Te Wharekura.
Photo: Amy Williams / RNZ
A frontline worker at Auckland District Court says more people with complex mental health and addiction problems are coming to her for help, having run out of options for food, clothing and housing.
It comes as unemployment rises to 5.3 percent and there are calls for a response to the city’s homelessness crisis.
Carmel Claridge coordinates a therapeutic court for homeless people that aims to stop recurring low-level offending and provide support.
Over the past year, she said the knocks on her door at Auckland District Court had become more desperate.
“People are presenting up here, and I’ve noticed particularly in the last year they are angrier, their issues are really complex. I’m no clinician, but it’s very clear they are not mentally well people.”
Auckland Council recorded a 90 percent increase in people sleeping rough from September last year, when eligibility for emergency housing was tightened, and January.
Claridge kept a stockpile of clothing, sleeping bags and bed rolls.
“A pair of shoes for someone who’s got no shoes, a raincoat, a mat so they’re not sleeping directly on concrete. Sleeping bags? I’d give out in a month probably about 10 to 12.”
She was concerned about calls to move rough sleepers out of the city centre when that was where the help was – the City Mission included.
Government ministers had confirmed they were considering measures to move homeless people out of Auckland’s city centre – but the exact details remained unclear.
The move worried housing advocates. There were similar calls in 2023.
Claridge said more needed to be done to support those on the street. She believed there was a gap in support for people without an abode who had complex mental health and addiction problems.
“If the issue is determined to be drug related, it’s not dealt with within the health system, then if it’s mental health related it becomes very difficult to get those people into alc and drug add centres, particularly for people who are homeless.”
Shortage of services
The Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission’s data showed 5000 fewer people accessed specialist addiction services in 2023/24, compared to five years earlier.
It said that decrease was due to significant workforce shortages in specialist services, and services focusing on caring for those with higher and more severe needs.
This week, the government announced more than $60 million of funding for additional crisis support over the next four years.
That would go towards additional crisis assessment teams, more peer support in emergency departments, more crisis recovery cafés and more 10-bed acute alternatives.
Photo: RNZ / MARIKA KHABAZI
Auckland man Te Wharekura was homeless for 10 months before finding housing through Lifewise. He hoped some of that went towards the most vulnerable.
“It’s only inevitable with the high unemployment and low housing, there’s going to be people who are homeless.
“The queues at the homeless meals are getting longer, there’s a lot more people struggling. There’s a lot more people who may be housed but they can’t afford to buy food, so they go to the homeless meals.”
When he became homeless a year ago, he had lost his job due to a drug addiction and was later evicted from a rental and then emergency housing.
“Some of us are worthy of a house, some of us don’t have [crimanal] records and keep a clean house like me, but just no houses were available, and then you can fall in the cracks and then you go unnoticed, forgotten.”
He turned to poetry when he became homeless and wrote this poem last year.
Here I am
Here I am with all I own
2 bags, no teddy
Evicted, trespassed
From my abode
No love, now all alone
Victoria Park has become my new home.
No kitchen, no shower,
No light switch or power
I sleep beneath the big tall sky tower.
The police took all that I own
My teddy bear, all I hold dear.
Homeless and bare
My heart, my soul
Now in despair.
My life I slowly have to rebuild
And repair
As I lay in Victoria Park
The cold
The dark
Not knowing how, when or where to start
My shattered pain and hurtful past.
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