This means 35 whānau will have new homes next year
Ōtautahi Community Housing Trust has been injected with a $14 million fund from a KiwiSaver scheme to cover the cost of building new homes for 35 whānau in the Christchurch suburb of Spreydon.
Cate Kearney, Trust chief executive, said thousands of people needed an affordable home in the city.
“At the moment, we have about 2,000 people looking for a home on any given day in Christchurch and there’s 25,000 people across New Zealand needing a home,” Kearney told RNZ.
Those figures were from the national housing register managed by the Ministry for Social Development.
Kearney said demand for affordable housing rose significantly since the trust was created six years ago.
“People are really struggling at the moment in New Zealand, and they’ve been struggling even before Ukraine and the cost-of-living,” she said. “Rents are so high that they can’t manage to go into the private market... so they need support.”
Each home in the project, the Trust CEO said, comes with a 25-year government contract to ensure residents will only need to put in a quarter of their income on rent.
“That way we get a family into a home, their rent is affordable, their life improves [because] it’s easier to get to school, it’s easier to feed everyone,” Kearney said. “Suddenly, a whole set of stresses are removed from their lives which allows them to actually have a better life in general.”
The homes had also been designed to create a community environment, she said.
“We’ve got 35 homes, some of those are one-bedroom but we’ve also put quite a lot of family homes because it’s such an amazing site – it’s really close to a school, right next door to a park,” Kearney said. “We really want to have that sense of a family community and giving people the opportunity to walk across a field and they’re at a school. It’s just beautiful.”
Construction has already commenced on the Willard Street homes, which were set to be completed by September 2023. A further 100 homes across the city were currently in the planning stages of development, Kearney said.
Since 2019, about 200 homes have been completed by the trust, RNZ reported.
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