Source: Radio New Zealand
Housing First Ōtautahi manager Nicola Fleming. Rachel Graham
A new outreach service for homeless people in Christchurch encountered an 87-year-old woman living on the streets in its first week of operation.
Housing First Ōtautahi has started a new rapid response, trying to ensure people who have just started living on the streets don’t end up there long term.
Its primary focus is people who have been homeless for some time, and was set up using funding from the government in September 2025.
Manager Nicola Fleming said Housing First Ōtautahi was one of a number of organisations which received part of the $10 million in funding, and needed to make us of it by June 2026.
She said their normal criteria was people that had been homeless for at least 12 months and self-referred to them for help.
“So the people covered by the outreach rapid response group will take everyone who doesn’t fit in there. To try and prevent them coming into Housing First’s criteria. If they have just been made homeless, what does that look like, how did they get there, what can we do to help?”
Fleming said the team was made up of five outreach workers, a housing locator, and two nurses.
The outreach workers and nurses head out on to the street each day at 7am to talk to people they believe could be homeless. They speak to them about what they need and ensure they know about services available.
In their first week on the streets, the team encountered 19 people newly on the streets, including an 87-year-old woman, a 70 year old, and a 17 year old.
She said they are increasingly seeing older people living on the streets, and a variety of reasons why they end up homeless.
“They have been living with family, and then family have moved away or gone into hospital. Or there has been trauma with some kind of issue in the family, or people passing away and they haven’t known where to go.
“Sometimes they don’t want to live in a rest home, or they are still using or an addict and don’t want to go into a rest home. But where do they go?
“There are massive gaps which leaves people walking around Ōtautahi who are stuck because they just can’t find stable housing but also don’t want to go to a rest home or a mental health facility. So where can they go?”
Fleming said there was also a growing issue of people who leave hospital or jail with no proper arrangements for where they will live.
“People just out of jail dumped out on the street. We have to do better.”
Fleming said the new service will give them a much better idea of how many people are homeless in Christchurch, as it can be a hidden problem and hard to pin numbers down.
It will, however, leave them with the ongoing issue of where to house people they know are in need.
“Where is the housing? It’s horrible to build up someone’s expectations up – oh I’m in this service, I heard it’s really great but then I have to sit here and wait for housing, when is that going to happen?
“And the truth is, we just don’t know.”
Housing First Ōtautahi currently supports about 250 formerly homeless people in housing, and has about another 100 on its waitlist.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
