Another day, another list of complaints about social housing in Rotorua Motels…
Rotorua emergency housing motels ads targeted Facebook users out of town
Some motel owners providing emergency housing in Rotorua have directly targeted potential out-of-town clients through social media.
A document shared by RotoruaNZ with Rotorua Lakes Council – aimed at informing “messaging” to the Government in March this year – shows examples of emergency housing motel advertisements on Facebook directly targeted at people in Tauranga and Whakatāne.
The advertising in Tauranga and Whakatāne was live at the time the document was produced.
Titles for some ads included “emergency Winz motel”, and “motel room for emergency accommodation” and listed their price as free.
…firstly, let’s acknowledge that social housing in Motels is a bandaid on a haemorrhaging social problem that no one cares about.
NZers don’t care about homelessness because that would ask questions of how rigged the home ownership casino is in this country, and with many in the middle class benefitting from home ownership, we don’t like to face the reality of how unequal our society has become.
But the sec and issue I don’t get is that ion all these Motels are so against housing the homeless and that it’s destroying their tourism reputation, then the Motels can simply say, ‘enough no more’ and stop bookings from the Social Agencies can’t they?
But they don’t.
Why don’t they?
Because they are making obscene profits from these contracts aren’t they?
Isn’t it outrageous they keep taking the bookings and keep taking the money and yet keep complaining?
If Rotorua Motels want their tourism reputation back, stop taking bookings from the social welfare agencies.
We all know they won’t.
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Yeah piss off the govt _and_ a bunch of dodgy people, sounds like a great idea.
I’m picking the Rotorua District Council know what these motels are up to as well, and the government, hence the change of mayor and hence their current review of the Fenton St problems, to try and stop them doing that.
Reading about vagrancy issues in Christchurch this morning, one thing is very clear; the homeless problem will only worsen until the government, and only the government can do this, start mass social housing builds, that is, not the business as usual cop out we see from Labour.
Housing, as bad as it is now and it’s appalling, will continue to corrode society until we have a government who is willing to deal with it! And the thing of it is, a government WILL have to confront this problem one of these days! They cannot kick the can down the road much further. Pity is wasn’t Labour!
“Housing, as bad as it is now and it’s appalling, will continue to corrode society until we have a government who is willing to deal with it! And the thing of it is, a government WILL have to confront this problem one of these days! They cannot kick the can down the road much further. Pity is wasn’t Labour!”
Insightful summary XRAY.
a motel room is not a home so peoplke don’t treat it as one.
just like sink estates in the uk, you group all the shitheads together with no effective supervision and they fuck it up for everyone…quelle surprise
concentrating them in one place is a dickhead move, they should be in motels dotted about the country
and yes the motel owners are profiting massivly from contracts signed in haste by a govt desperate for the appearance of doing something.
Public urination, public drug use, public beatings, assaults, motel guarded by gangs cause the security firms don’t go there, 1/3 of domestic violence call outs go to motels, theft, and general unpleasant behaviour by people who literally have been abandoned by government, winz, etc into a room without a view.
I get that you want to feel good about this issue, and in general i actually don’t’ disagree. But when you don’t actually think about how to use these motels, but just allocate rooms as they come available you have issues.
You have family with kids in one motel room, you have family separated across several motels, you have the returning 501 gangbanger next to the single parent with child or the elderly. You have no increase in police presence. You have no access to social welfare workes. You can not cook in these motels. You can not wash your clothes in these motels. You don’t have motels that are segregated say for families. for young people. for the mentally ill of whom they are quite a few. I personally had the pleasure of trying to stop someone from throwing furniture – out side table and chair into oncoming traffic, no point calling the cops they are too busy trying people from stopping others.
What was thought of as a band aid is no longer useful, the wound is actually a huge gash, infected and sepsis has set in. You need a proper clean out.
This is town of 60 – 70.000 people at best. It has one industry really, tourism and a bit of forestry work thrown in. No other industry, no government departments, no university. So in essence you actually have no jobs to offer these people. This too needs to be acknowledged.
The government could have bought some of these facilities and transformed them into housing with a purpose.
For example, Young parent/child assisted living facility – lease term 3 years. Enough time to get back on track. This could have been small one / two bedroom units, with cooking facilities – either shared or individual, with shared laundry facilities, shared play ground for the kids, and a live in social worker to help fill forms and get back on track with school or training.
for example, older people / retired people : same, small one / two bedroom units again with the same facilities as mentioned above, with a live in care person or two to make sure everyone is well.
Returning 501 – we have whole motel full of them. YEI! US!Again, provide proper individual rooms, social workers available, drug rehab to be offered, counseling services available etc etc etc. Yeah, nah nah…..that would be hard work.
But that is not done.
People get thrown at these motels, moved around when they stay too long at one lest they upset the books and by laws, non of these motels are equipped for people to live in them for month or years.
All of these people pay at least 25% of their benefit for that unfit accommodation.
None of these people have tenancy rights.
All of these people can get evicted willy nilly – no eviction is just for gangbangers in state housing – if they ‘upset’ the owner of the motel or their ‘hired’ private security goons.
Many don’t have visitation rights.
Last, because of all these issues People – local Kiwi Tourists – are not coming for a weekend anymore. In a town in which tourism is a big earner and has been so since the 1800, that will cause issues. People not staying the night, means people not eating dinner, not going to show, not going to the night market – our Sunday Farmers Market has been cancelled fully and we don’t know if the council will bring it back to unsafe i guess, not having breaky the next day etc. they come in to do their Mountain biking and then fuck off to Taupo for the rest.
Thanks Government. You kindness is slaying us.
Those of us that spoke up and have been speaking about this since at least late 2020 as to how this will be an issue were all just shouted down as Haters, Racists, Bigots, Phobes, and of course we all must dislike Jacinda Ardern and we of course all just want to see her fail. Never mind the misery that anyone can witness daily in our streets.
But it has been getting worse by the day, and it is continuing so. And the polls show that L is losing support faster then they ever gained it. And this is just one of the many reasons for it.
Unless this government pulls its head out of its proverbial, this will get worse, and people will recoil from Labour as if they were infested with lice because of it.
People want basic security, basic safety, basic decency and above all they want a fair go. And Rotorua has been made the dumping grounds for the homeless of elsewhere and the professional Left can see no fault with it. I guess someone has to pay the bills for the badly thought out ideas of some dudes /ettes that took managerial bullshit 101 and in this case everyone is happy for Rotorua to pay that bill. Cause someone has too, right?
Go for a Road Trip. Come to town. Check out the grandiose dumping of humans in rundown motels and see the utter misery for children, families, young and old that this refusal to actually build housing, apartments for low rents, and so on and so forth for yourself.
Ask the people in these Motels if they think that this was the best that our ‘finest’ ‘best paid’ ‘kind’ ‘socialist’ academics, think tank consultants, politicians and their enablers could have come up with. Or if it was just an easy thing to do to be seen as doing something.
Totally agree RB, it seems like an obvious solution, but the streaming of motels is just like the streaming of schools – UnPC – we all get to live in a shit hole equally. You too can be a single Mum being forced into prostitution by the Mob member next door.
I agree for what we are paying, we should buy them. If we had an MoW, we could buy 10 of the scummiest and convert them one by one to more fit for purpose housing. And the easiest to fix is the pensioner housing, then the small family single Mums. The courtyards of some of the older motels are usually big enough to provide a reasonable outdoor living area or playground.
But the problem is all the scumlords who have moved in to pick up the Governments largesse. (No this is not all motel owners and the Govt knows who they are) DSW needs to play hardball with them and then tell them they are going to be removed from the government roster and offered to buy under compulsory purchase price so no inflated values. However, I think this approach is limited because of the employment situation in Rotorua and because you do have quite a few hard core people being housed in the Rot at this time.
Then there is the wider issue of the destruction of Tourism and the town by the ongoing problem. Maybe DSW needs to look at the origin of many of these people and see if they can find more motels that fit the bill in other small towns and areas and see if they can replicate the buy back and reform approach there so some can return home. But the secret would be to carefully control the number of these purchases so any one town doesnt get overwhelmed with the same issue again.
Not that I am suggesting this is an appropriate solution to the waiting list but it seems a relatively easy fix for at least some people in emergency housing. Could ease things a little.
We don’t need MOW to use a calculator and do cost analysis of leasing vs buying a motel for homeless.
It is just a gravy train funded by the tax payers, and the ministries congratulating themselves on how they have solved this pesky problem.
Bet those managers earned decent promotions and bonuses for making their minister look good.
People go into business to make a profit .If you have someone who will rent a unit constantly and at a high rate why would you turn it away and risk a vacancy due to covid our weather and less profit. It is the system that is broken not the motel owners.
This is one thing i have said already under John Key. If the government is happy to pay 3000 a week for unit they can rent a proper house for 1200 and properly house families. They don’t, and that is telling.
Governments run scared of NIMBYs who would kick up a stick if the motel residents were scattered around nice neighbourhoods.
Better to concentrate the trouble (at whatever cost to those families) in one place (and one electorate).
If a Labour Government with a full majority is scared of ‘nimbys’ then i guess we are all fucked and why bother vote for them then?
I can see the logic to that from a political perspective but socially, pretty unacceptable though.
$1m per day. $365m per year.
Who doesn’t want a piece of that?
If not. Just don’t sign up!
One would hope the government is getting ‘a piece of that’, in the form of tax on that profit.
A windfall GST return maybe? the government giveth, then taketh, and the rest is still homeless.
But they’re not homeless, they’re living in motels, geeez!
Surviving would be a better way of describing their circumstances if the TV programme is to be believed. And I agree the last National government fell down on the job with regards housing but that is not to say the next one will after the election.
Poverty and homelessness are living in cars and under bridges, National Party Inc.
God bless motels.
Tee hee hee
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