Banning Rough Sleeping Won’t End Homelessness — But These Community Solutions Could
A ‘Rough Sleeping Ban’ won’t end homelessness — it will push people further into crisis. Across Tāmaki, community responses are showing us a future where housing support is both fast and fair.
The Government's decision to transform the Emergency Housing system by restricting access to it, has been a perfect example of how political decisions incease and excerbate the risk and harm of homelessness. This decision alone has shed a light on how unjust and unnecessary homelessness is! As a result, we have probably never had so much awareness of the crisis of homelessness and particularly that of youth homelessness.
Now with the Government's proposal od a "Rough Sleeping Ban" - a proposal that will essentially punish unhoused people for a problem of the Government's own creation - there has never been a more important moment for us to move past the naming of the problem, to that of the many solutions we have available to us.
However, with all the attention on the Emergency Housing reforms a key concern I have right now is that the focus on the issue of Emergency Housing has created a perception that the solution to ending homelessness is rolling back the Government's Emergency Housing Policy.
This does need to happen, however it is not the solution. If we elect a progressive, left Government next year, and all they do is role back this policy, we will simply be going back to a status quo that was unfit, often exploitative, demeaning and harmful to those who need to access it.
The Government's Emergency Housing policy has been an absolute disaster, and we should not shy away from the reality here, people have been harmed as a result of the Government's decision to make it harder to access emergency shelter through MSD.
However, we should not forget that the previous system was also unfit and caused immense harm. The mass motel based model succeeded in funnelling huge amounts of public money into the back pockets of landlords, while our children, our young people and our whānau, were forced to survive in environments which were often unsafe and unfit to live in.
In the face of calls for change and better living conditions for those needing Emergency Housing, the Labour led Government at the time often said that the situation was better than the streets. This rhetoric was challenged by those who were living in these conditions, with some young people sharing that they would feel safer sleeping on the streets than staying in the motels, lodges and hostels that were on offer.
The Coalition Government is not wrong when they say that the motel based model is unfit for our people. It has caused huge amounts of harm and I would argue that it has been a moral failure on behalf of the state. Rather than ending homelessness, it sustained it, exploiting our most vulnerable whānau, while funnelling huge amounts of public money into the back pockets of landlords. But, just getting rid of it and forcing people to sleep on the streets is equally morally bankrupt.
Nether solution is the answer, and if we just go back to the status quo, we will have achieved little.
It is also simply untrue that the the options are either using motels as emergency housing while we wait for enough houses to be built to house all of us, or leaving people on the street. There are alternative models, they exist, and are having success, right now.
Politician's and political parties that are serious about ending this crisis must commit to designing an alternative crisis response system for those at-risk of homelessness. This means investing in community led solutions to Immediate Housing which already exist, and empowering communities to blue print these models and scale them.
For example, there are already models which have been developed by the community and which are currently in operation in Tamaki and seeing encouraging results. The below 4 services are examples of community led services operating within Tamaki right now, that have been pulled together in response to overwhelming need, and are beginning to organically grow a form of coordinated response for rangatahi experiencing homelessness in Tamaki:
1) Kick Back's, The Front Door is a crisis response and early intervention centre specifically focused on responding to the needs of tamariki and rangatahi facing homelessness. Though, internationally these sorts of services exist and are critical first response services for young people facing homelessness, its the first of its kind here in Aotearoa.
The Front Door is essentially an integrated services centre, a HUB where we work to close gaps between services in order to bring the support rangatahi need to them at The Front Door. We provide access to mental health and addiction services, legal support, health care, kai, clothing, general advocacy, and long term navigation support. Essentially tamariki and rangatahi in crisis can drop in, we work with them to understand their needs, and than begin supporting them to navigate the system to ensure they get it.
In response to the Government's changes to the Emergency Housing system, Kick Back has worked proactively with MSD and friendly landlords who own hostels, lodges and boarding houses, to develop an alternative emergency system, working with MSD who have provided us a key contact within W&I who can streamline paperwork and support, and building on our relationships with landlords, we have been able to ensure that young people walking through our doors can access shelter swiftly, sometimes within a couple of hours of entering The Front Door.
The oppurtunity with The Front Door is for the Government to take the model and concept behind the service and than engage with local communities across Aotearoa to support the design and develop of similar projects, for specific cohorts, in each major city and town in the country.
Local city missions (and similar services) serve a similar purpose for our adult whānau in major hubs across the country. Ensuring there is also specific rangatahi centres, that are integrated with health, housing and other support services, as a central landing pad for rangatahi facing homelessness, will go a long way to ensuring that whenever a tamariki or rangatahi experiences homelessness, wherever they are in the country, we have the social infrastructure in place ready to support them. The Front Door, and similar services, play a critical role across a persons housing journey,in preventing homelessness for whānau and young people, while also working to provide early intervention services, long term navigation support, and housing stabilization services to support people to stabilize and maintain their housing.
2) Another innovation Kick Back has been developing is the Safety Net - a partnership between Kick Back and Massey Community Trust - TSN is a grass roots response to youth homelessness and yet another alternative to motel based Emergency Housing. TSN is a Host Home model that provides safe, stable Immediate Housing to young people in immediate housing need by connecting them with a host whānau who have a spare room available and are willing to host a young person for a short period of time.
The power of The Safety Net Project is that it is about developing the capacity of the community to hold and heal its own. Kick Back and Massey Community Trust have been working together over the last two years to organize and empower whānau within Massey Community in West Auckland to support and care for rangatahi in need of Immediate Housing. And we have seen promising results, with young people accessing the Safety Net often reporting improvement in their mental health, reductions in their reliance on drugs and alcohol, the support they needed to stay in school, retain employment, and move into more stable long term housing.
Kick Back has also developed a range of materials to support other grass roots agencies to become Safety Net providers, and is developing a longer term strategy to explore how we can grow the Safety Net across the country and eventually wider across Aotearoa.
The oppurtunity with this project is that in comparison to other bricks and mortar housing servives, it is relatively inexpensive, embedded in local communities and provides an opportunity for young people to access support swiftly within their own communities and from there stabilize while getting the support they need to develop a longer term housing plan.
3) Kahui tu Kaha's Pito Mata is yet another rangatahi focused Immediate Housing solution that if supported by Central Government could easily be scaled, blueprinted, and rolled out across the country as an alternative to motel based Emergency accomodation.
Seeing the need for rangatahi to be able to access housing immediately while in a state of crisis, Kahui Tu Kaha developed Pito Mata as a fast response service, ensuring swift access to shelter and onsite support, while longer term housing options are explored.
Pito Mata is one of the few housing services equipped to respond to the needs of young people who are significantly unwell, they rarely decline a referral, and do not discriminate against a young person for being mentally unwell or in a heightened state as a result of the trauma they have experienced.
4) LifeSkills Rangatahi Housing Navigators (embedded within Lifeskills' Youth Services team) do tremendous mahi in South Auckland. One of the services they provide is the Youth Payment, recognizing the high volume of young people coming through their door with experiences of homelessness, they developed their own rangatahi housing navigation service to provide swift access to housing navigation support and advocacy.
The existence of these services within Tamaki has begun to develop a level of functional and organic coordinated access to housing support for rangatahi and tamariki experiencing homelessness across the city. Due to the strength of relationship betwen these services, what has begun to develop is a rough sketch of what a coordinated, crisis response system could look like if it was invested in, planned for, and appropriately resourced.
As we look forward into the future, we must not accept that the failure of today justifies going back to the injustices of yesterday.
The next Government, whoever they are, must have a bold vision for transforming our housing and homelessness system, one that looks towards a future where the suffering of those experiencing homelessness is not simply alleviated, but where homelessness itself is ended.
We must continue to remember that Homelessnessness is a problem we can solve. We can end this injustice, we can make different political decisions, we can put our tamariki, our rangatahi and our whānau at the centre.
Investing in developing a coordinated crisis response and Immediate Housing system is one key step we need to take as a country if we are going to end homelessness in Aotearoa.