Winter is Here, and So Is the Crisis

The Human Cost of Emergency Housing Cuts in Otago and Southland

Let’s stop pretending. A government report in January patted itself on the back for “hitting emergency housing targets five years early.” But dig just beneath the headline gloss, and the story curdles fast. Because here’s the bitter truth: There are now only three - yes, three - centers for emergency housing across all of Otago and Southland. Not because the need has vanished. Because the door has been slammed shut.

It’s not a triumph. It’s a triage.

And meanwhile, a tent city is once again blooming across the grass of Dunedin’s Kensington Oval. In a country that prides itself on manaakitanga, on looking after one another, our response to housing the most vulnerable has become something closer to a game of strategic denial. Don't fix it. Just redefine the problem until it fits the solution you already want to deliver.

The Manufactured Disappearance of Homelessness

You can’t count what you refuse to see. If you make the criteria for emergency housing more exclusive, tighten who qualifies, shorten durations, scrutinize the “worthiness” of applicants, you’re not solving homelessness. You’re disqualifying it. This is statistical alchemy: Turn lead into gold by erasing the suffering you no longer want to account for.

Some of these cuts have been disguised as reforms: Efficiency, accountability, the usual bureaucratic buzzwords. But what they’ve actually done is strand more people outside the social safety net entirely. The lines at soup kitchens don’t lie. Neither do the sleeping bags tucked into alleyways. The crowd of tents spreading through Dunedin’s sports grounds tells a story that no press release can spin.

This is not a housing policy. This is an abandonment strategy.

Homelessness is Not Just a “Housing Issue”

When someone loses stable shelter, they don’t just lose a roof. They lose protection from violence. They lose health. They lose warmth, sleep, nutrition, access to hygiene, access to care. Over time, they lose social trust, and the system loses them in return.

Mental health deteriorates. Chronic illness flares. Substance use becomes survival. Relationships fracture. Job prospects evaporate. Each day without housing is a compounding wound. And yet the rhetoric from policymakers continues to orbit this fantasy that if you just cut services, people will bootstrap their way back into housing. Into what housing, exactly? With what resources? In what fantasy market?

For children especially, homelessness is a sentence with lifelong consequences. Interrupted schooling. Food insecurity. Developmental trauma. The kind of instability that makes it harder to trust, harder to learn, harder to believe that tomorrow will be any different than today. It doesn’t just change a life. It changes generations.

The Spectacle of Crisis Management

Let’s be honest: Much of our current approach to homelessness is performative. It’s warm words and cold policies. It’s blankets handed out by kind people with wonderfully good hearts… meanwhile, the structural conditions stay perfectly intact.

Volunteers are doing what the state refuses to do - meeting people where they are, without judgement, and trying to keep them alive another day. But charity that costs the everyday person while the government turns a blind eye is not justice. Giving out jackets in the frost isn’t a long term solution. It’s a bandage on a system that keeps cutting people open.

Emergency housing was never supposed to be a permanent fix. But when even temporary shelter becomes a privilege instead of a right, we’re no longer talking about social care. We’re talking about social triage. Who gets warmth? Who gets left behind?

And make no mistake, there’s a pattern to who’s being left behind.

Colonisation by Other Means

In Aotearoa, you cannot untangle housing injustice from the longer arc of colonisation. Māori are consistently overrepresented in homelessness statistics. The generational dislocation caused by land theft, systemic racism, underfunded services, and intergenerational trauma is not a “social problem.” It is a legacy of state-sanctioned erasure. Housing insecurity is simply one of its sharpest edges.

So when emergency housing gets cut, who disappears first from the stats? Who falls off the back of the system when it’s “rationalised”? Who ends up sleeping in cars, parks, tents, stairwells? Whose suffering becomes invisible again?

This is not some unintended oversight. This is what happens when governments build policy without listening to the communities most impacted. When bureaucrats define targets, not lives. And when housing becomes a privilege of the well-behaved instead of a human right.

The Real Emergency

We are heading into another South Island winter, and already the cold is biting. People are freezing outside while government agencies issue congratulatory statements about their own metrics. This is institutional gaslighting celebrating fewer emergency housing placements as a success while more people sleep in tents and cars.

If we want to talk about “emergencies,” then let’s call it what it is: A humanitarian crisis manufactured by austerity.

What’s needed now is not another report. Not another tweak to the eligibility algorithm. What’s needed is immediate, unapologetic action:

• Open more emergency housing, fast. Without arbitrary gatekeeping.

• Invest in transitional and permanent public housing, not market-based stopgaps.

• Shift the focus from individual pathology to systemic accountability.

• Let those most affected lead the solutions, not just be consulted for show.

And let’s stop pretending that all of this can be solved without facing the roots: Economic inequality, colonial legacies, and a housing market that treats homes as assets instead of sanctuaries.

Don’t Look Away

The tents in Dunedin are not a fluke. They are a symptom. And symptoms only get worse when ignored.

This is not a time for politics-as-usual or cowardly deflection. This is a time for reckoning. For demanding that we choose a different story than the one that’s currently being written in frost and breath and bones on cold concrete.

A society is only as strong as its weakest shelter. Right now, ours is collapsing in slow motion.

Let’s not wait for the coroner’s report to realise that three emergency housing placements is not a victory. It’s a warning.

Let’s listen. Let’s act.

Before the next cold snap writes another name into the ground.