Housing New Zealand’s vision is to build lives and communities by housing New Zealanders – he pukenga wai, he nōhanga tāngata; he nōhanga tāngata, he putanga kōrero.
Housing New Zealand is New Zealand’s biggest landlord, providing over 63,000 homes to more than 184,000 people across New Zealand, whose situations and needs are as unique and diverse as other New Zealanders.
We are a socially-focused landlord, and house people for the duration of their housing need. There are two key, interconnected parts to what being a socially-focused landlord means for us.
The first is housing people, helping them to manage the challenges in their lives, and engaging with them to ensure their homes and communities are places they want to live in.
The second is about maintaining the homes we already own to enable them to be warm, dry and safe places to live, and also building the right kinds of homes in the right places for the people who will need them, now and in the future.
A one-size-fits-all approach to building homes has never been ideal, and this approach is becoming even less so as New Zealand’s population becomes older, experiences more instances of short- or long-term illness, injury or disability1 and is more culturally and ethnically diverse than it has ever been.
Housing New Zealand is doing what’s best for the people we house as their lives and their housing needs change. These changes can be prompted by changes in family size, growing older, or having a temporary or long-term illness, injury or disability. The more suitable and adaptable a home is for a person’s situation and needs, the less likely they will find the home does not meet their needs over time, or the less likely it is they have to move somewhere else that better meets their needs.
For Housing New Zealand, which is both a landlord and a builder of homes, this concept of doing what’s best for our customers can start with the existing homes we manage, and the new homes we build.
The better our homes are at meeting the needs of the largest number of people without needing to be modified, or people having to ‘put up with’ homes that are inadequate for their particular needs, the better people’s quality of life will be. This quality of life includes good mental health because people are living in homes that suit their needs. We are also less likely to find we have new homes that are not built for the people who need them and consequently, we do not need to spend significant amounts of money fixing the homes we have built.
While we acknowledge a one-size-fits-all approach to building homes does not work, we also want to make sure that our homes work for the largest number of people without the homes needing to be modified in some way. Our aim is to recognise and address the practical reality that people have different and individual accessibility needs, while also ensuring as many of our homes have the right kinds of features that help people live well and successfully in our homes.
Housing New Zealand already has a focus on making our homes accessible, including by designing and building more accessible homes and considering accessibility in the context of our retrofit programme. This policy builds on the change that has started to guide us as we increase the accessibility of our homes.
This policy is our starting point and we will review it regularly, and revise as appropriate.
[B]uildings can be disabling. When a person is unable to live in a house because of physical barriers it is the house that is inadequate, not the person. But buildings can be changed.