Auckland City Missioner Helen Robinson reflects on a fortnight of headlines around homelessness, and the systems that sit beneath them.

Almost precisely a decade ago, following a protracted debate over whether New Zealand faced a “housing crisis”, the National government of the day moved to provide shelter for the most vulnerable people in motels rooms designated “emergency housing”.

In 2026, emergency housing roared back into headlines, following revelations on Q+A that managers for the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) were told they could face consequences if unable to meet performance indicators that include reducing the numbers in emergency accommodation. 

Social housing minister Tama Potaka, who issued a press release last January trumpeting that “the government has achieved its target to reduce the number of households in emergency housing motels by 75% five years early”, told reporters MSD directives to managers relating to those targets were an operational matter.

The prime minister, Christopher Luxon, has meanwhile faced criticisms after reluctantly conceding that he had not known Auckland city did not have a night shelter, despite the progress through the house of controversial “move-on order” legislation.

Numbers on homelessness and rough sleeping are notoriously difficult to measure, but for Helen Robinson, who joined the Auckland City Mission in 2013, the “bottom line” is that rough sleeping is a serious problem in many parts of the country; in Auckland “it’s at a scale that I have never seen before in my 13 years”.

Speaking to The Spinoff for the podcast At Large with Toby Manhire, the city missioner said she was concerned about the implications of a change in the eligibility criteria for emergency housing that created a “tightening of the gateway”. That meant, for example, excluding from eligibility those deemed to have “have contributed to your own homelessness”, she said. 

“What I know, in the experience of the mission, is that, particularly by the time you’re a rough sleeper, there’s two things more broadly that are going on. There’s a lack of affordable, appropriate housing. So that’s a real poverty driver. And then, particularly in terms of rough sleeping, there is a real driver of trauma that is behind that need to rough sleep… that could be people who are really physically unwell, people who are mentally unwell, people who are cognitively impaired, who are actively addicted, people who are really disconnected from whānau, or a combination of those things.”

She continued: “So, if you have an acquired brain injury, if the reality of that acquired brain injury means that you behave in a certain way, does that mean you’ve contributed to your own homelessness?”

Robinson has personally experienced a period of months in which she “fitted the definition of what homelessness is”. While she is keen to stress that her experience was not at the sharper end of the scale, and she’d been “‘very, very lucky to have good friends who literally let me live with them until I could figure out a way forward”, it offered a glimpse of the laddered reality of the problem and something of “accepting the that deep vulnerability about being human”.

“At the mission,” she said, “we come from this point of view that homelessness is driven at the system level. At a really kind of simple level, there’s just not enough affordable homes. And then, for people who need support, there’s not enough of the kind of support married with those homes.” That had informed the City Mission’s emphasis on services that go beyond the proverbial “safety net”, spanning urgent need through to transitional and permanent housing, complete with health and addiction services under the roof of HomeGround, opened in 2022. The ethos – as epitomised in the Housing First programme – is the idea that a home is a necessary precondition to dealing with other challenges, not the other way around.

“When you have a place to go to that’s safe, that’s secure, that is literally secure not just in terms of doors or locks that work, but secure in terms of security of tenure… and when it’s affordable, all of those things help all of us as human beings kind of rest psychologically, and say, OK, I’m safe, and I’m safe tonight, and I’m safe in the long term, and then from that position of both physical and psychological safety, then as human beings we can say, OK, what’s going on, what’s next? 

“What I know at a very, very simple level is that housing works, permanent housing works, and appropriate support works, and what I also know is that we need a place for people to go to until we can support that individual to access that permanent housing, and there’s

For Robinson, who is quick to acknowledge successive governments’ willingness to support initiatives like Housing First, the move-on order plan is antithetical to system-level thinking. 

The approach, she believes, is “morally questionable, because move-on orders are prefaced on this idea that if I was rough sleeping I have a genuine choice to go somewhere alternate tonight. Now, the experience that I know, and that I’m taught at the mission on a daily basis, simply by being in relationships with the hundreds of people who are accessing our services, is that for many people there is nowhere to go, so in that context of a potential of a move-on order, where do people go?”

When that question was put back to her, Robinson said, “At HomeGround, we’re literally in the central city of Auckland, a block up from SkyCity. When people are released from the hospital, or have been released from prison that day, and don’t get to us till much later in the day, they are literally standing outside, waiting for our doors to open up. So people are literally sleeping rough that night, or wandering the streets that night, until our doors open at 8am. We will welcome anyone. We will continue in our 106-year tradition to keep welcoming people. We also can only do the best of what we’ve got available in terms of those services.”

Asked what parts of the political machine she’d choose to change, Robinson said: “I would always ask decision makers to be meeting directly and specifically with the people who are most impacted by the decisions that they’ve made… We’re incredibly good at being relatively short-sighted in our policy decisions, and from my point of view, it’s not rocket science to know not only is it morally right, but economically we are wasting money allowing people to be without a home and without appropriate support. It’s dumb, and every politician of every color would stand with me and know that. So, if we know that – and we do know that – what is it going to take to harness our country to get to a very, very, very clear point that says every person tonight deserves a place to go?”

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