Is Wellington's homeless plan actually working? One man says it is
Monday, 27 July 2026
Grahame Hanns has been at the front-line of Wellington’s homeless saga. He has cleaned up dirty syringes, been beaten, seen the chaos. And he has good news: Things are getting better.
The usually-private central city facilities manager is speaking up now because, after years of watching the problem worsen, the change in the last 10 months had been marked. It was no thanks to him, he pointed out, but to work led by the Wellington City Council.
“This time last year it was chaos,” Hanns said.
Read more:
“There were huge camps of people in Cuba Mall. They were using Left Bank as their bathroom … it stunk like a urinal … and then the council announced this scheme.”
That scheme was the City Safety and Wellbeing Plan, approved by the previous council in June 2025 and later confirmed by the current council. It allocated $40 million over a decade to tackle crime, antisocial behaviour, public safety concerns and homelessness in the central city.
Official Government figures, from January to March, showed the number of people sleeping rough in Wellington had risen from 145 to 163 on the same period a year before. Homelessness – a wider set that also includes people in shelters – was about static.
But Hanns, on the ground, said that while the number of rough sleepers might not be falling, their visible presence was. On the morning he spoke to The Post he had just completed a lap around town. There were barely any people homeless or rough sleeping on the streets, aside from a couple at the bottom of Willis St.
The assumption was that, while they might be out later in the day, they’d had a bed and shelter the night before.
Hanns said he had seen the problem come in waves over a dozen years - first driven by legal highs, then by a Covid-era influx. In 2021 he was badly assaulted by a mentally unwell person on the streets in 2021 and he had removed syringes from stairwells in empty buildings that people had moved into.
“The criminal element sort of moved in … they were feeding off the chaos,” he said.
At that time in the Left Bank off Cuba Mall two trees and a wall had served as a urinal and one corner was grimmer. This week, the area was about as spotless as the city can be. You still wouldn’t eat off it.
The change involved not just the council but the groups it brought with it - the Māori wardens, Downtown Community Ministry, Wellington City Mission, the Wellington Homeless Women’s Trust and others, Hanns said.
The council’s Te Kāinga rental properties gave helpers an affordable place to stay. More bed spaces had been opened so people could sleep somewhere better than a doorway for the night. A Wellington wet house - where people with severe alcohol addictions could stay and drink - was quietly opened and has been working after past attempts by the council failed.
It is hardly a tag line for an ad campaign but Wellington City missioner Murray Edridge said, “the best city in the country to be homeless” could now be applied to the capital.
It was too early to say if the council-led actions were working but he suspected they were a victim of their own success – word was out that Wellington treated its homeless well, attracting more here.
The new faces he saw at the ministry’s new transitional housing, Whakamaru, suggested that was the case, he said.
Those at the coal face, helped by better coordination between agencies, knew almost everyone on the streets by name. But things were far from fixed, he said.
“There are problems there, the problems are huge” – ones that would not be fixed by blanket move-on orders which could treat all people on the street the same regardless of circumstance.
Wellington City councillor Rebecca Matthews said the “personalised, wraparound support” the council was leading was making a difference, “especially when the other conditions out there are so hard”.
The apparent success was a credit to Teri O'Neill, a councillor last term, and others who had worked on it over the last several years, she said.
O’Neill said Wellington had always been a “compassionate” city but it was not easy getting such a large chunk of funding. The apparent success was down to councillors, staff and people such as Edridge at the front line, she said.
Notably, Wellington City councillor Nicola Young – no bleeding-heart liberal – recently broke from the council’s right-bloc to join the left in opposing move-on orders. Young, a regular pedestrian down Courtenay Place, said the council was already doing a “hell of a [good] job” in addressing the issues.
Wellington mayor Andrew Little said the city had set up a team of front-line urban liaison officers to provide a “visible and professional presence“ and increased coordination with agencies. The council had committed, via the Triennium Plan to delivering and developing the City Safety Plan, and possibly extending it to suburbs starting with Newtown.
“The early signs are encouraging, but the central government’s move-on orders are unhelpful,” Little said, making it more difficult for agencies to work together ”to keep us safe and help vulnerable people“.