walls and a roof. It is the right to live in peace, security and dignity, and to equality and non-discrimination with respect to housing,” Leilani Farha wrote in her initial report. She defined this as secure, habitable, affordable housing with access to services. Farha urged the Government to legislate to make livable housing a right, and give victims – including an increasing number of first time homeless – access to remedies for unfair treatment.

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Six months after her visit, an amendment to the Residential Tenancies Act passed into law. It carried some extra protections for those in private rentals.

It also clarified that those in temporary housing had no legal rights.

A Stuff investigation has found transitional housing is a largely unregulated corner of the housing sector, where thousands of homeless families live at the mercy of a confusing bureaucracy guided by an ad-hoc, opaque set of contradictory policies. And while transitional housing is supposed to last for no more than 12 weeks, some families have been living in shelters for years.

Investment in this type of housing has ramped up, with the Government spending $166m in the past year and pledging to build another 2000 transitional houses on top of the 3500 existing places. It’s worthwhile spending to keep people off the streets, many believe.

But rather than solving the homelessness problem, critics fear it’s just shifted it. “I always liken it to musical chairs and when the music stops someone is without a house. And inevitably they’re poor, inevitably they’re brown, and inevitably they have kids,” says one social services worker, who did not want to be named.

At the University of Otago Wellington, public health and housing researcher Kate Amore has watched nervously as transitional housing has exploded. “When these systems get set up they just grow, and they cost heaps of money, and that’s money that’s not put into permanent housing,” she says. “Now there’s a much higher rate of homeless than [the Government] ever thought, but that hasn’t changed how much they’ve invested in real, long-term solutions.”

It’s stinking hot in Flaxmere, and Belinda Hosa shifts uneasily on a plastic chair. Kids' voices float from the front yard. Two of her daughters sit on a faded couch. In the corner a pair of single mattresses, covered in sheets, are tucked in and stacked tidily.

This is where all three women sleep. Or don’t sleep. Tangled together on the floor of a friend’s lounge in the humid Hastings night, or cuddling when the temperature drops.

Hosa, who has a back injury, anxiety and chronic asthma, can sometimes dull the pain with tramadol or the other medications prescribed to get her through the months – it’s already been years, there’s no end date – until she is accepted for surgery. It’s harder for the two girls, who are both in the second trimester of their pregnancies.

Hosa has been on the public housing waitlist for three years. During that time, she has mainly lived in rundown motels. Every week, huge chunks of her time are spent applying for private rentals, to prove she has been trying to find somewhere to live so her emergency housing grant doesn’t get cut off. She never gets them. In the last motel she barely left her second-floor room. The steps were too difficult.

Before, she worked as a teacher aide. She was sporty. “I didn’t always look like this,” she says, apologetically, wincing as she shifts her weight.

More recently, Hosa was moved to transitional housing. She was hopeful of a permanent house; in the ranking system used by the Ministry of Social Development, she was an A17. No-one knew for sure how it worked, but if you were an A18, you seemed to get a home.

Belinda was at her last place for ten months, until she was evicted over a disagreement about a puppy. “I felt like they had been trying to get rid of me for ages…they just wanted me out of that house,” she says.

“I just feel useless, I don’t want my kids to watch me go through this s… again. I’m just worried about my girls … it messes with your mind and it’s scary not having a home, especially when you’ve got children.”

On the day she was packing her meagre items to shift back to another motel, she was at her wits’ end. When the provider came to see her out, she lost her temper and began crying and yelling that she wished she had a gun. Hosa’s daughters took the mokopuna to play next door when the Armed Offenders Squad descended on the property. The provider also called the motel, warning them against housing Hosa.

She lost the motel room.

The Hosa family say the suspected weapon was the glint of a framed family photo, packed in the back of a car.

Hosa is still homeless.

Across town, Ashani, 16, leans against a countertop. She’s just put her one-year-old brother to bed, and is back from driving 20 minutes into town to take her other younger siblings to school and daycare.

She dropped out a couple of months ago. When they lived in Auckland, Ashani used to top her classes at Lynfield College. “Yeah, I loved school,” she says quietly. “But it was too hard for me to go when we shifted here.”

Ashani’s mum, Shelley Behniwal, 38, has neurological complications which mean she can no longer drive. The family of mum and five children have been living in this bunkhouse in an industrial area of Hastings for more than four months.

This isn’t the technical term. If you ask the Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development or even Kainga Ora (formerly Housing New Zealand), it is a transitional housing complex.

Before Covid struck and before homelessness became commonplace in New Zealand, this facility was used for registered seasonal employer (RSE) workers. Some of these men still live here, while the vacant units are filled with Hastings’ homeless.

Nationally, the homeless are disproportionately sole parents, mostly mothers. At last count, around 43 per cent were in this demographic. The Government’s own Homelessness Action Plan says women’s experiences of homelessness are poorly understood. Because they are seen less often in public spaces, their needs and vulnerability can be overlooked. “For example, women living in insecure or unsafe situations or who are in temporary or short-term housing (such as staying with family or friends) may be difficult to identify.”

For Behniwal’s young family, this place is akin to a prison. There is nowhere for the kids to play. The orchard workers can look into their lounge room while they play football. She’s asked if she can put a curtain up, but has been told no - there’s no extra furnishings allowed. At regular intervals during the week, residents are texted alerts about the spraying of horticultural chemicals. “It feels like we’re living in a little cage,” she says.

Ashar, 6, Jazmeen, 3, and Arjan, 1, all suffer from eczema, which their doctor says has been exacerbated by the regular spraying. All three sleep with Behniwal in one bedroom, with two bunk beds pushed together. Ashani and Ashonika, 14, sleep in another room. Behniwal says she’s been told she’s not allowed a cot. The younger kids don’t like sleeping without her now, anyway. They get too anxious, crying out in the night.

Behniwal was working as a nursing support worker and living in a private rental when lockdown struck in March, and an agreement to buy the house fell through. Regular blackouts meant she had to leave her job. Since then, the family has lived in motels.

The last time Behniwal was hospitalised, her mum came to help look after the kids. Behniwal was asked to tell her to leave in a text exchange Stuff has viewed, as no visitors were allowed. Ashani could look after her four brothers and sisters alone.

Play dates are out of the question.

Ashani is studying her nails. She hates it here. She doesn’t feel safe.

Did she like it better when they lived at the motel?

“Which motel?” she asks.

Behniwal pulls out her phone and scrolls through her email; she reckons she has applied to rent around 160 houses in the past six months.

But who wants to rent to a sickness beneficiary with five kids? “It’s always: ‘Thanks, we can’t help you.’ Some days it just breaks me, honestly,” says Behniwal.

“I’m just worried about my kids, and I want somewhere I can look after them.”

Non-profit iwi social services provider Te Taiwhenua o Heretaunga is the contracted housing provider for both Hosa and Behniwal.

Chief executive George Reedy won’t comment on the women’s specific cases, but says every property is put through vigorous safety vetting. His understanding is that the instructions given around spraying are precautionary.

Reedy says he would have thought close family members would be allowed to visit. If there was no cot allowed, it might be due to a safety issue, he said.

His organisation was working overtime to try and house needy families, he says. “Last year around this time we had 800 whānau in emergency and transitional housing in the Hawkes Bay, and now it’s 1700. We are looking after them as much as we can…we only put them in places we would live in.

“They’re better than some of my experiences around the shearing shed accommodation in the old days. I’m not saying it’s the greatest, but we have a crisis in the Hawkes Bay and everyone is doing their bit. We’re lucky at the moment that the RSE workers haven’t turned up, or I don’t know where these people would be, there’s nowhere for them to go.”

Any complaints were resolved direct with clients, he says. “We take it seriously, we talk to them, we work out what went wrong and we fix it.”

The Ministry of Social Development Regional Commissioner Annie Aranui says Hosa was evicted after continuing to have a puppy living on the property, and left significant damage to it. “We work hard to support our clients and we expect them to be treated with dignity and respect. However, we also expect our clients to respect those that are working with them, and to be good tenants.” She was now being supported with an intensive case manager, she says. Hosa had not yet been housed because there were many people assessed as having very urgent needs.

Aranui says Behniwal’s accommodation was modern, safe and dry, and that MSD had not had any complaints about spraying. She would be concerned if Behniwal was not allowed to put up a cot or curtains, and would question the provider about this. However, Te Tāiwhenua o Heretaunga has a good record of supporting Hasting’s homeless, Aranui says.

Kainga Ora says it aims to have 160 new houses built in Hastings by the end of next year - 80 new homes were under construction or contract. An extra $100m in Budget 2020 had been injected to help this building programme nationwide. “No one likes to see an increase in people needing public housing, however, as a result of these policies more people and whanau are being helped than ever before.”

With a spotlight placed on Auckland’s increasingly visible homeless in 2016, the then National-led Government introduced the emergency special needs grant and began putting people up in motels. (This is currently costing around $27 million per month, with more than 3000 people being paid an average of $1800 per week.)

But the problem was worse than anyone thought, and there wasn’t enough public housing to meet demand – back then, the waiting list was around 4000 – so transitional housing was developed. Now, the wait list is 18,520 and counting.

Transitional housing is in a mix of repurposed accommodation like motels, hostels and shelters, private housing rented by the provider, or new builds.

It is essentially a contestable market for social housing funds, with HUD and MSD managing contracts with 60 providers. While they can register with the Community Housing Regulatory Authority and join Community Housing Aotearoa, it’s not a requirement and less than a quarter have done so.

In the short term, advocates like the Salvation Army’s national team leader Laurette Farr say it’s a solid option alongside building more permanent housing.

“It’s working really well in the sense that it’s allowing people that safe haven, we are seeing a lot more people in transitional housing who have never asked for help before – they’ve lost jobs, they had been bunking in with families but it wasn’t working, they’ve had a relationship breakdown, they’d been living in cars. … But it can only work if you have somewhere to move them to.”

They have had 3600 people come through their 350 properties since they began offering the scheme in 2017. Services they offer include social, budget and tenancy support workers, and help with children and community connection.

Around 75 per cent of its properties are private rentals, begging the question - isn’t it simply adding another cog to the merry-go-round of rental chaos?

But Farr says it’s not that simple. A lot of people they house would have difficulty renting a house in such a competitive market, she says. “When they go to see a rental with 30 other people, they don’t stand a chance.”

But others, like Wellington Community Law’s Sarah Croskery-Hewitt, say the situation is a mess with no legal basis. It is unclear how contracts are awarded, or what standards providers must meet. Some in the sector aren’t sure if levers are pulled by MSD, HUD, Kainga Ora, or all three.

“It’s a flawed solution to a housing crisis that we would only want used as a very temporary measure, and we can see it becoming entrenched,” says Croskery-Hewitt. “We see people staying in these places for longer and longer, and they have no protections.”

Clients live in fear of eviction. Unannounced housing inspections – including searching the contents of fridges – draconian no-visiting rules, and problems with safety are regular concerns, she says.

Amore says there appears to be perverse incentives to go into emergency housing, with people assessed at being at higher need of public housing if they do so. “Even though it is not the best thing for them and their children, they’re going to get a house faster.”

In disputes, community lawyers report bias from MSD towards believing the housing provider’s version of events. If there is an issue which ends with the person being kicked out, MSD can then decline further housing grants.

Housing Minister Megan Wood says it would not work to have short-term tenancies covered by the Residential Tenancies Act. “Requiring full compliance … would often not fit well with the way transitional and emergency housing is delivered and would risk reducing the availability of these services that provide people with a safe place to stay.”

Asked if investing in transitional housing would take funds away from more permanent solutions, Woods says both are necessary. The Government is on track to build 2282 homes this year, she says.

“By 2024, we aim to have delivered more than 18,000 places and we remain committed to increasing supply further. Until the balance between supply and demand is addressed, transitional housing continues to be needed for people in urgent need of a place to stay so they don’t become homeless.”

The MSD says transitional providers have to be accredited, and if there is a pattern of issues they can have this cancelled.

Croskery-Hewitt says UN investigator Farha’s report should have been a wake-up call. It’s not enough to just talk about change, she says.

“Everyone deserves to have a safe place to live, it’s a pretty basic human right. It shouldn’t be a privilege to have a roof over your head.”