ONE MORE FOR SALVATION ARMY
This week I got another private landlord to provide another unit to the Salvation Army’s offender reintegration program.
Providing good housing for reintergration is critical. Offenders who don’t have good housing can re-offend quickly and this is a path directly back to prison.
Offending creates more victims as well as causing an expensive revolving door in our courts.
DOUBLE GLASSING QUOTES
I meet with Cr Phil Maugers last week to talk about social housing moving forward.
Phil did some work on better the cost of improving a number of social houses during the election campaign.
I now have a copy of those quotes from Hagley Window Replacements. They’re not cheap at around 10% of the average cost of units.
I can see value in asking the question for living rooms on the ground floor, south sides of complexes where the winter sun will not get and cause those homes to need heating.
People want to help improve social housing in the city, this was clear from my conversations with both Phil and Collin, from Hagley.
LAND QUOTES & OTHER SOCIAL HOUSING PROVIDERS
Also of interest this week was a discussion with a large land holder in Burwood with land adjacent to Concord Place.
As I’ve traveled my recent journey into social housing, it’s become obvious to me that there is profit in this area with an ample supply of profitable tenants. I’ve been looking around the city at locations and the question of the need for a competitor to OCHT.
It seems to me that the model is now well understood and the demand for housing very much exists.
QUALITY DATA AT COUNCIL
This weeks CCC Sustainability and Community Resilience Committee agenda includes a big section on social housing.
I reached out to the chair to make a short deputation on Thursday because I had a number of questions about the quality of data and information being presented to elected members and I also want to reaffirm with the council that our interest in social housing was more than just as an election stunt.
The result of this exchange has been a very productive exchange with the CCC housing manager who has invited Stephen and I to meet to talk further about housing at some point and has also provided an extensive backgrounder to improve our understanding.
QUALITY DATA AT HOUSING NEW ZEALAND
Some very useful and interesting data showed up from HNZ this week. They presented their data by census area and broke it down by ‘bedroom count’.
Big thanks to Stephen who spent some time checking the data, putting it into a spreadsheet and added ward data so I could import it into the database to let us compare and consolidate with the council data.
In presenting this data for your consideration, these are the things that occurred to me.
- The social housing portfolio is large and getting a good view of it isn’t easy.
- For good governance elected members should constrain to looking at stock in their own ward as a starting point
- Members need to consider the condition and quantity in their ward and the need.
- CCC data doesn’t present number of bedrooms, so it’s hard to compare with HNZ data.
- A useful measure of service is bedrooms, not just dwellings
- We don’t know where the ‘Other social housing providers’ units are
Notes:
- The HNZ data columns are showing 0,1,2,3,4,5+ rooms per dwelling
- Papanui includes 18 ‘zero’ bedroom dwellings in the HNZ data, we never asked why.
OUR SOCIAL HOUSING, NOT JUST CCC HOUSING
As you can see, we are starting to get a more full picture of the state of social housing in our city.
Our aim to to better understand the bottom rung of housing in our city to best inform ourselves and others around housing policy and rise up the state of social housing.