Hundreds of people with storm-damaged homes are still living in hotels and motels more than five months on from the Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle.<\/p>\n
Contracts for this accommodation have contributed to a spend of more than $27 million by the government’s Temporary Accommodation Service (TAS) since it was activated in February.<\/p>\n
From September, more displaced people will be able to access support for private rental accommodation. But with a limited pool of rentals available, TAS says people who need to stay in their costly rooms can do so for as long as they need.<\/p>\n
When Cyclone Gabrielle brought landslides down the cliffs near her Muriwai home, Amy Nelson had to evacuate overnight. A week later, her family of six had already moved between four different houses.<\/p>\n
“There’s obviously the initial shelter that you seek on the night, then bowl up to a friend’s house but they don’t have any space, then go to another friend’s house where there’s a couple of rooms, then find a tiny flat that you can stay in for a couple of weeks,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It was at that point that we realised this wasn’t going to be a couple of days and then you go home type of thing.”<\/p>\n
Nelson said when she called TAS, they were already overwhelmed.<\/p>\n
“They were basically just like, ‘We’ve got nothing, take anything you can get. There’s nothing in your area; there’s barely anything in Auckland. Good luck to you. If you find anything, grab it with both hands and worry about how to pay for it afterwards’,” she said.<\/p>\n
“That was their advice.”<\/p>\n
Fellow Muriwai resident Lauren Wetini had a similar experience.<\/p>\n
“It was subsidised rent which for a family of five is like $650 a week, which doesn’t feel like much of a subsidy, especially when you’re having to pay a mortgage as well,” she said.<\/p>\n
“You can say where you’d like to live, but there are no guarantees that you’d get a rental in your community.”<\/p>\n
While TAS was telling people to get into whatever housing they could, the service was also scrambling to secure whatever accommodation it could.<\/p>\n
It meant that in Auckland, some people who were able to access the service ended up in five-star hotels like Movenpick, Pullman, or JW Marriott, while others went into motels or serviced apartments.<\/p>\n
RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hundreds of people with storm-damaged homes are still living in hotels and motels more than five months on from the Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle. Contracts for this accommodation have contributed to a spend of more than $27 million by the government’s Temporary Accommodation Service (TAS) since it was activated in February. From September, more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6881,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6880","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\/6880","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=6880"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6882,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6880\/revisions\/6882"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}