Inside the urgent race to solve homelessness in Aotearoa
As homelessness hits an all-time high, New Zealand’s frontline organisations are embracing unconventional and innovative strategies. Joel MacManus takes a closer look at the crisis and meets the people who claim to have the cure.
Photos taken by David Jensen on an outing in Wellington, October 2024.
The names of those currently experiencing homelessness have been changed.
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Prologue
“Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn’t permanent” – Jean Kerr
Murray Edridge has square shoulders, bushy eyebrows and a thick head of hair. He looks like a tough-but-fair football coach. His job title is Wellington City Missioner, head of the city’s largest homelessness charity. He’s seen it all and isn’t often nervous. But one morning in January 2023, that’s exactly what he was. The nerves were because he had a meeting with New Zealand’s finance minister at the time, Grant Robertson. There wasn’t anything expressly unusual about that – the two men counted each other as friends and would meet at least once a year. But that day, Edridge had something important to say, and he wasn’t sure how.
For weeks leading up to this moment, Edridge had been talking with his street outreach staff about what they were seeing. What they described scared him. It wasn’t just that there were record numbers of people on the street; City Mission had always dealt with homelessness. This was different.
“Grant,” he began, ushering the finance minister into his office in an old chapel. “I haven’t seen this before. This is way, way, worse than it’s ever been. For the first time, we’re seeing hopelessness in our community.”
“Hope doesn’t necessarily fix things, but it does create a pathway to change one’s circumstances,” he explained. Wellington City Mission’s role has always been to help people plot a way forward, to give them the tools for a better future. But when people have sunk too deep to think about tomorrow or next week, they’re not interested in addiction support or financial mentoring. “When people get so desperate that they don’t feel hopeful in their ability to navigate out of it, then we have a problem. We have a massive problem.”
Chapter one: Jacob’s Ladder
“There is no ‘them’ and ‘us.’ There is only us.” – Gregory Boyle
Eliza Wormell vaults over a concrete barrier, crashing down on a garden bed. She peers behind the shrubs, then stands and scans the surroundings, her curly hair whipping across her face in the wind. We’re in Frank Kitts Park on the Wellington waterfront. Wormell bounds up a set of stairs to get a higher view. “I see something over there,” she calls out. “Where?” asks Natalia Cleland, her colleague. “There, in the bushes. Something red.”
Cleland squints, following Wormell’s gaze across Whairepo lagoon until her eyes settle on a red object lying in a cluster of trees on the other side. The pair speedwalk over the pedestrian bridge towards the trees until Wormell suddenly halts. “False alarm, it’s just a tackle box. There are some guys fishing over there.”
Wormell and Cleland are social workers for Downtown Community Ministry, an inner-city Wellington charity dedicated to ending homelessness. At any given time of day, DCM outreach teams are combing the streets, always in pairs, counting the city’s rough sleepers and offering help. By their latest count, there are 464 people living on the street in Wellington; an all-time high, and a 40% increase from last year.
On the veranda outside TSB arena, there is a lumpy, cream-coloured blanket on the ground in the distinctive shape of a person. “Kia ora,” Wormell calls out cheerily, as if making a house call on an old friend. The blanket doesn’t move. “Kia ora,” she tries again, squatting down closer to the lump. After a second, the fabric rustles, and a face pops out. “Oh, Jacob, it’s you!” she says.
I recognise Jacob immediately. I know his face. He’s been a regular fixture on the streets of Wellington for years. Once, while I was carrying a box of beers home from the supermarket, he tried to buy one off me for a dollar. When he realised they were non-alcoholic, he walked away, disappointed. I’ve told that story to people before as a mildly amusing anecdote. I didn’t think I was laughing at Jacob, just at the awkward situation. Now, standing in front of him again, I’m not sure there’s a difference.
Jacob has serious addictions. He smokes meth, huffs glue and drinks – a lot. He’s usually friendly but can get aggressive at times. Pedestrians walk in wide circles around him when they see him on the street. His presence can be intimidating, even when he’s not trying to be.
On this particular Thursday, Jacob is calm, almost docile. It is around midday, and Elisa has just woken him up. Like many who live on the street, Jacob finds it safer to sleep during the day so he can stay alert at night. He briefly lived in social housing four years ago but was kicked out within months. He has some friends who occasionally let him stay on their couches, but more often than not, he sleeps in places like this – sheltered, concrete patches that offer little more than bare protection from the elements.
“We’d like to help you. Is there anything you need?” Wormell asks gently. There’s a blank expression on Jacob’s face for a few seconds until he processes her words. “Well, a place to stay would be nice,” he replies. His tone is polite but dry, as if to point out the obvious. He snuggles his shoulders into the blanket, making himself comfortable. Then, almost as an afterthought, he mentions that he has lost his ID card, which he needs in order to receive his benefit payment.
“You should probably sort that,” Elisa says. Jacob shifts, turning toward the wall, bristling at the remark. He thinks he is being patronised. Sensing the change, she tries again. “No, Jacob, I’m saying I can get you a new ID. Will you come to see us at DCM tomorrow?” she asks. “Yeah, I’ll come see you tomorrow,” Jacob replies, but he sounds noncommittal. “We’ll play chess again,” Wormell adds, hoping the memory of a game they once shared will help spark a connection. Jacob grunts. He is done with the conversation. With a slow, deliberate motion, he pulls the blanket back over his head, shutting out the world once more.
What are the chances Jacob will follow through on his promise, I ask. Cleland estimates about 50%. Convincing people to accept help is the eternal challenge for DCM. “I get told to fuck off all the time,” she says. For some, the stigma of homelessness wraps them in shame; or they are still scarred from a bad experience with another charity or agency. Some are closed off due to trauma or social anxiety; others are high out of their minds. Recently, she celebrated a small victory: a client who had resisted help for months finally stepped through their doors. “I figured you guys were going to keep coming back anyway,” he told them.
As they continue their search on Cuba Street, they encounter two more large blanket lumps. Wormell taps on the first, a black polar fleece, until one eye pokes out. “Oh, hello Tai! It’s good to see you. Remember you have an appointment with us at 1pm tomorrow.” Tai is slightly confused about what day it is, but once he confirms he doesn’t have to wake up, he tucks his head inside the fleece again. Cleland checks the other lump, a green and white tartan. She recognises the man sleeping and doesn’t wake him. “He’s already engaging with us; he saw his key worker today. There’s no point disturbing him,” she says.
As the two return to the DCM office in Luke’s Lane, Marcus is sitting on a concrete ledge outside the door. He has a diminutive build, short and skinny, with no teeth that I can see. His arms are twitching, a constant chugga-chugga from his shoulders. “I’m only just inside the yellow line,” he says with a gummy grin. He knows he is being cheeky. Marcus is trespassed from DCM. He can still access their services, but he is not supposed to cross the yellow line painted on the ground. Cleland gives the tired, compassionate sigh of a teacher with a naughty student. “You’re OK this time,” she says. “Thank you, I love you,” he calls out.
It isn’t easy to get trespassed from DCM. The charity has an extremely high tolerance for bad behaviour. Cleland has caught people injecting themselves in the toilets and huffing glue in the front courtyard. Even assaulting a staff member won’t get you kicked out on a first offence. Marcus is a repeat offender on that front.
“This group that we work with, most doors they knock on, they’re being told, ‘No,’” says Stephen Turnock, DCM’s manahautū (director). Most of their clients have been trespassed from MSD offices and blacklisted from banks for unpaid debts.
Turnock points out a pinboard on the wall showing the schedule of services available at DCM that week. There are time slots with nurses, dentists, counsellors, money management services, and meetings with Ministry of Social Development and Corrections staff. He estimates that 70% of his staff time is solely dedicated to helping people navigate government systems. “We should not have to be doing that,” he says. “We’re not doing that because it’s a really amazing initiative or anything. It’s a response to a failing system.”
Wormwell and Cleland are happy to have found Jacob, because DCM had lost track of him. When the outreach teams don’t count someone for a while, they get worried. When a homeless person dies, it usually falls to DCM to organise the funeral, arrange undertakers and hold a memorial. They also have the task of notifying any living relatives – often, it’s the first they’ve heard of their loved ones in years.
Now that they’ve found Jacob again, I ask Cleland, can DCM get him into emergency housing? Her mirthful sign tells me my question is naïve. “We can’t,” she says. “And even if we did, it could do more harm than good.”
Emergency housing is the lowest level of publicly subsidised housing in New Zealand. It’s usually tiny motel rooms or overcrowded hostels. Emergency housing grants are issued seven days at a time but can extend for years while people wait for a place in social housing.
Social housing is made up of public housing and community housing. Kāinga Ora, the government housing agency, owns 72,000 houses, while non-profit community housing providers add another 20,000. Tenants in social housing pay a fixed 25% of their income in rent, while a government subsidy covers the rest up to the market rent.
Jacob wouldn’t get social housing unless he could prove he was drug-free –or lied about it. If he were placed in emergency housing, there’s a high chance he would smoke meth inside, damage the walls, or disturb the neighbours. If he got evicted from emergency housing or went to prison for property damage, he would be blacklisted from future tenancies.
There are currently 22,923 people on New Zealand’s social housing waiting list. Some of them are living on the streets like Jacob, others are stuck in overcrowded rentals, and the largest portion are in emergency housing. Each person on the waiting list is assigned a “need score” out of 20. When a new social housing place becomes available, the Ministry of Social Development provides the landlord with a shortlist of the 20 highest priority clients, determined through a combination of need scores and “fast-track qualifications” for families with vulnerable children. The landlord can choose to offer the home to anyone from the list.
Jacob would have one of the highest possible scores. He ticks all the boxes: drug and alcohol abuse, poor credit, financial issues, inability to manage tenancy responsibilities, antisocial behaviour and instances of threatening behaviour. The need score is intended to ensure that people with the greatest need are housed as quickly as possible. When Cleland started at DCM, she believed this to be true. She would try to get her clients the highest possible need scores, hoping to increase their chances of being offered homes. Then she noticed something strange: the exact opposite was happening. The people with the highest need scores were waiting forever, while social housing spots were offered to those with the lowest scores.
“I’m a betting man,” Turnock says, “and I would bet my shirt that it’s the lower ratings who are the majority of people who go through.” Instead of using it to prioritise the most desperate, social housing providers are using the need score as a measure of risk. Someone with a high need score is someone that landlords, even charitable ones, don’t want to touch.
The story of Jacob’s Ladder comes from the book of Genesis. It’s about Jacob, an ancestor of the Israelites, who has a vision of a ladder stretching from the skies down to earth. It’s a story about God reaching down and offering a pathway to heaven.
New Zealand society has constructed a similar ladder, through an intricate system of government payments and services, all intended to offer a pathway into housing. The ladder costs hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars every year, but it isn’t working. The ladder doesn’t reach Jacob.
Chapter two: The Streeties
“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” – Dalai Lama XIV
“Johnny, you alright? Hey Johnny… Johnny?” A large Polynesian man slumps on a bench, his stained sweatshirt struggling to contain a protruding belly. His head hangs forward, unmoving.
“He’s urinated himself, I can smell it,” senior sergeant Miriam Bentley says. She nudges his shoulder a couple of times, trying to wake him. With a snort, Johnny jerks upright, his bloodshot eyes glazed, his long hair hanging limply over his face. Bentley asks again if he’s OK, but the sound that escapes his mouth is an unintelligible gargle.
The sun beats down mercilessly on the bench – it’s not a comfortable place to pass out. “Do you need water?” Bentley asks. With another groan, Johnny points to the shopping cart next to him, lifting a blanket to reveal two large bottles. Bentley offers a thumbs up. “Alright, look after yourself.” Johnny doesn’t look OK, but he doesn’t want help, and he isn’t actively committing a crime. There isn’t anything more the police can do. Tina, sitting next to Johnny, is more engaged. “How’s it going, Tina?” Bentley asks. “I’m renovating,” Tina quips, motioning to the bench and footpath.
Bentley and two other community beat police officers are on their regular patrol of Wellington’s inner city streets. On Cuba Street, Dingo is perched on a stone wall playing his harmonica. He greets Bentley like an old friend – she’s the only police officer who knows his real name. “You know what song that was?” He asks. No one knows. “It’s Elvis!” he declares with the flair of a game show host. He tells us he was recently called to jury service but managed to get out of it. “I wasn’t interested ’cos they don’t do the hanging anymore,” he says with a belly laugh. Dingo is not homeless, but he spends his days on the street because he doesn’t like to be cooped up in his small apartment.
Police refer to “the street community” rather than “homeless people” because not everyone they interact with on the street is homeless. When speaking more colloquially, police officers call them “lags” or “streeties” – a nickname many in the community have adopted themselves.
Bentley knows most of the street community by name. There are about 30 who have been there her entire career. Slowly, a kind of relationship forms – though it’s unpredictable. “One day, they might be fine. You can have a decent 5-10 minute conversation. The next day could be a lot different.” She spent her first 11 years on the force in Wellington City, then served two years in the Kāpiti-Mana area before returning to the city earlier this year. In her first week back, she recalls thinking: “Whoa! Where have all these people come from? It was evident the increase in our street community.”
One of the first jobs she was sent on as a junior officer involved Hunter, a teenage boy living on the streets. He’s still out there today. “He’s someone that police deal with every day, if not every second,” she says. Hunter has serious mental health issues and receives a monthly depot injection of antipsychotic medication. “Three out of four weeks a month, he’s somewhat good to deal with. I’ve had conversations with him and can have a bit of a laugh,” she says. But every fourth week, as the meds wear off, things change. Drugs and alcohol start to take over, and his behaviour deteriorates. Hunter has a long history of police interactions: Threats, intimidation, harassing people and following them around, especially women. “The sad thing is that he’s been there for 14 years – longer, but that’s when I first interacted with him – and he’s still consistently exhibiting the same behaviours and going around in circles.”
At the edge of Opera House lane, a man with long black hair is squatting down against a wall, muttering intensely to himself in a foreign language. Police think he is Thai or Burmese, Bentley says, but no one has been able to communicate with him. Another man, outside the St James Theatre is also sitting down and mumbling to himself. Bentley attempts to make conversation, but his response is mostly gibberish. The only part I can make out is: “I’m a prophet.”. As we walk away, I ask Bentley, “Did he say he’s a prophet?” “Yeah, he’s a prophet,” she replies. “You know, mental health”.
As Bentley walks down Manners Street, I spot a familiar face: it’s Jacob, who the DCM team found outside the arena two weeks earlier. His body is moving like it’s in fast-forward. His arms and head jittering, and he’s frantically mouthing silent words. He drops his maroon sweater, and then looks around in a panic, before realising it’s right in front of him. “You alright, Jacob?” Bentley asks. He offers a thumbs-up and hurries off.
The increased police presence in city centres is a direct response to the growing street community. “Increased visibility deters crime and encourages a sense of safety through positive engagement with the public and business owners,” police commissioner Andy Coster said in June while announcing 63 new officers in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch.
As we walk along Courtenay Place, a man runs up to the officers, breathless. His wife’s bag has been stolen. A few minutes later, she appears, also puffing, phone in hand, showing her bank app. It showed her card had just been used at Night’n’Day. Inside the shop, the officers scan CCTV footage. A staff member, mid-lunch, points across the street: “That’s her!” A woman in a black dress is walking into KFC. The officers recognise her instantly – she’s part of the street community. Within a minute, she’s in handcuffs.
The community beat teams are popular with the general public. Almost every shift, someone thanks the officers for their presence. Small interactions like finding a stolen bag add to the perception of safety – but that’s the keyword, perception. Nothing the police do addresses the underlying causes of homelessness, it’s just managing the symptoms. The number of people on the street has continued to rise with no sign of slowing down. The police aren’t doctors who can cure homelessness, they’re hospice nurses, just trying to make things more comfortable. “I constantly wonder what is going to change,” Bentley says with a weary sign. “But I don’t have the answer. I honestly, genuinely don’t.”
Chapter three: Change
“These days, many politicians are demanding change. Just like homeless people.” – George Carlin
Murray Edridge is wearing black boots, dark jeans and a black fitted T-shirt. He’s sitting in the same no-frills wooden office where he had that meeting with Grant Robertson almost two years ago. Edridge is different from every City Missioner who came before him, in one important way. He pulls out a book with photos of all his predecessors and asks if I can tell the difference. After a second, he gestures to his neck: “I became the 12th City Missioner and the first one not to wear a dog collar.” Wellington City Mission is affiliated with the Anglican church, and, until Edridge was appointed in 2018, it had always been led by priests. Not only was Edridge not a priest, he wasn’t even Anglican.
Before joining City Mission, Edridge’s CV listed job titles including: chartered accountant, business manager, management consultant, corporate services manager, deputy chief executive, chief executive, and chief executive again. Across New Zealand, an urgent race is underway to find a solution to the growing homelessness crisis. Perhaps because he’s a man of the boardroom rather than a man of the cloth, Edridge is at the forefront of that change, embracing fresh strategies and unconventional approaches.
For 81 years, City Mission ran a traditional soup kitchen offering hot meals twice a day, four days a week. In 2021, Edridge shut it down, transforming the space into a community lounge open all day. It gives staff more time to build relationships and offer meaningful help.
Dining tables made way for armchairs and couches. There is free food and barista coffee, but now people don’t have to leave after eating. As I walk through the lounge, a dozen people are chatting and playing board games, and two women are singing along to ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ by Bon Jovi.
He also shut down the food bank and converted it into a social supermarket. Instead of pre-packaged food parcels, customers stroll down aisles of brand-name products labelled with points instead of prices. Each customer is given a certain number of points to spend based on the size of their family. Pet food and period products cost nothing. Because it’s a more dignified experience, people are more likely to use it early, and City Mission can catch them before they hit rock bottom.
In October, City Mission opened Whakamaru, a $50 million facility backed by an extensive fundraising campaign – which included Sir Ashley Bloomfield abseiling a high-rise building.
The building has showers, laundry facilities, a community lounge, a pay-what-you-can café, an expanded social supermarket, crisis services and meeting spaces for clubs and businesses, and long-term apartments designed to transition homeless people into permanent housing. “I think this building is going to change lives. I think this building is going to change this city. I think in its own small way, this building will change the world,” Edridge says.
The most dramatic overhaul has been at the Wellington Men’s Night Shelter. First opened in 1969, it had been managed by a trust for decades but had fallen into extreme disrepair. When City Mission took it over in 2020, staff found clumps of hair, human teeth, faeces, and 500 cigarette butts stuffed into the walls. The kitchen was covered in rat droppings, and the fridge was broken and filled with rotten food. “We discovered a guy in there who hadn’t physically left the building for two years,” Edridge recalls. “He had long grey hair and a long grey beard. He just assumed he was going to die in that place – because no one was paying attention.”
Edridge shut it down and vowed City Mission would never run it as a night shelter again. The place wasn’t just filthy, it wasn’t working. Men would come for a few nights, leave in the morning, and find themselves no better off. It was a slight, temporary improvement over the streets, but it wasn’t making any lasting difference in their lives.
The individual shelter rooms, tiny partitions barely larger than a toilet cubicle, were demolished and replaced with 18 private bedrooms with ensuite bathrooms and round-the-clock carers. City Mission identified a need for supportive housing for people with alcohol use disorder. “If you can’t be sober or abstinent, then nobody wants you on their premises. So there is no housing for people who are alcoholics unless they have their own resources,” Edridge says. In 2023, the building reopened as Te Pā Maru. It is New Zealand’s first wet house; a fully supported transitional housing facility where clients are supplied with alcoholic beverages once an hour. “The irony is, the alcohol will keep them alive. If the alcohol stopped tomorrow, the people we have there will all die because they have so much alcohol embedded in their system that it’s part of their constitution.”
Edridge says one of the challenges early in the program was figuring out how to move people onto beverage-based alcohol. “That might seem like an odd ambition, but when people are getting their alcohol from hand sanitiser, methylated spirits, or rubbing alcohol, getting them onto beer, wine, or cider is a big advantage.”
Edridge turns to his computer and clicks open a photo of Peter, the first resident at Te Pā Maru. He’s a thin, middle-aged pākeha male with grey-blonde hair, a scruffy beard, and a blotchy red wound across his forehead. Peter had previously lived in a different City Mission housing unit for 12 months. During the time he was there, Edridge had to sign off on 87 incident reports. Peter started fights, broke things, and hurt people. Eventually, he was trespassed for assaulting a staff member and placed into emergency housing on the strict condition that City Mission staff would check on him twice a day. Edridge only ever sent senior staff on those visits, because of the high probability that they might find him dead. His room was filthy. He had incontinence issues, seizures – several a day – and was only able to move with a walking frame. During the six months he lived in emergency housing, Peter triggered 37 paramedic call-outs. “This is a man who was really, really unwell,” Edridge says.
Peter’s alcohol consumption averaged 18 standard drinks a day – on the days he didn’t lose count. “This is what staff would find in his room on the regular,” Edridge says, flipping to the next image: four empty wine bottles and four empty goon bags. Then, as he clicks again, “He has an artistic ability.” A photo shows 15 empty boxes of Country medium white wine stacked in a pyramid.
After six months in Te Pā Maru, Peter is down to eight drinks a day. He’s reconnecting with his son for the first time in years. He writes poetry. As Edridge prepares to click to the last slide, he hovers his finger above the mouse for a second, building anticipation. “Remember, a few months ago, he couldn’t stand up. Now he’s showing his colleagues what he can do”.
A video opens on the screen. The speakers crackle with a tinny rendition of ‘Billie Jean’ by Michael Jackson. It’s Peter, standing in front of a packed couch in the Te Pā Maru lounge, though I barely recognise him. He has gained weight and sports a fresh haircut and thick moustache. The wound on his forehead is gone. He is moving his body to the music. The movements are frail and clunky, but still, he’s dancing.
“This is more significant than anything we’d ever anticipated,” Edridge says. “He was on his route to an early grave, and there was no coming back. Now, he’s not out of the woods yet, but what a contrast.”
Life in Te Pā Māru isn’t always as happy as that dance party in the lounge. It’s a tough, messy journey. One day, hopefully, some of those men will reach a point of sobriety where they can live a productive life, but it’s not the reality for most. “Some might die with us, but at least they’ll die with dignity,” Edridge says.
Even as hopelessness seeps into the street community, stories like Peter’s give Edridge hope. “If your City Missioner isn’t hopeful, then life’s really grim indeed. That’s our job, to be hopeful for the people who can’t be hopeful for themselves”.
One more thing: You know that bit earlier in the story about Murray Edridge being the first City Missioner who isn’t a priest? That’s no longer true. He was ordained in 2021, three years after starting the job. “I’m probably still not an Anglican, but I became an Anglican priest, so I do wear a dog collar when it suits me to do so,” he says with a shrug as if describing a first aid certificate or a forklift licence. Priest’s robes, it turns out, can be a useful tool for gaining political and financial support. That’s not to suggest he isn’t isn’t serious about his religious duties – he is. But it says something about who Edridge is. He isn’t trying to solve homelessness because he’s a religious leader – he became a religious leader because it would help him to solve homelessness.
Chapter four: The cure
“To save a life is a real and beautiful thing. To make a home for the homeless is a thing that must be good; whatever the world may say, it cannot be wrong.” – Vincent Van Gogh
In the early 1980s, New York City faced a crisis akin to what New Zealand is grappling with now. In just a few short years, the city’s homeless population surged from a few hundred to tens of thousands. They slept on park benches and on church steps, frightened passersby, and created a feeling of urban devastation.
The thinking at the time was that people were on the street due to mental illness or addiction, so the system was designed to get them into treatment, by force if necessary. Police were given the power to arrest homeless people and take them to hospitals or night shelters. It didn’t work. The vast majority of people taken to hospitals were discharged within a few days and ended up straight back on the street.
A young research psychiatrist on New York City’s homelessness task force named Dr. Sam Tsemberis proposed something no one had considered: If we’re trying to figure out what homeless people need, why don’t we ask them? So that’s what he did; and almost every time, they would respond: “Isn’t it obvious? I need a place to live.”
That was the eureka moment. They had been fixated on using housing as a carrot to address other issues. Tsemberis designed a solution that separated the two. You could address housing and addiction and mental health and physical health – and it all became easier if you started with housing first. In fact, that’s what he called his idea: Housing First.
Here’s how Housing First works: You find people sleeping on the street and offer them permanent, secure housing, in their choice of neighbourhood, furnished however they like, with no strings attached. There is no requirement to get clean, seek treatment or engage with any services. The Housing First model provides a tailored suite of wraparound services, but none of it is compulsory.
It is no exaggeration to say Housing First is the most important innovation in the history of homelessness policy. The Washington Post described him as “the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness”. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in 2024, saying he “has changed the lives of tens of thousands of people”. He’s constantly jetting around the globe, sharing his model with eager audiences. More than 400 cities worldwide have adopted it.
Tsemberis visited New Zealand in 2015. In videos from that trip, he cuts a striking figure – handsome, with a strong jawline and intense eyebrows. There’s a ruggedness to him from years of hands-on experience. He has that uniquely American confidence that would have come off as too slick if it weren’t backed up by such deep knowledge. He isn’t just a policy expert; he’s a pitchman and a brilliant one at that.
People are really excited about Housing First. There are no less than five TED or TEDx talks on YouTube espousing its benefits. It has been described as a panacea, the vaccine for homelessness, with Tsembris cast as the movement’s Louis Pasteur. In a Zoom interview from his Los Angeles home, I ask Tsembris how he feels when people describe his model as the so-called “cure for homelessness”. He looks at me down the barrel of the webcam, his gaze as piercing as one can be on a computer screen. “We found the cure,” he replies. “We know what to do. We know the cure. It’s not that complicated.”
In a long preamble to my next question, I describe Housing First as showing “promising results”. Tsemberis cuts me off. “Far more than promising. They’re extraordinary results.” He’s so confident in his model that calling the results merely promising is an insulting understatement.
The gold standard metric for homelessness programmes is called the housing retention rate. It’s a simple measurement that tracks the people who went through the programme after five years to see if they are still homeless or have retained stable housing. The treatment-based approach in New York City had a housing retention rate of 47% – which was considered high at the time, since most programmes registered in the low 30s.
In 1992, Tsemberis ran the first randomised controlled trial of Housing First in New York, giving homes to 242 homeless people. After five years, they recorded a housing retention rate of 88%. “We’re on to something here,” Tsemberis recalls thinking. “We thought all we had to do was tell the world, and we would end homelessness.”
“The reason people get so excited about Housing First is that for many, many years, we thought people with these kinds of conditions could not manage on their own,” Tsemberis says. “But in fact, we’re finding out that if you give them a decent safe place and the support that they need, they can manage a house. That’s the exciting part.”
A follow-up study in New York found a housing retention rate of 80%. A five-city study in Canada recorded 73%. Then, the rest of the world started running trials with remarkably consistent results: 80% in the Czech Republic, 85% in France, 86% in Ireland, 90% in Australia, and 92% in the UK.
The People’s Project in Hamilton ran New Zealand’s first peer-reviewed Housing First trial. After two years, researchers measured a housing retention rate of 97.5%. A larger, five-year study found a dramatic improvement in other life outcomes: 44% fewer hospitalisations, 63% fewer nights at mental health institutions, 43% fewer criminal charges, and 46% more months earning income.
In 2019, the Labour-led government committed $197 million to run 14 Housing First programmes across 11 regions. In its first budget, the National-led government provided $48 million; enough to continue the programme, if not expand it.
Wellington’s first Housing First programme was Aro Mai, launched by DCM in 2019 in partnership with Emerge Aotearoa and the Wellington Homeless Women’s Trust. To date, Aro Mai has given homes to 339 people, almost all of whom had been sleeping rough or in long-term emergency housing. Its internal numbers show a housing retention rate of 85%. About half of that 85% are still in an Aro Mai house, and half have moved on to more positive housing outcomes.
Barrie Walker, Aro Mai’s housing lead and Stephen Turnock, DCM’s director, say they are proud of the programme’s success, but their faces tell a different story. They’re tired. It is taking a toll on them. They face daily struggles just to keep the programme running.
It can be challenging simply to convince homeless people to accept a home. “There can be trauma that follows them that we haven’t been able to help them address; around identity, worthiness, whether they actually deserve to have a property,” Walker says. Sometimes, they’re scared of living in the cheap apartment buildings used for Housing First. “A lot of people we work with are vulnerable to other people. There’s this perception that homeless people are the perpetrators of crime when, in fact, quite often, they are the victims,” Turnock says. If the choice is between a house where they don’t feel safe or the streets where they have lived for 10 years, they’ll choose the streets.
More difficult are the complaints from irate neighbours. “In all fairness, it’s understandable. The people we’re dealing with are not your run-of-the-mill, quiet neighbour,” Turnock says. He gets calls at all hours of the night about Aro Mai tenants playing loud music, having arguments and fighting. “There’s just no real sense of awareness of how their behaviour impacts others, which is very typical for the people we work with.”
The greatest challenge is simply finding enough houses. Aro Mai needs to lease a constant supply of new houses for their tenants. Those houses are sourced through a combination of private landlords and community housing providers. Kāinga Ora was slow to be convinced but is providing some properties now.
Because the government guarantees market rent, providing a home for Housing First can be an attractive investment. The difference is that Housing First tenants are riskier than most. Insurers have figured this out and have started applying stringent excess, often requiring business insurance rather than simple homeowners insurance. Turnock says Aro Mai landlords had their excess increased from $1,000 up to $50,000. “It has freaked out the housing providers. And now, to minimise their risk, they’re saying if someone has a history of meth or arson or whatever, we won’t take them.”
These problems emerge almost everywhere in the world where Housing First has been trialled. There is a constant flow of news stories about tenants damaging properties, and causing chaos for their neighbours. A story in The Hill describes property destruction in Boston as “human wreckage wrought by Housing First”. Tsemberis blames this on housing providers who cut corners. “I guess the problem is really in the definition of what Housing First is,” he says. “We know from the studies that if you do it correctly, you get great results. So why aren’t we getting great results? It’s because the model is not set up properly… All of this falls apart when they don’t provide enough service support at the level of intensity that the people who are housed need. Then, you have a program that’s calling itself Housing First creating a complete disaster in the neighborhood, and everyone is correctly pointing to and saying ‘this Housing First thing is not working’.”
Housing First has also faced criticism from conservative US think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute. They argue that while the model succeeds in getting people into housing, its ability to address deeper issues like drug addiction and mental health is less clear. A critique by Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute includes this biting line: “They are housed but broken, wracked by the cruelest psychoses, compulsions, and torments – all under the guise of medical care.”
That criticism is “a misleading representation of the root causes,” Tsemberis says. “The underlying causes of homelessness are not mental illness or drug addiction. Clearly, people with addiction and severe mental illness who have resources, families and insurance are not homeless.
“If you insist on people becoming psychiatrically stable or completely clean and sober before you give them housing, there would be a lot more homeless people in New Zealand because not everyone living indoors is completely stable or sober. But we hold poor people to a different – and I would say hypocritical – standard.”
There’s one question about Housing First that has bugged Tsemberis for 30 years. Everywhere the model is studied, the housing retention rate is around 80-90% – but it has never recorded 100%. What is going wrong for that small portion of people? He has a theory: “Usually, it’s because they can’t turn their friends away; these people who were on the street with them and maybe saved their lives. Now that they have a place, they can’t say no.”
The answer for that group, he says, is a high-service approach: a dedicated building, with case workers on site, and someone managing the front door, where visitors have to sign in. He is almost exactly describing Te Pā Māru and Wellington City Mission’s three other transitional housing facilities.
When I ask Tsemberis about his trip to New Zealand back in 2015, there’s one thing that stands out to him. During a visit to Auckland City Mission, he asked for some stats on how many people were sleeping rough in Auckland. The outreach team told him they had recently conducted a survey of the city centre and found 147 people sleeping rough. Tsemberis was incredulous. “I was like, 147 people?! There were 48,000 in Los Angeles. We can fix this problem. This is of a scale that is totally fixable.”
Chapter five: A war story
“A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.” – Christopher Reeve
Whina clutched her gun. Her eyes scanned constantly, left and right, across a dusty desert street. She was in Iraq on a peacekeeping mission as a second lieutenant in the New Zealand Army. Whina was no stranger to combat zones, and she knew something was off. It was quiet. Too quiet.
BANG, BANG – gunshots. She spun around and saw a truck full of insurgents, bearing down on her group. It was an ambush. One of her army brothers was directly in their line of sight. She put her head down and sprinted towards him, adrenaline rushing through her veins like the Huka Falls. She remembers mustering every ounce of strength in her legs and sprinting at full bore towards him. She doesn’t remember getting shot.
The patrol managed to flee to safety. Whina was shaking the whole way back to base, she was so jacked up by what had just happened. It wasn’t until they got back that one of her comrades turned to her and said: “Whina, you’re bleeding.” “Eh?” She responded, confused, “You’re bleeding.” She felt around her waist and hips. When she looked down, her left hand was dripping in blood. She raised her arm, “Umm, General, I need to go to first aid, I’m bleeding”. He took one look at her and growled, “Get there now!”. Medics confirmed the bullet had hit the left side of her hip, missing her spinal cord by mere millimetres.
Today, Whina is a Housing First tenant with Aro Mai. As she tells this story, Whina is sitting with her DCM case worker, Liz Smith-Lee-Lo, in her new one-bedroom apartment in a distinctive green building on Frederick Street. It has a comfortable lounge, a good kitchen, and a balcony with a great view of the city. The walls are painted a cheerful yellow. “I love it here. It’s the only decent place I’ve had for a long time,” she says.
Whina is 52 years old, a wahine Māori with “too many iwi to name”. She’s a natural storyteller, with an expressive face and great comedic timing. It’s been about 15 years since that day in Iraq, but she can’t remember the dates exactly. There are still bullet fragments in her body that surgeons can’t remove because it’s too close to her spine. “I’m going to be having ongoing pains all the time now, but it’s just something that I’m used to,” she says. “But I’m still walking, that’s the main thing.”
A few weeks earlier, she collapsed outside the DCM offices. Staff found her writhing around on the ground in severe pain. “We got chased all because this other fulla who was there with us owed money for drugs, and I’m not supposed to run,” she says. She slipped a disc, it hit her spinal cord, and she ended up in hospital for a week.
When she was growing up, Whina’s parents were alcoholics – or, as she puts it, “bloody idiots who wouldn’t look after us properly”. She was raised by her grandparents, who came from a military tradition. Her grandfather enrolled her in the army the day she turned 17. She went on to serve in front-line roles in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq until she was sent home due to her injury. “I didn’t want to come home because, as the saying goes, no one gets left behind. But I had no choice.”
She lived on base for a while but eventually had to leave the army for several reasons to do with her injury, respiratory illness, and Covid-19. She drinks but says she never turned to drugs and alcohol in the way that so many wounded veterans do. She doesn’t think she has PTSD, but many of her former comrades do. “There are a couple of guys that I know that suffer from PTSD, and they call on me for help, just to talk to them and everything. That’s one thing I’m grateful for.” Still, it’s clear combat has affected her in many ways. “It’s taken me a long time – I would say four years – to mingle and react with the public. I didn’t know how to talk to them… I would have just told you fullas to bugger off and leave me the hell alone.”
For several years, Whina lived in emergency housing at The Setup on Dixon St. She hated it there in her tiny room with loud, aggressive neighbours. “I just had real bad trouble sleeping at nighttime because we used to have a lot of idiots on our floor that caused trouble.” She would go to Te Aro Park to have a drink and get away from it all. One day, she says, “I was sitting in Te Aro Park, and I didn’t know anyone. I had no one. Here I am, freaking the hell out, going what do I do now? I just got off an army base, how the hell do I live my life? All I knew was how to live an army life, a military life. I didn’t know anything about any of this. I was freaking out”.
That’s when she was first approached by a DCM social worker. They’ve supported her ever since. In February this year, she was offered a house with Aro Mai. She signed the papers and moved in that day. Her first reaction after seeing the apartment was, “Wow! It’s so much cleaner and fresher. This is me. I can do something with this” She is protective of her home and doesn’t let anyone in who she doesn’t trust. “I love it here, alright! I’m not going to have anyone come here and destroy my peace.”
Whina’s main goal at the moment is to get healthy so she can return to the army, the only place she has ever felt truly happy. “I just gotta give myself time to sort everything out and just go from there.” Once she has fully recovered from this latest injury, she’s talked with Liz about graduating from DCM, which means she won’t get daily check-ins. She is increasingly independent and can do things on her own. She doesn’t really need Liz anymore, but Liz will always be there for her.
Chapter six: Courage
“I think it all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it.” – Sir Edmund Hillary.
Homelessness gnaws at your conscience until it gets blunt. The scale of the crisis is in our face every time we walk down a city street. Sometimes, it’s easier not to think about it. We tell ourselves it is all too complex, there are too many intertwining issues. We put it in the too-hard basket. The bigger the problem gets, the stronger the desire to block it out.
But homelessness is not an impossible problem. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that well-funded Housing First programmes, supplemented with higher-service facilities like Te Pā Māru, can achieve a housing retention rate close to 100%. Solving homelessness is not complicated; it’s just hard.
There are three major barriers stopping New Zealand from ending chronic homelessness, each of which poses a different question: one for the government, one for housing providers, and one for us, as citizens.
The first question is one of cost. The taxpayer subsidy on a new one-bedroom apartment like Whina’s comes to about $20,000 a year – and it costs a lot of money to build those homes. New Zealand simply doesn’t have enough social housing. Every party in parliament has their own ideas about how to best address that. Labour-led governments have tended to make big investments in Kāinga Ora, National-led governments prefer subsidy schemes that incentivise non-government housing providers. Whatever way you slice it, social housing is expensive.
But homelessness is even more expensive. People living on the street have far more hospital visits, mental health episodes and arrests than people with homes. Finland is often praised as the country that has best embraced Housing First policies. The Finnish government reports a 68% decrease in people experiencing long-term homelessness since 2008 and claims to be on track to completely eliminate homelessness by 2027. None of that has come cheap: the country has spent €250m building new homes and hiring social workers – but research suggests each person placed into housing saves the taxpayer €15,000 a year. A study last year by the Queensland government found a similar result: it would be $17,462 per year cheaper to put people into supported housing rather than leaving them on the street.
The second question is about worthiness: Who deserves a home at the taxpayer’s expense? It’s easy to argue that Whina should be given social housing. She’s a literal war hero who took a bullet for her country and is highly motivated to get back into the workforce. It’s a much harder argument for someone like Jacob; a serious drug addict with occasionally aggressive tendencies who has already been kicked out of social housing previously.
Whether it’s Kāinga Ora or a community housing provider, it’s understandable that social housing landlords want their homes to go to the people who they believe deserve help, are most likely to benefit from it, and will treat them with respect. That’s why they traditionally require tenants to be drug-free, and why families in emergency housing are fast-tracked ahead of people living on the street – because society deems them more worthy of support. But these policies, although well-intended, exclude the most vulnerable, like Jacob, who end up on the street with no way out.
The final question is one for us, as individuals. For decades, New Zealanders have complained about disruptive Kāinga Ora tenants. It can take a huge toll on your quality of life if your neighbours are anti-social, belligerent, or dangerous. Of course, most Kāinga Tenants aren’t like that, but some are – and Housing First tenants tend to be even worse. A core principle of Housing First is that people are housed in a neighbourhood of their choice, near the services and community that they trust. If you had the opportunity to end chronic homelessness, but it meant Jacob moved in next door, is that a price you are willing to pay? It’s a question we all have to wrestle with because the only way to get a homeless person off the street and back into functioning society is to truly treat them as a neighbour.
There is a poster stuck to the wall at DCM, with the words of a prayer. It’s best known as the serenity prayer, or in some circles, the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
When we put our heads down and scurry past a street beggar, we are seeking a small piece of serenity. We tell ourselves homelessness is an impossible problem, so there’s no point worrying about it. But thanks to people like Sam Tsemberis, we have the wisdom to know the difference. We know homelessness is something we can change. All that’s left now is courage.
Epilogue
Jacob went to DCM the following day to get a new ID. He is engaging with his social worker. He is considered an excellent candidate for Housing First.