Close to Home: Grant housing reserve soon to maximise effectiveness

Friday, 30 July 2021

Nelson Tasman Housing Trust Director Carrie Mozena is urging Nelson City Council to use its housing reserve fund in grants rather than loans, and as soon as possible to maximise its effectiveness.

Grant the $12m housing reserve fund as soon as possible, and you could end up housing 140 people at once, a housing trust director says.

Carrie Mozena, director of the Nelson Tasman Housing Trust (NTHT), spoke to the Nelson City Council's urban development subcommittee on Thursday, urging it to implement the council’s $12m housing reserve fund as quickly as possible – a sentiment which was echoed by Nelson’s mayor.

The council established the fund from the sale of its pensioner housing to Kāinga Ora to help tackle Nelson's housing crisis.

“I appreciate that it’s complicated, and I know you’re working hard, and it is important to get it right, but there’s some practical effects of the long time that it’s taking for the housing reserve to play out,” Mozena said.

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Mozena says Government funding changes have allowed the trust to build more homes, but access to the council's fund would enable them to serve more people in the community.

Projects the housing trust were currently working on, like the duplexes on Murphy St, were enabled by both the trust’s anonymous philanthropic donor and Government funding, but they were obliged only to take people on the Government’s housing register as tenants.

The council fund would enable the housing trust to build houses for low income people or families who were not eligible for Government housing, she said.

Mozena did some quick maths at the council table and estimated, based on NTHT’s processes and projects, that the $12m housing reserve fund could be leveraged to build 140 “bedrooms”.

The trust’s philanthropic donor also wanted the trust to leverage their donations to greater funding, and had promised to match contributions from the council.

“We feel urgency,” Mozena said.

She said the council would be better to think in terms of enduring results (houses) from the fund, rather than an enduring pool of money.

Mayor Rachel Reese said it would “break [her] heart” if results from the fund were not seen until December. “That isn’t to me responding to a crisis in a way that is reflective of the crisis”.

“I’d encourage council to think more in terms of enduring impact, rather than the fund itself enduring, because … it sounded like council was focused on keeping a hold of the fund and drip-feeding it over time, and frankly from our point of view that will really diminish the impact of the fund. Housing costs are continuing to escalate, this money is worth the most it will ever be now.”

She did some quick maths based on an upcoming housing trust project to build five homes with 12 bedrooms between them and calculated that granting the money immediately would build “more than 140 bedrooms”.

She based this on the trust’s ability to “triple” council contributions with a matched amount from their philanthropic donor and a matched loan from the bank, making a total of $36m. She said the 12-bedroom project cost about $2.5m – “that’s more than 140 bedrooms, more than 140 people housed right now”.

“If you’re actually delivering, with that $12m, homes for 140 people immediately, that’s more than Kāinga Ora have built in the last three years, it’s more than the housing trust homes. Our 44 homes are lived in by 120 people. So you can have a very significant, a very significant impact.”

Mayor Rachel Reese said there was a “large part of our population suffering from a housing affordability issue” and urged council staff and the committee not to delay.

“I’m really conscious that this is a priority both for the council and the community, and particularly for our partners who are waiting to try and make decisions … if there are some barriers to delivering this, and if the committee feels like that’s a delay that the community can’t afford, then we need to have some solutions for how we’re going to speed this up,” she said.

Reese said, taking into account the time to finalise how the fund would be used, and time to assess any applications it got, it was starting to look like it would take several months to see any result.

“It would just break my heart if we’re sitting here, if it’s December before we’ve actually got an agreement signed,” she said.

“To me that doesn’t feel, as a governor, as the mayor of this city, it doesn’t feel consistent with the good faith urgency that we’re talking about. I say that with absolutely no reflection on a really hard-working staff team, but from an organisational perspective that isn’t to me responding to a crisis in a way that is reflective of the crisis.”

Urban development subcommittee chair Deputy Mayor Judene Edgar said a councillor workshop could help speed things along if it enabled them to settle on a meaning for “enduring” – either an enduring fund of money, or an enduring result from the fund.

“That’s why I’m quite keen to have that councillor workshop because the direction we set will actually then narrow what the staff need to do.”