‘Nats ignore the homeless'. That might be the message waved under the nose of Tauranga MP Simon Bridges next week. Or ‘rental price hikes must stop'.
'A protest banner has to be a brief but pointed message,” says Lynette Haines, an enforced caravan dweller and housing crisis outcast.
'I can laugh about it,” she says. But Lynette may get serious next week and rewrite her precarious living situation into a political statement outside the MP's electorate office in Third Ave. She plans to wave some banners on behalf of struggling renters.
'[The amount of] $3120 – that's how much the average rent has gone up in Tauranga during the last 12 months,” says Labour's housing spokesperson Phil Twyford.
'For many Tauranga people on low incomes that is the difference between economic survival and tumbling over the edge into homelessness.”
So $3120 in 12 months and $5200 in four years, according to Labour.
'The average wage is relatively low in Tauranga and very few people have had a payrise of any significance in the last four or five years, so where are they going to find that sort of money?”
And just as Lynette was talking to The Weekend Sun she got a call from the garage. 'There's something else wrong with my car and it's going to clean out my savings.” She juggles from one week to another.
Lynette lost her job first, made redundant in 2008, receiving two weeks' holiday pay. Since then she's lost her 'little rented pad” and cut into her savings for car and teeth repairs.
Lynette is 69, worked all her life and never thought one day she'd be subsisting in a caravan at a camping ground. 'It's survival mode for many of us – and no one seems to understand what's going on in Tauranga.”
When Lynette was made redundant in 2008 she received an unemployment benefit of $204. 'My rental including power and water cost $180 and so I had $24 left for food. I lived like that for a year.”
So she bought the caravan. At the beginning of 2015 when she started looking for rental accommodation she could have afforded $300 a week. 'With an accommodation subsidy I would have had enough for food and power and possibly save for a haircut.” But two years later she's still in the caravan because that's her only affordable option.
Lynette was at a Labour Party meeting called to discuss the rental crisis in Tauranga. About 40 aggrieved Tauranga renters shared the difficulties they have living in the rental market. And she became 'a bit politicised” after attending the pan-party homelessness inquiry and various meetings about the housing problems.
'It's putting massive stress on people right across the spectrum,” says Phil. 'It's affecting kids in terms of health and education, there's the loss of dignity and respect for parents who can't provide. Even the middle class who 10 years ago would have reasonably expected to have a decent crack at owning their own home are now struggling to pay their rent.”
According to Labour one of the problems is cashed-up Aucklanders coming to Tauranga, outbidding locals for houses, pushing up prices, then hiking rentals to recoup their investment.
'There's an acute problem in Tauranga, a desperate shortage of affordable rental housing,” says Phil. 'You would think if the market was working properly it would respond to the demand for affordable housing and build them and sell them, but it's not.”
Phil says Labour would build 100,000 affordable homes and sell them to first-home buyers because no one is catering for that market. His party would also build more state houses, crack down on speculators, close tax breaks and stop foreign buying of existing housing stock.
'There are plenty of 200m2 homes at $800,000 being built, but that's no good for someone working in retail or a start-out schoolteacher.”
No good for Lynette in her caravan either. Because she's going to have to move on. 'The campground site will cost three times as much during the peak summer holiday period and it would take all my pension just to stay in one spot.
'But there are a lot of people out there worse off than me.”