‘Freezing out here bro’: Voices of the capital’s homeless

Saturday, 30 August 2025

Tom Hunt talks to the people living on the capital’s streets, like Kiri Cashmore ‒ who shelters under a tarpaulin in a city park ‒ as well as businesses and policy makers.

The mayor of Wellington once knew the name of every homeless person in Wellington. Or so the story goes.

It wasn’t a triumph of memory. There were only two, maybe three.

But that was another millennium. A time of institutions and, it would seem, a safety net that worked.

New government figures have shown a sudden up-tick in Wellington rough sleepers – a subset of homelessness – with 114 recorded earlier this year. Downtown Community Ministry had the city’s homeless figures at 328 earlier this year.

Ministry of Social Development figures show a staggering drop in nationwide emergency housing grants. The quarter before a National-led government came to power there were 25,866. There were 3831 in the most-recent financial quarter.

Small numbers perhaps in a city with 210,000 people. But tell that to the locals or businesses in parts of Newtown or the central city where they gather, some with addiction or mental health issues, and the problem is growing and urgent.

Tell it to those who are now ending a cold winter outside and, well, they probably just want somewhere warm.

The homeless

“I’ll get out of here sooner or later,” says Kiri Cashmore, 62, whose home is sheltered by a tarpaulin in a central Wellington park. His blanket lives in a trolley.

“Back to Australia.”

Cashmore was born in Ruatoria, about as far east as you can go in New Zealand, but he left there 50 years ago.

He hasn’t always been homeless. Until recently he was living in Australia working as a water blaster and forklift driver. But then a horror run hit. His mother, brother and sister died.

Cashmore was staying with another brother in the King Country but there was an argument and he was out. He found his way to Wellington.

“I got stranded here nine months ago,” he says outside a Courtenay Place convenience store.

He probably could get a house but it comes down to money.

“I’ve only got a couple of hundred bucks. If I get a home, I’ll have nothing.”

He is happy enough. He has warm clothes, a blanket, a tarpaulin. But it has been winter. There can be a cold breeze at night, he understates.

Technically, TC (Top Cat) is not now homeless but has spent much of the winter on the streets since release from prison on Friday the 13th of June.

“It has been freezing out here bro,” he says. He won’t give his real name.

Home now is Petone, where a prison release programme found him a flat, but it is Newtown, the south Wellington suburb that has become a new capital epicentre for homelessness, that he spends his time.

“There is a lot of generosity here, cities live off generosity,” he says.

TC has a facial tattoo, a Placemakers T-shirt, and a Snapper card on a lanyard around his neck. His jacket is clean. The only thing that marks him as recently homeless is the people he is hanging with.

There is a man with a seeming-diamond-encrusted ring and claims of an inheritance worth billions he never got, a woman keen to recount how police swooped the day before, or the man just asking where he can find somewhere warm to sleep tonight.

TC is from Christchurch but moved to Wellington after the quakes. The capital’s streets, or prison, have been his home for much of the time since. And Newtown, and its aforementioned generosity, is the place.

Back to that generosity, the Salvation Army shop across the road is a reliable place as much as any to get a blanket for the night, courtesy of donations left in the shop front. Those donations have been well gone-over on the morning The Post visits.

The politicians

Wellington City councillor Nureddin Abdurahman has been trying to get some progress on homelessness in Newtown. He, like others, says the vast majority of those on the streets are good people. But there are problems with about 10%.

An email from a local, raising issues of a “rapid increase in antisocial behaviour and drug use” in the past six months, saw him ramp up his actions.

The resident talked of four individuals openly using drugs on the footpath ‒ behaviour not unheard of from the group but it was becoming more dangerous and abusive to passers-by.

“The breaking point for me, however, was this morning when I watched this same group sitting at the bus stop outside 222 Riddiford Street, openly taking drugs while a police patrol drove past not once but twice without any intervention,” the local wrote. It was a time children were walking by on the way to school.

The resident, it should be noted, had no issue with those living on the street. But those who had never been abusive seem to have moved on as a more dangerous group moved in.

Abdurahman says drugs – synthetic cannabis or methamphetamine – share some blame for the “aggressiveness or zombiness”. And the solution, in part, is help.

Help for addiction, or mental health, or just finding somewhere to live. He tried to get the council to extend the City Safety Plan to Newtown but failed, with some of those voting against saying it will move the issues elsewhere.

To Wellington Central MP Tamatha Paul, the Green housing spokesperson, policies don’t come much crueller than that which hinders access to emergency housing based on the idea that someone has “contributed” to their own homelessness.

Proof of flat viewings or applications for public housing can be harder for those who often have no phone or internet, she said.

She was recently at a meeting of various agencies trying to tackle the problem. The drastic drop in emergency housing grants was a big factor in the rise of homelessness. But those on the streets fell into three rough categories ‒ rough sleepers, those coming to town to beg, and others with active addictions.

It would be easy to think of homelessness as a Wellington issue but, with figures showing a rise in rough sleeping around New Zealand, that would be wishful thinking.

For Mana MP Barbara Edmonds this came close to home recently. She recently came across a young woman, in her early 20s in Porirua, homeless and getting help with food.

Edmonds soon realised the reason she recognised the woman was she had gone to school with her own daughter.

“She is so young. That is why we need to support our rangatahi.”

The businesses

Back down Courtenay Place, Drippin Cafe and Bar co-owner Amrad Pal Singh opened the doors a few weeks ago.

He has been spared the trouble of other businesses, which would not be identified but talked about loss of business, urine in doorways, or general chaos.

He reckons not being open at night helps. There has been vomit or urine on the door step but that could have come from any drunk, regardless of where they lived.

There was one incident, when they were renovating the place, when he opened the front door not knowing there was someone sleeping outside.

“There was yelling and kicking and screaming. We called police but, by the time they got here, they were gone.”

A bar manager in Cuba Mall talked of the recent “congestion” of homeless outside. The bar tried extending their liquor licence into the street but they wasn’t much help.

“As a business we can’t really do anything,” he said.

At Nabil Barber on the main road through Newtown, Salem Saadoon in recent weeks saw one seemingly homeless man ask a woman, carrying a baby, for money. When she did not help, the man grabbed her hair.

The number of homeless has risen from few to “oh my gosh”.

He has another man who sleeps in a doorway by his shop who occasionally screams or says strange things.

“Many people he scares, mostly the women he scares.”

Nabil Al-Sabhawi has had the Newtown barber shop for four years and has heard his unofficial doorway neighbour tell passers-by to “f… off” or “f… you”.

Until a couple of months ago there were two to four resident homeless in Newtown. Now it is about 20.

The locals

Ayub Mohamed has lived most of his life – housed – in Newtown and says there has always been some homelessness. But there has been undoubtedly a recent increase.

Most of them are fine, respectful even. But it’s the minority who occasionally – with no rhyme nor reason – kick off “yelling and screaming”. Things can, at times, get out of control. Nights are worse.

“The problem is the Government or people at the city council are not doing anything,” Mohamed says.

Off Cuba St, Cullem Johnson says the homeless in the area don’t cause issues. Maybe once or twice they have asked for a cigarette but that is about it.

Really, most of the trouble he sees in the city is down is down Courtenay Place and it is not the people who live on the streets.

“It is drunk people,” he says.

The homeless, though, mostly kept to themselves.

“It is just sort of like they are there. They are people, that is about it.”