As many Aucklanders enjoy their hard-won summer freedom, not much changes for the city’s most vulnerable residents
Auckland’s temporary disguise as a ghost town over the height of the summer is a time-honoured tradition. This year, the city’s residents will be vacating en masse after several months cooped up within the city.
But while the inner city is likely to be just as quiet as it always is between Christmas and New Year, there is a significant chunk of its denizens that won’t be going anywhere.
Life continues in much the same way for the city’s homeless population - whether it is lockdown or vacation time.
As team leader of youth housing at Lifewise, Aaron Hendry said his job didn’t change very much over lockdown - helping young people who find themselves sleeping rough into emergency accommodation and in the best case scenario, finding them the support that will help them begin a healing process.
Half of New Zealand’s 41,000 homeless people are under the age of 25. Part of the cause and a major exacerbating factor is that despite this, much of the services aimed at getting people into secure housing are aimed at adults.
This coupled with the fact that teenagers and adolescents are much more vulnerable to the dangers of a rough sleepers life - such as abuse - means this group is particularly neglected.
Hendry said the problems of youth homelessness have been around long before lockdown, but the period did make some parts of it even more severe.
“We’ve received a huge increase in referrals since lockdown began - to the point that we are struggling to keep up with them,” he said. He said his team have had around 100 requests for support since the lockdown and were able to support 30 to 40 of them in emergency accommodation and permanently house roughly six to ten.
What made that possible was a new partnership with an inner-city hotel who can serve as temporary emergency accommodation for young people in a tough spot. This means Lifewise has been able to get these young people off the street immediately and give them some access to support.
Hendry said there’s been a dire need for temporary solutions like this - something that wasn’t available during last year’s lockdown.
“We've needed an immediate accommodation solution for young people for several years now,” he said. “There is a huge gap in that initial stage - what we've seen is young people reach out for support and they can't access it and they end up sleeping rough or staying in really vulnerable or dangerous situations.”
Homelessness support from the Government often lacks youth-specific services, which can leave young people between a rock and a hard place.
“Even though this group of people are experiencing this horrific experience at probably the highest level, the services that have been funded have not been directed into that space,” Hendry said.
This means young people generally only have access to the same one-size-fits-all support as anybody - which isn’t always a safe or appropriate plan of action.
“Most emergency accommodation spaces are mixed accommodation where you have a whole group of really vulnerable people who are going through some of the hardest stuff in life,” Hendry said. “Often when young people are in that environment, they are the ones who get exploited or harmed, because of their age and their vulnerability.”
Other barriers such as not being able to sign a tenancy agreement without a caregiver and the perception of young people as troublemakers prevent young homeless people from finding a permanent place to lay their head.
And it’s not just the people you see on the pavements of the inner city - homelessness being defined as lacking access to adequate housing, rather than strictly referring to people living directly on the street.
In the 2018 census, 41,644 people were severely housing deprived. For over 30,000 of them, this meant sharing accommodation on an unstable and impermanent basis - perhaps a temporary resident in a severely crowded private dwelling.
Analysis from the University of Otago reveals almost half of the country’s homeless population live in Auckland - that’s almost 500 people living without shelter, 2,337 people in temporary accommodation, 15,582 sharing temporarily and an additional unknown number of people living in uninhabitable dwellings.
This means the problem is happening all over the city, not just in central. Hendry said the idea of bringing more police and cracking down on rough sleepers in the CBD won’t do anything to help, but would likely exacerbate the issue.
“Picking people up from the street, putting them in lock-up for a few days and letting them out again doesn't solve the issue,” he said. “The underlying issues are lack of housing, support, and trauma - those are the things that are going to make the most difference if we take them seriously.”
At the same time, the inner city is often the visible heart of the problem of homelessness.
Green MP for Auckland Central Chlöe Swarbrick said the city centre has largely been the place people end up if they don’t fit anywhere else.
“We are currently experiencing an extreme amount of distress from folks who obviously are in dire need of support,” she said.
She said the 12 million dollars in the Reactivate Tāmaki Makaurau support package for food banks was an inherent recognition of the fact that so many people are struggling right now - but saw food banks as a temporary solution to the problem.
“Instead of increasing incomes or doing anything that changes the structural drivers of why people are going to food banks, we are just continuing to paper over the cracks.”
Hendry also sees little changing in the long-run without a commitment to foundational change, rather than catching people as they fall.
As Aucklanders breathed a sigh of relief as their favourite cafe reopened, the road to their favourite provincial summer beach spot was cleared and families were reunited after four long hard months - things won’t change much for the city’s homeless.
“As we Aucklanders are looking forward to heading out to a cafe or restaurant or having some extra freedoms, for those of our whānau who have been doing it the hardest, not much changes,” Hendry said. “They've been living in extreme poverty during lockdown and that will continue on afterwards. Unless there's a real commitment to addressing poverty and homelessness in this country, those freedoms will continue to be enjoyed by only a select few.”
