Three empty double state housing units are fenced off and awaiting demolition at Awapuni's Raleigh St.
The demolition would happen at the same time as New Zealand was experiencing a housing crisis, with families living in sheds, garages, in cars, and crashing on the sofas and floors of friends and relatives, [Manawatu Tenants' Union advocate Kevin] Reilly said.
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The tenants' advocate sees three to four families a week looking for affordable, decent accommodation. He tells of a woman, and her daughter, escaping an eight-year relationship of family violence, forced to sleep on a friend's couch. There's a 20-something man and his two young sons who spent several nights sleeping rough somewhere behind St Patrick's Cathedral.
He knows of a couple of families crammed into small two-room $400-a-week motel units on Pioneer Highway, and suffering from 'cabin fever'.
"These are people with serious living needs, and the thing that's really wrong with these [Raleigh St] houses coming down is that they've been neglected."
They're not being demolished in order to build new ones - Housing New Zealand is selling the land, trying to permanently shrink the number of state houses here. While we have people without homes here and Paula Bennett is offering money so we have more. Again, its incoherent policy from a government which has no idea what it is doing, and is just layering "make it up as they go along responses" on top of one another.