Save State Housing in Pōneke Wellington City

Wellington City should be a place where everyone has a stable, healthy and suitable home whatever their income. A place where children can grow up together and where people can put down roots near the people and places they need to thrive.

Housing affects every part of our lives. The stress of short tenancies, week-to-week emergency housing grants, and the looming threat of rental increases has a major impact on people’s wellbeing and working lives. Constant moving to find housing robs whānau of the opportunity to connect with their communities.

State housing has and can provide stable, affordable homes for people on lower incomes - from the first ever state house built in Miramar, to the new state housing built in Pukeahu Mt Cook. We know from our own history and from overseas, that when governments play a bigger role in building and providing decent and suitable housing, we lay the foundation for thriving communities. Yet, despite the benefits, successive governments have not built enough homes to meet the growing need in our communities.

In Pōneke Wellington:

There are 400 state homes which have been cancelled in Wellington City[5], including:

Only 3 projects continue:

While these essential public housing developments have been cancelled, the need for decent and secure housing has increased. Downtown Community Ministry recorded a 24% increase in rough sleeping for the first 3 months of 2025 compared to the same time in 2024.[6]

Wellington is fortunate that the City Council is involved in housing through Te Toi Mahana, a Community Housing Provider (with 1764 homes) and through Te Kainga housing (370 homes), and with NGO community providers like Dwell (100 tenancies) and Wellington City Mission (70+ transitional units, and rest home and residential care). Despite this, it is still not enough to meet demand and these providers have limited access to funding to build more.

The Government has the obligation and the ability to fund housing to meet the needs of all. We need the Government to build more public housing, but to also make the housing they build accessible and suitable for our communities.

This means supporting different types of public housing, including using the Housing First approach, which is a proven best practice for supporting whānau who have experienced long-term homelessness and have other challenges, such as mental health and addication. It means housing first, and then wrap-around services for whānau after.[7] Te Ō in Mt Cook is an example of how this is working for Wellington City public housing, through a Single Site Supported Housing model. 

If we leave house building to the market, we’ll keep building homes that are not accessible or suitable for our communities - with steps, narrow doorways, and bathrooms that don’t work for many. Through publically-funded housing we can support designs that work for your niece with cerebral palsy, your friend recovering from a stroke, your pregnant sister, your colleague with a broken leg, or your granddad who now uses a walking frame. 

Currently, only 4% of our public housing has universal design that are suitable for a wide variety of people, while the housing register has around 19% of people in households who need accessible housing. Kāinga Ora were making commitments to building more accessible homes including the 30 universally designed homes on Evans Bay Pde that have now been cancelled.

We ask the House of Representatives and Minister of Housing retain existing housing sites, keep building the promised state houses and to increase public builds at a scale that will ensure stable, permanently affordable and accessible housing for everyone who needs it.

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