Yeah
Turn it into a hostel
Yeah
Turn it into a home
Yeah
Narrator: New Zealand has 1.9 million homes
And on census night 2018
94,000 of them were empty
That's one in every 20 homes
The census also found 102,000 New Zealanders
were experiencing severe housing deprivation
These are people living on the street
constantly couch surfing
and living in houses considered uninhabitable
Kia ora, so my name's Aaron Hendry.
I'm the team leader of the
Lifewise Youth Housing Service
I'm also a member of Manaaki Rangatahi
which is a collective that's working
to end youth homelessness
When I think of homes standing empty
I think of the people that I know that are suffering
I think about the people that I know
that are living on the street tonight, you know?
I think of the over 20 young people
that got referred in the last few weeks
and I had to look at their names, read their stories,
and recognise that I had to reject all of them
because we don't have anywhere for them to go
I think that...
Yeah
Aww, stop
Because we had no place to go
we used to sleep underneath these
I remember one morning
Like under there?
Yeah, under here
Over in this area
we'd flip the table over
so we could sleep under it, so no one could see us
'cause it was embarrassing, you know, being young
And we didn't want no cops around
so we had to do what we had to do.
How old were you then?
I was about 14
What was that like?
I mean, having to sleep rough
or break into abandoned buildings to sleep at night?
It was a struggle, bro
It honestly Scary?
Yeah
There were times where I was afraid to sleep at night
so I would stay awake until day
and then I'd go to sleep at the libraries or at McDonald's
Unfortunately, they shut that McDonald's down
because of the amount of homeless people
that would go in every night
So it's yeah... it was a struggle.
How did that make you feel?
You don't have a home, you're in this abandoned building
and you know that people have these homes
that are just sitting there vacant
They're not living in them, they're not loving them
And you really needed one
How does that make you feel?
It made me realise how selfish society really is
We have these multi-billionaires sitting up on their castle
looking out at a view
and there's homeless people everywhere
And I still think about it
every time I walk past the homeless person, I'm like
'Fuck, bro, there's so much room, but
these rich people are taking over.'
Narrator: The most common explanation
for new Zealand's 94,000 empty houses are holiday homes
The Coromandel had the highest proportion
with a third of all houses empty on census night
But even in urban centres
there's plenty of vacant properties
Auckland had 17,000 empty houses on census night
There's a range of explanations given for this
such as houses in between tenants or owners
or properties in disrepair
and a concept called property or land banking
where an investor leaves property empty
to make profit from capital gains
without the work of having tenants
My name is Sharon Cullwick. I'm Executive Officer
of the New Zealand Property Investors Federation.
There's a lot of reasons why there's empty houses
I've got a house in Auckland at the moment that's empty
I was doing renovations on it
and then I ended up having a flood in it
And now they haven't finished doing the repairs
after the flood that's been empty now for six months
So that's counted as an empty house
When the government started working on
the healthy home standards, which is great
When they started working on the
Residential Tenancies Act,
I said to Kris Faafoi and the time, I said
'I understand what you're doing,
but don't do it when there's a housing crisis on.'
Sure, we can slowly start to improve our properties
But what it means if you make rules and regulations
there's a lot of people that have had to leave houses empty
There was a developer in Hamilton
who had a whole lot of houses
He'd buy them. he'd sit on them for a year or two year
wait until he had all the plans done
get it going through council
but he'd have tenants in those houses
He's not doing that anymore
It's too hard to bring them up to the healthy homes
So they've got another whole lot of houses there
that are sitting empty
If they push it into a certain amount of time
some people say 'Oh, it's just too hard,
my properties are too old' so they decide
'No, I'm not going to rent them out anymore.'
So you've got your land banking
your homes that aren't up to scratch and need to be revived
and what was the third one you mentioned?
[Producer] Baches.
Baches, yeah
I mean, once again, when there's not enough
I think almost all of them, we need to address it
The solution to this is so much more complex
Even if we fill those homes
we're still gonna have people experiencing homelessness
because of a range of other inequalities and injustices
But I think that the most simple perspective is
if we are struggling with housing
and we don't have enough, then that at least
there's a whole layer of people
that are in motels right now that could be in a tenancy
If you had all those millions of dollars
do you think you'd buy heaps of homes
and just have five baches?
You know, I will, bro
I would make them into a home for the homeless.
Make them into a home for the street youth
I... pretty much, yeah, yeah
Yeah
Got to, eh, bro?
We got to
We all gotta make it together
That's always been in my mind
We're all gonna make it together
Narrator: New Zealand's increasing rate of homelessness
has coincided with the decline in home ownership rates
More people are having to rent
making property investment more attractive
leaving more houses in the hands of fewer people
Of the homes being rented in 2021
a quarter are owned by people with two or more properties
Nowadays' it's seen as being greedy
and there's people saying
'You shouldn't have so many houses.'
And I think, well, everyone needs a place to live
and really it doesn't matter who provides it
and the government can't afford to provide
all the houses to all the people
So therefore they really need to concentrate
on the lower socio-economic people
The people that really need a hand up
They need to concentrate on that
And for the other people that are doing okay for themselves
those houses need to be provided by private landlords
We do see people that are not able to sustain tenancies
because they can't afford it
Or people who are not getting tenancies
because the landlord doesn't want the house to have
Hey, it's a three bedroom home
I only want one person to live in it, so
no, your partner can't stay
or your children can't be here
we're going to have to move you on
So there's people falling out of housing
not because they're doing anything wrong
but because actually
the way we're thinking about housing is
meaning that we're thinking about it with a business lens
rather than a human rights lens
That has led to gross inequalities
and injustices in our nation
So seeing all the whānau who are still out here
living rough
how does that make you feel?
Makes me want to help them even more
And makes me think twice about how
the system
and how it runs
'Cause the system isn't all good
There are some bad things about it
Like this