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Speaker 1: The number of families living in emergency housing has cut

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Speaker 1: has been reduced by get this, fifty seven percent, nearly

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Speaker 1: sixty percent. This is according to new numbers from MSD

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Speaker 1: and Housing in the Urban Development Agency. In December last year,

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Speaker 1: there were just over three thousand families in motels, now

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Speaker 1: just thirteen hundred. Phil Gilbert is with us. He's the

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Speaker 1: Community Housing ALTI at our chief executive Phil. Good morning,

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Speaker 1: Oh hi, Paul.

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Speaker 2: Hi, right now, All good, it's early in the morning. Brother.

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Speaker 1: They gave me, Paul, tell me, do you buy these numbers?

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Speaker 1: I mean it seems incredible.

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Speaker 2: Oh look, it's a big turnaround and in a short

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Speaker 2: space of time, and yeah, we believe they are accurate.

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Speaker 2: If you are looking at children, getting children out of motels,

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Speaker 2: we think that's a fantastical idea, hugely supportive of it,

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Speaker 2: and it seems to be tracking in the right direction.

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Speaker 1: Fantastic. Do you know where the twenty percent of people

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Speaker 1: that leave and we don't know where they're going? Do

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Speaker 1: you know where they're going?

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Speaker 2: Oh? Look, we've got a pretty good idea. We've got

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Speaker 2: in the community sector, got about twenty thousand houses across

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Speaker 2: the country, so about thirty five thousand New Zealanders go

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Speaker 2: to bed every night in one of our houses, so

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Speaker 2: we're picking up quite a few of them. But there's

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Speaker 2: a lot more people been lost in the system who

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Speaker 2: don't sell out a census data and who we're not

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Speaker 2: picking up. So you can't take this measure as the

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Speaker 2: only measure of homelessness to get an accurate picture of

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Speaker 2: what's actually playing out in society at the moment.

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Speaker 1: The government has a target of fifteen hundred new social homes.

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Speaker 1: This is by twenty twenty seven, which will be delivered

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Speaker 1: by community housing providers, presumably like the ones that you

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Speaker 1: work with.

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Speaker 2: Yep.

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Speaker 1: Is that doable?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Look, that's absolutely right. That is our target. The

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Speaker 2: government's backing our sector and it's our job to deliver those. Yeah,

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Speaker 2: it is achievable. Look, we're with non solutions at the

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Speaker 2: moment to find the billion dollars that's one thousand million

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Speaker 2: dollars we're going to need to find pay for those

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Speaker 2: houses and tracking very well. We've done those sorts of

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Speaker 2: numbers historically over the last few years before, and so

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Speaker 2: we're pretty confident we can deliver on those. Yes, we can.

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Speaker 1: Paul, what's changed. It feels like just a couple of

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Speaker 1: years ago, even a year ago, this was an entrenched problem.

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Speaker 1: We had thousands of families stuck in these motiles and

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Speaker 1: no real prospect of them getting out, and now all

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Speaker 1: of a sudden, it's like evaporating into thin air.

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Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Look, I think we have a tendency sometimes

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Speaker 2: to oversimplify, but I think in general, communities, society, community providers,

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Speaker 2: the government kind of or has been tremendously helpful with

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Speaker 2: helping fix this problem. Most of the families who've been

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Speaker 2: permanently housed have been housed by them, and your members

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Speaker 2: need to your listeners, sorry, need to remember. KO has

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Speaker 2: been building one in five houses in the whole country

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Speaker 2: for the last few years, so they've been really cracking

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Speaker 2: into getting new supply going. I think we've all decided

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Speaker 2: that we don't think growing up in motels is a

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Speaker 2: good place for kids, and when we focus on a

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Speaker 2: goal like that in New Zealand, we can fix this stuff. Actually,

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Speaker 2: we're a pretty small country and this is a man

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Speaker 2: made problem in the housing crisis. We can actually undo

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Speaker 2: it if we want to.

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Speaker 1: Paul, thank you very much for your time and your analysis.

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Speaker 1: Paul Gilbert, the Community Housing Altie our chief executive for

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