NZ Politics

Its a very complicated thing.

In NZ in the 2020s Kainga Ora's tenants tend to be people who have had generationally impoverished lives; ie they're at least the second generation living in the cuts to social services that started with the Ruth Richardson budgets in the early 90s, or it might even be mathematically possible that some of them are 3rd generation.

Its not always this cut and dried but a lot of people who struggle to maintain jobs, and their own private housing end up in Kainga Ora houses. They might have mental illnesses, be ex-convicts, have all sorts of social development problems, be gang members, or have family members who are - all sorts.

Then in many areas, there are whole streets which are entirely Kainga Ora houses, so whole neighborhoods of people who are struggling to get ahead, but might have a bunch of time stuck at home with not much to do; and very little supervision because its all just government provided housing - its not like a care facility or anything.

So yeah, perhaps unsurprisingly, there's been some cases where the folks haven't got on well with their neighbors, some when they're violent or abusive so that's part of what they want to "resolve" by kicking them out to no house. Then there's just people who for whatever reason don't take great care of what in some cases are pretty miserable flats or houses - often with longstanding maintenance issues.

The problem I have is that its an entirely punitive way of dealing with the problems.

1. we should aim for 0 homelessness so instead of shuffling problem tenants out into cars we should build more social housing.
2. there's very little day to day care given for a lot of these people, and almost none given at a whole community/neighborhood/collective way.
3. NZ also has piss poor mental health support, so there's a decent chance folks are out there struggling on their own and then other folks have to try to contend with a neighbor who's not necessarily acting as stable as you'd want.
4. Basically all this does is shift the problem; if these tenants are bad as tenants, they'll probably be worse as homeless, or if they're forced into getting housed with people who don't want them, or don't like how they live etc then there's all sorts of other harm that can come - eg we have these big "hostel"/boarding house type situations for similar people and they've got even less care around them and we've already seen a tenant burn one of them down with people inside last year.