The housing agency hopes more staff per house, a bigger focus on tenancy placement and an internal review group will address antisocial behaviour from tenants
With 65,000 homes in its pocket, housing agency Kāinga Ora is New Zealand’s biggest residential landlord.
With that comes the difficult responsibility of making two groups of people happy - existing communities with Kāinga Ora housing developed within them, and the tenants themselves.
It’s a responsibility the agency has neglected, according to a 54-year old professional woman living in central Auckland next door to a pair of Kāinga Ora tenants who have engaged in a two-year long war of petty harassment.
It’s been two years of overhearing tumultuous fights, unwanted visitors intimidating her on her property and false accusations about her from the neighbours to the Police. Recently, her son was spat at as he left the property and a fire truck was called for the fifth time after she used her outdoor cooking fire.
“I’ve been here for 25 years, and it’s always been a Kāinga Ora house,” said the woman, who didn’t want to be named so as to avoid adding new zeal to her neighbour’s vexing behaviour. “We never had a problem before. But now, there’s no end in sight.”
She engaged with Kāinga Ora early on to tell them about the behaviour, but after little had been done by the public housing agency by January of this year, she applied for a protection order against the unruly neighbours to stop what Judge David Clark called a persistent pattern of harassment - adding that it arguably it goes well beyond the threshold of abusive behaviour for a court order.
Now they are prevented from interacting directly with her, but the circus goes on. They will still stand on the fence and shout at her dog or throw rubbish out on the public street - a list of micro-aggressions too small for Police to deal with on a case-by-case basis, but representing a long and stressful two years for the Auckland woman.
“It’s infuriating,” she said. “It’s caused me a whole lot of stress and taken up a lot of my time. When my son came home from university, he was worried about my safety.”
For a public housing agency, it’s a difficult dilemma. It is tasked with housing some of the country’s most vulnerable and deprived people - people who may have nowhere else to go if facing eviction from their Kāinga Ora home.
At the same time, the Auckland woman’s experience is not unique. A pattern of stories have emerged detailing Kiwis dealing with antisocial and disruptive behaviours right on their doorstep.
It’s the challenge of a class-stratified society in microcosm - the often ugly and loud fallout of social deprivation affecting the comfort and peace of other members of society.
It makes neither side’s story any less significant, which seems to be the web Kāinga Ora is stuck in.
Perhaps in an attempt to break out of this stalemate of competing interests, the organisation has announced a new approach to dealing with disruptive behaviours - one it hopes could help it solve issues like this one in Auckland.
Kāinga Ora’s new approach includes an internal review group to provide advice and guidance to escalate tenancy issues, a lower property to case worker ratio and a promise to spend more time making sure tenants are placed in the right community.
According to general manager of national services Nick Maling, this, with changes to the Residential Tenancies Act last year allowing Kāinga Ora to end tenancies after three warnings, should give the organisation ammunition to deal with the issue.
However, he stressed turfing disruptive people out onto the street isn’t the answer.
“We also do not want to make a customer homeless; we will move them to another Kāinga Ora home and continue to provide them with the intensive support they need to address the causes behind their behaviour,” he said. “Making people and whānau homeless creates a revolving door for housing which only sees problems compound and perpetuate.”
Meanwhile, Maling said antisocial Kāinga Ora tenants represents a small percentage of the total.
Since 2017, the number of Kāinga Ora tenancies that receive disruptive behaviour complaints has declined each year, while the number of Kāinga Ora public houses has increased. There were 12 percent fewer complaints in 2021 compared with 2020 and 31 percent fewer than 2017.
But while the number of tenancies that receive disruptive behaviour complaints represent less than one percent of the total occupied public homes that Kāinga Ora manages, the numbers are cold comfort for neighbours whose lives are affected.
“It is a small proportion of cases we are talking about,” said Maling. “At the same time, I don’t want to minimise it at all. It’s a tricky societal problem. It’s a problem that’s always been with us and always will be with us… It’s like crime, you can’t fix crime.”
He said he had seen some terrible behaviour and feels for the neighbours putting up with it. “It’s not acceptable - and it’s not acceptable to Kāinga Ora. That’s why we are making these changes.”
Part of Kāinga Ora’s new approach is a greater focus on wrap-around services to help tenants in need - be it mental health services, police or engaging help from the health system to help them deal with drug or alcohol issues.
“It depends what’s going on in the household and driving the behaviour,” Maling said.
Bricks and Mortar
Alice Daniel-Kirk is the housing support manager for Kāinga Ora tenants from Wellington to Ōtaki. She’s been with the organisation for 16 years, and said the big change she had noticed was a shift from just looking after the houses to looking after the people within them as well.
“We’ve done a shift from looking at the bricks-and-mortar kind of stuff to looking at people’s wellbeing,” she said. “The biggest change is we finally started to acknowledge the complexities of our people that we are charged to look after.”
She suggested this more holistic approach is the way to help people get out of the public housing trap.
“Ending their tenancy and sending them out the door and just having them come right back through the door doesn’t help,” she said.
And the opportunity for Kāinga Ora housing tenants to move to a new house can have a silver lining - Daniel-Kirk said everyone she has offered that chance had taken it.
Similarly, Maling said tenants were often keen to have a shot at a fresh start.
“Often, the tenants see it as less that they are the cause of disruption and more like a neighbourly dispute,” he said. “They often welcome the chance to move on.”
Stabilising tenancies
In documents obtained under the Official Information Act on Kāinga Ora’s disruptive behaviour policy, the agency says it is committed to sustaining tenancies - suggesting the policy is to find a way for tenants to keep on living in the same place peaceably, rather than attempt to move them on.
“We seek to identify the root cause of any issues as they arise and tailor our approach in a way that works for each individual and their whānau,” one document says. “We do this by working with other agencies and community providers where appropriate, assisting our customers to access the right supports at the right time.”
The progress being made with the tenants is therefore hidden behind the Privacy Act, meaning neighbours like the Auckland woman have little way of knowing how the situation is changing - or if it is at all.
Tools under the Residential Tenancies Act allow the agency to require a tenant to transfer, but according to Kāinga Ora: “This step would only be considered as a last resort and backed up with appropriate support for any tenant transferred, and only undertaken with Review Group approval.”
Instead of moving people on, the agency wants to “stabilise the tenancy” - reduce disruptive behaviours while keeping the tenants in their new homes.
At the same time, 142 were relocated due to disruptive behaviour in 2021 - but these are those willing to move.
When questioned on Kāinga Ora’s lack of action by National MP Nicola Willis during Question Time in Parliament last year, Associate Minister for Housing Poto Williams said “everyone has the right to feel safe and secure living in their home, and I would expect Kāinga Ora to do all they can to ensure that this is the case”.
In reference to a case in Whangārei where an elderly man had his life verbally threatened by a Kāinga Ora tenant neighbour, Williams said she expected the housing agency to get involved as soon as it became aware of issues at its properties - but also noted that in situations like that, the police should be the first port of call.
