Experts warn housing policy lacks long-term vision
A quarter of all households rely on some form of government support to keep the roofs over their heads, and one economist says it’s a clear sign that a more cohesive housing strategy is needed.
Hundreds of thousands receive accommodation supplements and subsidies
Data from the Ministry of Social Development and Ministry for Housing and Urban Development showed 377,193 households receive the accommodation supplement, which is available to help with rent and mortgage costs.
Another 107,568 receive temporary additional support and special benefits. Some of those households will receive both the accommodation supplement and temporary support, RNZ reported.
Just over 6,300 people are in transitional housing, 86,454 are getting income-related rent subsidies (paid by the ministry to public housing landlords), and 598 are receiving the emergency housing special needs grant.
In total in New Zealand, there are about 1.2 million households living in homes they own and just under 566,000 renting households.
Shamubeel Eaqub (pictured), Simplicity chief economist said the numbers were equal to three-quarters of renting households, or a quarter of total households.
About 25,000 households are receiving the accommodation supplement to help with mortgage payments.
Gunson: Housing system failing children and whānau
Isaac Gunson, Child Poverty Action Group spokesperson, said the data should “set off alarm bells in the Beehive”.
Gunson said it showed how unstable housing was for children.
“These are not just numbers, they are whānau doing everything right but still being failed by a system where incomes have not kept up with the cost of living,” he told RNZ. “Many are raising children while living with the daily stress of rising rents, insecure housing, and the fear of eviction.
“Every child deserves a warm, dry, secure home, but the scale of need has long outstripped supply. Thousands of families across Aotearoa need affordable, high-quality housing, and they needed it years ago.”
Gunson said councils and central government needed to share responsibility to ensure that growth delivered well-connected, high-quality, and affordable homes—rather than simply building more houses. He added that when rents rose faster than incomes, more tamariki were pushed into hardship.
“Stats NZ reports that between June 2020 and June 2024, average housing costs rose by 31%. Over the same period, average disposable income rose by just 24%,” Gunson said.
Renters are especially impacted. In the year to June 2024, 45.9% of non-owner households spent 30% or more of their income on housing, compared with 26.6% of homeowners. Among Māori and Pacific renting households, 64.1% and 69.9% respectively faced that burden.
Gunson said there needed to be more public and community housing, as well as higher incomes.
“Families need a permanent fix, not temporary top-ups,” he said.
Government subsidies under scrutiny amid rising costs
Housing Minister Chris Bishop said it was evidence that the housing crisis was costly for households, and very costly for the government, RNZ reported.
“It is precisely why we need this government’s Going for Housing Growth plan.”
The accommodation supplement alone costs the government about $2 billion a year.
Economists urge coordinated approach to affordable supply
Eaqub said the way households were being supported was not working well – but it was hard to unwind.
“If you take it away you literally create more poverty… these are not well-off people,” he said. “It’s not like the subsidies are generous and as a result they’re somehow in an extremely positive position. These are not actually good subsidies because they're not coordinated to create good long-term solutions.”
Eaqub said there needed to be a way to encourage affordable housing supply that was more than giving subsidies.
“We have to say we’re spending this money,” he told RNZ. “Is there some way we could also encourage more housing to be built that remains in the pool of affordable housing?”
Eaqub said the payments were pushing rents higher than they would otherwise be. Earlier, research from the University of Auckland showed the accommodation supplement was not making rents more affordable.
An increase in crowding in New Zealand households also reflected the unaffordability of homes, he said.
“If you look at household size in New Zealand, it hasn’t been going down as much as it should for a population that's aging,” Eaqub said.
“The subsidy deals with the necessity of helping people have shelter… but is there a coordinated approach that ensures increasing rental house supply that remains affordable over time? The answer is no.
“So, much of public policy is not just one thing, it’s the coordination across many things. You should help people in poverty but if you don't coordinate your approaches all you do is create a subsidy that gets bigger and bigger over time without any meaningful improvement in supply.”
