Glen Sowry is the boss of Housing New Zealand.
“This is a significant milestone for Housing New Zealand, our development partner Creating Communities and the Northern Glen Innes Community. It affirms Housing New Zealand’s commitment and presence in the region,” says Housing New Zealand Chief Executive Officer, Glen Sowry.
“As one of many of our redevelopment initiatives in the country, the project will help us address the ongoing issue of the shortage of housing supply in Auckland by making better use of the land. It will also enable us to provide more modern, healthy, warm and safe homes to people in need.
“Importantly, we will have increased opportunity to house tenants in a sustainable, mixed-tenure community.”
The chief executive of Housing NZ, Glen Sowry, is explaining the new vision for GI, down to such details as letterboxes.
“You see those green Dalek things?” he says. “From this year, we are no longer putting those in.” There’s also a white square one. “Whenever you see those, you can guarantee it is one of our properties.”
Such telltale signs are not in the future vision. “We call it blind tenure.” We’re looking at a row of camouflaged state houses on Castledine Cres. “As you create these mixed communities there should be no stigmatising or obvious Housing NZ homes.”
Sowry took the job in January last year knowing the government wanted 20 per cent of all social housing to be provided by the community housing sector within five years and that his organisation would be shrinking. In early October, new Housing Minister Bill English signalled a further sell-down of Housing NZ’s 69,000 housing stock worth about $17 billion, and said he would be happy for that percentage to rise.
“Coming from a background of competition, I’m very comfortable with that,” says Sowry, who was previously operations manager for Air New Zealand.
Details of how Housing NZ shrinks — asset transfers and the like — are still being worked out. Meanwhile, the ministry has been shedding roles and funding.
First, the Special Housing Unit (SHU) within the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment now allocates a new Social Housing Fund. From July 2011 to the end of 2013, it gave $123 million in capital grants to Community Housing Providers (CHPs). A further $18 million is on the way.
With CHPs chipping in about $150 million, the total funding of $273 million is expected to bring 774 new social and affordable homes. Examples of CHPs include: Accessible Properties, a subsidiary of IHC; Airedale Property Trust, assisted by the Methodist Church; and Te Runanga o Ngati Porou. CHPs, says Sowry, provide “wraparound services” to tenants with particular needs “in a way that we at Housing NZ are not”.
Second, Housing NZ no longer decides who gets a state house: that’s the role of the Ministry of Social Development (MSD). “If you are going to create a contestable market of suppliers, then it wasn’t appropriate for Housing NZ to be the arbiter of need,” says Sowry. He adds that the MSD is better placed to take a “holistic view” of a tenant.
A third reform accompanies those two: a revised policy of reviewable tenancies. “There are a reasonable number of people who live in a Housing NZ house today that arguably don’t need it,” says Sowry. Under new periodic tenancy reviews (conducted by MSD), some tenants, even those paying market rents, will be moved out to provide for those with greater needs.
Sowry says he wants to bring the customer-focus emphasis learned from his time with Air New Zealand — “we are a people business” — to Housing NZ. In his first month, he set out to meet “the people in all the organisations who throw rocks at us”.
He fronted up to GI school principals, the police and the Panmure Community Action Group — who had “pretty strong views” about northern GI. He didn’t, however, talk to the Tamaki Housing Group, although they did try to talk to him, protesting outside his Glendowie home when he wasn’t there.
He traces most of the problems back to the Creating Communities contract, a legacy he inherited.
“Anyone could do the arithmetic and see the number of Housing NZ houses was halving. Not surprisingly, the community said: ‘There are fewer state houses for us to live in. What are you doing?’”
Indeed. So, will the number of state houses — currently 2800 — in Tamaki halve? “My commitment is when we do redevelopments going forward, we will maintain our footprint in the Tamaki area,” says Sowry, vaguely.
He acknowledges that if you turn what has been overwhelmingly a state-housing suburb into a pepper-potted area, the proportion of state houses will decline. He also acknowledges the resettlement process was poor, especially for families who have lived in their homes for 40-50 years. “That’s the bit that arguably we didn’t manage well enough.”
Read more information on what they believe by clicking on these links.
Northern Glen Innes redevelopment to provide homes to those in need.
Housing NZ no longer decides who gets a state house: that’s the role of the Ministry of Social Development.