Preface – Chief Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt Many will be familiar with the alarming scenes from emergency housing that have run across our screens in recent months. Scenes of children and families crammed into motels with little or no cooking facilities or space for their belongings, security guards intimidating residents, and people deciding that they are better off sleeping in their car than in government-funded emergency housing. These should not be the enduring image of efforts to help people out of homelessness. Our emergency housing system should uplift the dignity and human rights of the people it seeks to help. In September 2022, the Human Rights Commission invited those living in emergency and transitional accommodation to share their experiences with us to inform our Housing Inquiry. Many people came forward, including residents of such housing and service providers. Their testimonies, outlined in this report, paint a sobering picture of a system that is failing to meet human rights standards, particularly in emergency accommodation. The Inquiry heard that some young people have felt so unsafe living alongside some adults in emergency accommodation that they have resorted or returned to street homelessness. It also heard stories of children who are now two or three and have only ever known living in a motel room. 4 Human Rights Commission This is a huge challenge, decades in the making. An estimated 100,000 or more people in Aotearoa New Zealand are experiencing homelessness. It is a problem most significantly experienced by Tangata Whenua, reflecting our nation’s painful past where the colonial government, beginning in the 1860s, systematically stripped Tangata Whenua of traditional land and home ownership. This report highlights other historic decisions by governments that have contributed to this crisis, including the depletion of public housing stock in the 1990s and 2010s. This has left the current Government’s frontline response to homelessness with a huge shortfall of decent homes. I acknowledge that the Government has made very significant efforts over the past five years to deliver a more equitable housing system in Aotearoa New Zealand. These efforts include for example, a $3.8 billion housing acceleration fund, legislative changes to improve conditions for renters, the Māori national housing strategy, and the introduction of Healthy Homes Standards. This report also highlights decisions by the current and recent Governments, such as the Cabinet decision in 2020 to remove emergency and transitional housing from the Residential Tenancies Act. This left residents of such housing with nowhere to turn for the past two years. Instead of an emergency system with dignity and accountability, we’ve seen an emergency system causing stress, trauma, and frustration. In many ways, at its core this is an issue of accountability.