Chris Glaudel’s email to Andrew Crisp

Thank you for attending the Community Housing Aotearoa workshop this morning. Our members valued the opportunity to hear from you and to ask questions. We appreciate the amount of time you chose to spend with us discussing this important issue. As a sector, we are committed to working in partnership with Government to fix what is currently not working for too many families. You asked us to provide our ideas on priority actions. As we concluded our meeting today, the following three were agreed by those in attendance as important steps to put forward. Further ideas on funding were provided in our letter to Julia Bergman on 5 October.

1. A New Zealand Housing Strategy that will guide our collective efforts to see all New Zealanders well-housed. The Housing Strategy will define the outcomes we want to achieve in housing. We believe that sustainable, thriving mixed-income, mixed-tenure communities are the standard to be achieved. It will set supply targets for social, assisted rental and assisted ownership homes. It will also outline the required actions to make homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring. The Strategy will build upon the current RTA reforms and embed settings which facilitate the ability of families to transition from assisted to private rentals.
2. Better relationships are another priority for the sector. The housing issues we face are too large to be solved by any one sector; government, community providers, developers, builders, investors and others have significant roles to play. We have been working across these sectors to deliver more supply, but government has too often not been an active partner. We welcome the opportunity to work with you to deepen and expand on the work to date.
3. Consistent and predictable financial settings are required to activate the community housing sector’s ability to achieve agreed outcomes. A level playing field is desired, with access to low interest loans and long-term equity. Providers will leverage this investment with private capital, philanthropic funding and volunteer contributions to provide measurable well-being returns in social, cultural, environmental and financial capital. We stand ready to work with you to document and evidence these outcomes.

Thanks again for joining us today. We look forward to working with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development on these topics.