Hardship & Hope: ‘People living in cow sheds’: The iwi providing solutions to Tairāwhiti’s housing crisis

“We can’t fail,” says Toitū Tairāwhiti Housing’s Annette Wehi. “Our people are desperate and the longer we wait the longer they suffer.”

Wehi is talking about the innovative work of a multi-iwi effort to get houses built quickly, affordably, and where they are needed in the Tairāwhiti region.

Toitū Tairāwhiti has gone from a standing start two-and-a-half years ago, to pumping out houses two dozen at a time from an offsite building facility in Gisborne.

Four iwi came together in the early days of Covid to form Toitū Tairāwhiti – Ngāti Porou, Rongowhakaata, Ngai Tamanuhiri and Te Aitanga a Mahaki – to support whānau with food and hygiene supplies, and running vaccination centres that have delivered 64,000 doses.

At the end of 2020, the group moved into housing, inspired by work going on in the rohe of Te Whānau a Apanui on the East Cape. There, Māori land advocate and widely-respected treaty negotiator Willie Te Aho was leading efforts to address the plight of whānau living in decrepit houses and severely crowded conditions.

Te Aho laid down the challenge – and what Wehi calls “crazy timelines” – at hui held at a rural marae around Tairāwhiti. Wehi says everyone understood that “the longer we leave it, the longer our people suffer in disgraceful conditions”.

“It’s very normal for our whānau to bring out the mattresses at night, and the whole sitting room is full of bodies,” she says. “And in the morning before the kids go to school, those mattresses get put away. And they’ve lived like that since they were born – and now they are in high school…

“Then there’s the phone calls to ask: ‘Auntie, is anyone living in your shed? We’re losing our rental, can we move in until we get a place?’. And they move in and never leave because there is nowhere to go… there was a whānau living in a cave in Te Whānau-ā-Apanui. People are in lean-tos and decrepit houses with black mould in them.”

Wehi and other volunteers – most of them leaders in their local marae and kohanga reo – swung into action under Te Aho’s guidance. Wehi – now managing director of Toitū Tairāwhiti Housing Ltd – had never worked in the housing sector before; she’s a lecturer and her family is prominent in the world of kapa haka. But her first task in late 2020 was to track down five “pre-loved” houses and get them relocated into the region for Te Aitanga a Mahaki.