“A [gang member on parole] moved in and was a predator who stalked all the females including [client]… she moved to another emergency housing place and it was the same there. She couldn’t access shared cooking facilities and had to be careful accessing walkways because it was unsafe. She got stalked again there too and it was triggering because of her experience with [the person who had stalked her at the previous facility].” [Former resident of emergency accommodation] “I was propositioned on more than one occasion by the emergency housing property owner, to engage in sexual activities on the premises.” [Former resident of emergency accommodation] “Management harassed me and my children daily. They would yell and scream at us, calling us rats and Māori who bred like rats and should go back to their hole.” [Former resident of emergency accommodation] “It’s been a free-for-all. Working families are put into motels next to offenders and drug dealers.” [Transitional housing provider with significant background in social services] “It’s not that all the people were bad but there is always conflict and no-one to manage it. I have been threatened with rape... I slept in bathroom sometimes because there was one more lock on the door there... my friends are too scared to visit me.” [Resident in a social housing complex under contract to MSD (the Community Housing Provider Programme)] One advocate shared that, due to the power dynamics involved, people are often afraid to complain, or if they do complain, feel they are not listened to by motel managers or their MSD case manager. In the worst cases: “Instead of complaining if they feel unsafe, now they will just move out into a car or a friend’s garage, which often also results in MSD considering them to have abandoned their housing and refusing any new [emergency housing grant].” [Housing/benefit advocate] Some people who contacted us also expressed concerns, fears, and frustrations about the impact of emergency housing4 on their city and on other residents living nearby. “Emergency housing in Rotorua is beyond wrong… it’s brought in violence, more drugs, more crime, and two fires in two different motels.” [Former resident of emergency accommodation] 4 26 In most cases, those who shared these perspectives did not distinguish between emergency and transitional housing. In our view, it is likely that the use of motels for both emergency accommodation, and contracted transitional housing, has led to the conflation of these two systems and assumptions that ‘all motels are the same’. Human Rights Commission