Freedom camping sites and carparks in Whanganui are home to a growing fleet of vehicles where the city’s homeless sleep.<\/p>\n
The district council has set aside money and earmarked a site for them to live, but it has not attracted universal support.<\/p>\n
One person not in favour of the proposed site on Taup\u014d Quay is Jenny Johnson. She has spent much of the past couple of years without a home.<\/p>\n
Thanks to the generosity of Whanganui businessman Murray Robinson, who lets them live on his rural property rent-free, she and partner Grant Fothergill have somewhere to live now.<\/p>\n
But the growing problem of homelessness cannot be ignored, she said.<\/p>\n
“I wish that the council and other organisations really would take the homeless situation seriously instead of just flogging them off or passing them on to somebody else who doesn’t give a hoot either.<\/p>\n
“Help them.”<\/p>\n
Johnson said she lived in a caravan with her mother Pat for a while, before the pair got a house.<\/p>\n
After her mum died she could not stay at the house and was again homeless. She then lived with Fothergill in a shack in sand dunes near Whanganui, until it became unsafe for them there.<\/p>\n
At least there the pair had space – something Johnson said was lacking in the Taup\u014d Quay site.<\/p>\n
“As far as I know there are probably 100 people that are homeless. How the hell are you going to fit 100 people in that little tiny box?<\/p>\n
“Half of them are crackheads and the other half are druggies, and the others aren’t even mentally stable. They shouldn’t be in the community.”<\/p>\n
Johnson now has somewhere to live, but she knows how precarious life on the streets is.<\/p>\n
“To have a home and somewhere to call home – it means a lot to me. I feel sorry for the other people that are still looking.”<\/p>\n
She described the property where she and Fothergill were staying as bliss. They did not have hot water, heating water with a fire for their outdoor bath. They grew and caught food, and had few costs.<\/p>\n
But they knew they were lucky.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
SOURCE RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Freedom camping sites and carparks in Whanganui are home to a growing fleet of vehicles where the city’s homeless sleep. The district council has set aside money and earmarked a site for them to live, but it has not attracted universal support. One person not in favour of the proposed site on Taup\u014d Quay is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4122,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4120\/revisions\/4122"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}