One of National's over-arching policies for its term of government has been its efforts to exit state housing provision. Selling state houses, evicting tenants, and tightening assessment criteria so that now only people who are living in a cardboard box can even apply have shifted the basis of the state housing system from providing decent homes for all to providing temporary housing support for the homeless. And here's the result: people living in indecent "temporary" conditions for years, because they cannot get a state house:
Tenants at a South Auckland boarding house are waiting years for a state house, compared with just a few months a decade ago, its owner says.
Mike Ross, who owns Favona Lodge in Mangere, said his residents were almost all permanent tenants now because they have given up hope of finding a state house.
[...]
Ten years ago, about one person every two months would get a state house, he said.
"They would get a house and then someone else would move into the room, usually another couple with one or two kids."
Now, they were waiting years.
"Most of them have given up and have gone to private rental houses, flatting, sharing with other people," Mr Ross said.
And in the meantime, they wait for years in nineteenth-century living conditions, with whole families crammed into rooms, because National has made the system which is meant to help them unavailable. It's not just indecent - it also has terrible, and hugely expensive, consequences for people's health, education, and employment. But National doesn't care about that. All they care about is cutting back the state, while maximising the profits of their parasitic, blood-sucking landlord mates (and their landlord backbench MPs).
