Kāinga Ora has been ordered to pay a tenant $6000 after she was “terrorised” by her neighbours and fellow social housing tenants, who pooed outside her door and allegedly threw a woman off a balcony.
Poor woman.
The tenant said they had been “terrorised” by their neighbours, who had made death threats, left blood, urine and phlegm around the complex, pooed outside her door, slashed car tyres, had fights in the hallways, used methamphetamine, intimidated other tenants and invited antisocial visitors onto the premises who knocked on residents’ doors asking for money.
Any of these should lead to eviction. Being able to carry on doing all of these is unthinkable.
Kāinga Ora sent six notices to the tenants requesting a meeting to discuss the bad behaviour – all which went ignored – before finally applying to the tribunal to have them evicted in March 2024, two weeks after the complaining tenant filed their own complaint to the tribunal.
Why six notices? At the most you would do two and the third should be a final warning or eviction notice.
The tribunal decision noted that Kāinga Ora had offered to move the complainant to another home multiple times, instead of applying to the tribunal to have the unruly tenants evicted sooner.
“I am very confident in concluding that any reasonable landlord would have applied to the Tenancy Tribunal well before the landlord did in this case,” Woodhouse said in his decision.
Would be nice to have the state being a “reasonable landlord”
Minister of Housing Chris Bishop said Kāinga Ora needed to be a better landlord.
“There are many communities around the country that are sick to their back teeth of disruptive Kāinga Ora tenants.”
Great to have a Minister call it straight. I hope heads will roll at board level if things don’t improve.
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.
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