Housing minister visits Tauranga

Housing and urban Development Minister Phil Twyford (centre) with fellow Labour MPs and guests at today’s housing forum held in Tauranga. Photo: Ryan Wood.

Housing and Urban Development Minister Phil Twyford hosted a housing forum in Tauranga this afternoon to discuss the future of the city's housing options

He was joined by local Labour MPs Tamati Coffey (Waiariki), Jan Tinetti (Tauranga, list) and Angie Warren-Clark (Bay of Plenty, list).

The round table meeting, held in the Tokyo Lounge at the Tauranga Racecourse, included a mix of guests from the emergency housing, social housing, building, and developer sectors.

'Housing is among the top priorities for our government,” says Phil. 'There's a pretty good cross-section of the housing crisis here in Tauranga, and you can see the terrible social and economic impacts.

'Fundamentally, we need to build more houses, in places people want to live, and at prices they can afford.”

Te Tuinga Whanau Support Services Trust executive director Tommy Wilson, who attended the meeting, says there is land administered by Accessible Properties in Tauranga that could fit more houses to provide accommodation for the homeless.

'Winter is coming and we have families who need homes,” says Tommy. 'There's no land available in Tauranga, but you do have these properties. We need to reorganise what's in front of us.”

James Brownlee, director of company Podlife providing relocatable ‘pods' of 10m2-18m2 for rent or sale, also attended the meeting. He says they've had a lot of interest from people looking to use the pods as accommodation.

'One of the issues these people are having is finance, though,” he says.

He and his colleagues suggest the government could help buyers purchase the pods (which are around $30,000), which can then be used to help build a deposit when the buyer on-sells the pod.

However, Phil says it is not a priority for the government to increase financial support for home buyers in the short to medium term.

'Around $2 billion of taxpayer money is spent every year on rental subsidies. We want to fix the supply issue, so that maybe that money can be shifted to help people attain home ownership.”

Another issue of which Phil is highly critical is methamphetamine contamination testing, which he calls a ‘scam' that has cost landlords and homeowners ‘hundreds of millions of dollars' in needless decontaminations

'There have been no guidelines around meth decontamination from the previous government. Landlords should not have been spending money decontaminating homes that turned up such low levels of meth use.”

He says it is the manufacture of meth in a home that causes problems, as opposed to simply smoking it.

No concrete plans were agreed upon at the forum, which Phil says was mainly about gaining an insight into what's happening locally.

Tauranga-based list MP Jan Tinetti accompanied Phil to earlier meetings in the day with local councillors, and says they were impressed with the housing minister making himself available to listen.

'We had councillors saying it was the first time they had experienced this level of accessibility to a minister, and were really pleased.”

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