Latest news with #housing policy
RNZ News
3 hours ago
- Politics
- RNZ News
Pacific families bear the brunt of public housing evictions
Local leaders comment on Kainga Ora housing data 31 07 2025 caption:Porirua councillor Moze Galo, Manurewa MP Arena Williams and Auckland councillor Angela Dalton are leading calls for government accountability over public housing policies affecting Pacific families. Photo: Kainga Ora/Auckland Council/Value Your Vote/Porirua Council Pacific families are being kicked out of public housing at disproportionate rates in Manurewa and Porirua, sparking calls for an urgent review of policy. New tenancy enforcement data shows Pacific families represent less than half of Kāinga tenants in Manurewa, but make up three-quarters of enforcement action. Porirua Councillor Moze Galo says the data is "heartbreaking". "These aren't just numbers. These are kids from our schools, our churches, our neighbourhoods. Losing a home affects everything," Galo says. "They lose routine, friendships, stability, and the comfort of their own space. In Pacific culture, the home is more than four walls. It's where we gather, teach values, and pass on identity. "When families are evicted, it's not just disruptive, it's traumatic." Homelessness is rising in Auckland, with leaders warning more Pacific youth are sleeping rough as families lose public housing. Photo: RNZ / Luke McPake Local leaders say the system is failing Pacific communities and are calling on the Government and Kāinga Ora to review its approach. Having worked in social housing at the Ministry of Social Development, Galo said he has seen first-hand how hard Pacific families fight to stay afloat. In Manurewa, Pacific peoples make up 46 per cent of Kāinga Ora tenants but received 75 per cent of all actions related to unpaid rent between January 2023 and May 2025, including terminations. Photo: In Porirua, Pacific tenants represented 46 per cent of tenants but made up 62 per cent of tenancy enforcement, including four of six terminations. Across both areas, Kāinga Ora issued 45 notices to end tenancies, took 43 cases to the Tribunal, and terminated eight households for non-payment of rent. Six of those terminations involved Pacific families. In total, 20 children lost their homes and more than 80 were affected by tenancy action, according to the data. Kāinga Ora defended its policies, saying evictions are a last resort. The organisation confirmed it has conducted no internal review of how its rent enforcement policies affect Pacific tenants. Galo says some families feel embarrassed to ask for help, and many are confused by the process. Families are trying to survive on low incomes, dealing with language barriers, cultural commitments and rising living costs, he says. "This isn't just a housing issue. For our Pacific communities, it's part of a bigger story of inequality and struggle." Housing Minister Chris Bishop confirmed the government had directed Kāinga Ora to take a tougher line on tenants with rent arrears or antisocial behaviour. "That's been a clear expectation that this government has set right from the start, and the stats show that Kāinga Ora has responded to that expectation," Bishop said. Bishop had not reviewed the ethnic breakdown, however a follow-up request for comment has been sent. Manurewa MP Arena Williams says the tenancy figures reflect the human cost of government policy. "We're seeing children kicked out of homes, and we don't know where they've gone because the government doesn't take that data." Williams said homelessness is rising in Manurewa, with local churches and social organisations reporting more Pacific youth sleeping rough. She said the figures show a stark lack of fairness in the way public housing policies are being applied. "Why aren't Kāinga Ora dealing with Pacific families in a way which is open to communication, open to being able to negotiate what's going on in the household?" Kāinga Ora national services manager Nick Maling says only a small number of tenancies had been ended in Manurewa and Porirua since the agency introduced a new rent debt approach in February 2025. "Since then, we have ended a small number of tenancies (eight) in Manurewa and Porirua. This does not reflect the significant work our teams have done to help tenants get back on track with their rent payments," Maling said. Kainga Ora houses caption: Kāinga Ora Housing - New figures show Pacific families face disproportionate tenancy enforcement in Manurewa and Porirua. Photo: Kāinga Ora Since February, Kāinga Ora has reduced rent debt for 179 tenancies across the two regions, including 101 Pacific households, he said. "Our frontline teams work hard to support all tenants to resolve tenancy issues, and we apply our policies in a fair and consistent way in communities around the country." He said engaging respectfully with Pacific tenants was a priority and households are supported with practical guidance. "We do not take the decision to end a tenancy lightly - especially when there are children or young people involved," he said. "We make every effort to help tenants resolve tenancy issues so they can remain in their home." If they do not address the issues, despite repeated efforts, Kāinga Ora will apply to end the tenancy as a last resort, he said. "If this happens, Kāinga Ora makes every effort to connect the tenant with appropriate housing options." Maling said the low number of tenancy terminations in Manurewa and Porirua meant small changes could result in large swings in percentage figures. 'We will not turn our back on them' Auckland councillor Angela Dalton, who chairs the Community Committee, said she found Kāinga Ora's response "clinical, cold and dismissive." "Do Kāinga Ora or MSD provide wraparound services like budgeting and social justice support to these families, who I am sure are working multiple jobs to make ends meet?" Dalton emphasised Auckland's 90 per cent rise in homelessness since 2024 and noted that Pacific and Māori women face additional discrimination when seeking housing. Galo has called for a formal equity review into Kāinga Ora's rent enforcement policies, urging that Pacific experts and families be at the centre of the process. "We need to dig deeper and understand why this is happening. But the review needs to be done with our people, not just about us." - LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
Japan Times
4 days ago
- Business
- Japan Times
Freezing rent is easy. Making NYC housing affordable isn't.
Among the campaign promises that helped propel Zohran Mamdani to the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, his pledge to "freeze the rent' is at once the most radical sounding and the easiest to accomplish. In fact, it's been accomplished multiple times over the past decade. The mayor chooses the nine members of the city's Rent Guidelines Board, which every year determines the allowable rent increase for the city's nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. The members' terms are staggered, so a new mayor can't replace them all immediately, but with the two tenant representatives certain to favor a freeze, it would take only three of the five members appointed to represent the public to get to a majority (there are also two owner representatives, who would, of course, oppose a freeze). During Bill de Blasio's tenure as mayor, the board voted for no rent increases on one-year leases in 2015, 2016 and 2020 — as well as 0% for the first six months and 1.5% for the last six in 2021. So, yes, Mamdani could deliver a rent freeze. Whether he should requires a longer answer. This year's Rent Guidelines Board deliberations, which resulted in a vote earlier this month to allow a rent increase of 3% on one-year leases starting from October 2025 to September 2026, and 4.5% on two-year leases, provide a fascinating window (which one can gaze through on YouTube) into the crosscurrents buffeting tenants and landlords in New York. On average, New York's rent-stabilized landlords appear to be raking it in, with net operating income up 12.1% — 8% after adjusting for inflation — in 2023, the most recent year for which the board's staff has compiled income and expense data. But those averages mask a lot of variation and testimony about the struggles of nonprofit affordable housing providers since the pandemic seems to have been crucial in bringing about the 3% increase. The appointees of the next mayor, whoever he turns out to be, will confront the same dilemma. New York City rents have been regulated since 1943, with the rent-stabilization system — and Rent Guidelines Board — dating to 1969. As of the most recent New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2023, rent stabilization covered 779,000 occupied rental apartments in buildings constructed before 1974 (apartments covered by the pre-1969 system of rent control pass into rent stabilization when the tenant moves out or dies) and 181,700 in newer buildings that accepted rent regulation in exchange for tax breaks or other subsidies. Together that amounts to 48% of the city's occupied rental apartments and 28% of occupied housing units overall. This makes rent stabilization by far the city's (and the nation's) biggest affordable-housing program, with almost six times as many rent-stabilized units as there are apartments in the New York City Housing Authority's public housing projects. A 2023 study by economists Ruoyo Chen, Hanchen Jiang and Luis E. Quintero estimated that the monthly rent-stabilization discount in New York City averaged $450 a unit in 2017. Multiply by 960,700 apartments, and that's a $5.2 billion annual subsidy from New York City's landlords to its rent-stabilized tenants. That has surely grown since 2017 as market rents have outpaced stabilized rents. This is, economically speaking, an extremely inefficient way to keep housing affordable. By reducing the return on housing investment, rent regulation reduces investment in housing. Politically, though, it has proved much more achievable than the outright subsidies that economists recommend. The city's annual contribution to its second-biggest affordable-housing program, NYCHA, is not much more than $200 million (the federal government has been chipping in close to $3 billion a year, but that is likely to fall). The job of the Rent Guidelines Board, then, is to balance affordability for rent-stabilized tenants with enough income for landlords to keep their buildings in good condition. Avoiding the fate of NYCHA, where decades of underinvestment have left buildings in grave disrepair, is an oft-mentioned priority. For owners of many rent-stabilized buildings in affluent parts of the city, bringing in enough rent revenue to cover costs became a lot easier after the state legislature voted in 1993 to remove apartments from rent stabilization when the rent passed a threshold ($2,000 at the time, higher in subsequent years) and the apartment became vacant or the tenants' household income exceeded $250,000 (later dropped to $175,000). Over the next 27 years, this deregulation removed 177,048 apartments from the rent-stabilized rolls, 69% of them in Manhattan. High-rent deregulation came to an end with the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, approved by a state legislature that Mamdani had not yet joined (he was elected to the state Assembly in 2020) and signed into law by none other than the governor at the time, Andrew Cuomo, who after losing to Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary announced that he would run as an independent in the general election. The bill's passage (and especially Cuomo's decision to sign it) came as a shock to real estate investors who had been piling into rent-stabilized buildings in hopes of cashing in as more apartments were deregulated — Bloomberg's Patrick Clark and Prashant Gopal did a great job last year of depicting the market turmoil that has resulted. The deregulation of the previous three decades, meanwhile, left the city's rent-stabilized housing stock bifurcated between a bunch of buildings concentrated in Manhattan south of Harlem ("Core Manhattan' in Rent Guidelines Board parlance) where most of the apartments are market rate and the 50% of rent-stabilized buildings citywide where 100% of the apartments are regulated. Which brings us back to the dilemma faced by the Rent Guidelines Board. Over the years, the board has tried to keep rent increases in line with increases in operating costs, which generally rise with inflation. Rent was frozen in 2015 and 2016 because costs weren't rising — the nonshelter consumer price index for the New York area actually fell both years. But the increases approved by the Rent Guidelines Board in 2021 and 2022 fell far short of inflation and the increases since then have only more or less kept up. Rents on market-rate apartments in the city have risen faster than inflation since just before the pandemic, in part because the 2019 rent law cut off what had been a steady stream of newly unregulated apartments coming on the market each year. As a result, rent-stabilized buildings in Core Manhattan — most of which, remember, are majority market rate — experienced a whopping 23.1% gain in net operating income in 2023. In the Bronx, where 75% of rent-stabilized buildings have only rent-stabilized units, net operating income rose just 0.8%, a decline in inflation-adjusted terms. On average, even the 100% rent-stabilized buildings in the Bronx still turned a monthly operating profit of $325 a unit, but 476 buildings there, 12.7% of the total, reported negative net operating income in 2023. These financial struggles are accompanied by increasing signs of physical decay, with the average number of maintenance deficiencies in pre-1974 rent-stabilized buildings up 45% since 2017, according to the Housing and Vacancy Survey. This is not just a tale of greedy landlords: Representatives of two large affordable-housing nonprofits, the Community Preservation Corporation and Enterprise Community Partners, told the Rent Guidelines Board that the New York City buildings they're involved with are increasingly struggling to keep up. Nearly 60% of the 160 buildings in Enterprise Community Partners' New York City Low-Income Housing Tax Credit portfolio were "cash-flow negative' in 2023, senior director Tania Garrido said, up from 20% in 2019. One big reason these buildings are struggling is that, while insurance costs are up for real estate owners nationwide, for less-than-clear reasons they rose a shocking 103% from 2019 to 2023 for owners of affordable housing in New York City. Another is that the share of tenants paying their rent on time fell in 2020 and 2021 and hasn't fully recovered. The COVID-19 pandemic hit working-class New Yorkers especially hard, with employment in construction, retail, leisure and hospitality in the city is still below pre-pandemic levels. Raising rents doesn't seem like the optimal solution to a problem caused in part by people not being able to afford the rent. But it's the only arrow the Rent Guidelines Board has in its quiver. The city and state have more arrows. In his campaign literature, Mamdani stresses reforming New York's property tax system, which taxes apartment buildings much more heavily than single-family homes but also gives inexplicably large tax breaks to some high-end condominiums and coops. He wants to "put our public dollars to work' building 200,000 new rent-stabilized apartments over the next decade, offering a set of wonky suggestions for how to fund this and has some interesting ideas for pooling rental assistance funds currently distributed as vouchers to tenants (or not distributed; utilization rates are quite low) to support struggling affordable buildings directly. None of these is as catchy or easy to deliver as freezing the rent. It's understandable why Mamdani chose this as a campaign pledge, and probably inevitable that the Rent Guidelines Board will deliver at least one 0% annual rent increase if he is elected. Whether he succeeds in making housing more affordable in New York City, though, will depend on what else he does. Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts.
Bloomberg
21-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Freezing Rent Is Easy. Making NYC Housing Affordable Isn't.
Among the campaign promises that helped propel Zohran Mamdani to the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, his pledge to 'freeze the rent' is at once the most radical sounding and the easiest to accomplish. In fact, it's been accomplished multiple times over the past decade. The mayor chooses the nine members of the city's Rent Guidelines Board, which every year determines the allowable rent increase for the city's nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. The members' terms are staggered, so a new mayor can't replace them all immediately, but with the two tenant representatives certain to favor a freeze, it would take only three of the five members appointed to represent the public to get to a majority (there are also two owner representatives, who would, of course, oppose a freeze). During Bill de Blasio's tenure as mayor, the board voted for no rent increases on one-year leases in 2015, 2016 and 2020 — as well as 0% for the first six months and 1.5% for the last six in 2021.
