Category: Housing

Scoop ran a piece on homelessness and basic income in Aotearoa by Basic Income New Zealand, which does something important – it acknowledges that poverty and housing insecurity are not marginal issues but central political questions. The mere fact that guaranteed income schemes are being discussed in relation to homelessness signals how deep the crisis has become. But from an anarcho-communist perspective, it is not enough to debate how much money the state should distribute. We have to ask why, in one of the wealthiest countries per capita in the world, so many people do not have a secure place to live in the first place.

Homelessness in Aotearoa is routinely framed as a failure of income support, a gap in the safety net, or an unfortunate by-product of economic turbulence. That framing is too polite. Homelessness is not a glitch in capitalism, it is one of its regular outputs. We live in a society where housing is treated first and foremost as a commodity, something to be bought, sold, speculated on, leveraged, and accumulated. Shelter is not organised around need but around profit. Land is hoarded, and rents are pushed as high as the market will bear. Under those conditions, it is not surprising that tens of thousands of people experience insecure housing, are shunted into motels at public expense, or end up sleeping rough. The surprise would be if they did not.

The attraction of a basic income in this context is obvious. If rents are extortionate and wages are stagnant, give people more money. If benefits are punitive and conditional, replace them with something universal and unconditional. Parties such as the Green Party and The Opportunity Party have floated versions of guaranteed minimum income schemes as a humane response to poverty and precarity. The idea that every person should have a material floor below which they cannot fall has moral force. It speaks to dignity. It gestures toward the principle that survival should not depend on pleasing a case manager or satisfying bureaucratic criteria. In a country where benefit sanctions and administrative cruelty have pushed people further into crisis, the appeal of unconditional income is understandable.

Yet we have to be clear about the limits of this approach. A basic income, introduced within the existing framework of capitalist property relations, does not de-commodify housing. It does not socialise land. It does not remove rental housing from the speculative market. It does not end the power of landlords to set prices according to what they can extract. Instead, it injects cash into a system that continues to operate according to profit. In such a system, there is every reason to expect that a significant portion of that cash will be absorbed by rising rents and costs. Without structural transformation, income supports risk becoming subsidies for property owners.

There is a deeper issue at stake. Capitalism does not simply generate poverty by accident, it requires insecurity as a disciplining mechanism. The threat of unemployment, debt, and eviction keeps workers compliant. When education is financed through loans, graduates begin their working lives already indebted. When housing is scarce and expensive, people are less likely to resist exploitative work for fear of losing their home. Homelessness, at the extreme end, is a warning written in human terms – fail to secure your place in the labour market and this is what awaits you. A basic income might blunt that threat at the margins, but if it leaves intact the wage system and the commodification of essentials, the underlying logic persists.

In Aotearoa, we have seen how state policy oscillates between paternalistic support and outright punishment. Benefit levels rise slightly, then are eroded by inflation or offset by cuts elsewhere. Administrative hurdles are lowered in one term of government and raised in the next. At the same time, proposals emerge to empower police to issue “move-on” orders to rough sleepers, effectively criminalising the visibility of poverty. The contradiction is stark, the state claims concern about homelessness while expanding its capacity to remove homeless people from sight. Under capitalism, social policy and policing often work hand in hand, one managing poverty, the other containing it.

Those who experience homelessness are not a random cross-section of the population. Women, children, disabled people and Māori are disproportionately affected. That fact alone should dispel the myth that homelessness is about individual failure. It is about structural inequality layered across race, gender and class. The legacy of colonisation in Aotearoa, the alienation of Māori land, and the concentration of property ownership in settler and corporate hands form part of the story. So too does the transformation of housing into an asset class that delivers untaxed capital gains to investors while locking others out. A cash transfer cannot undo that history.

This does not mean that anarcho-communists should dismiss basic income debates as irrelevant. On the contrary, any measure that immediately reduces hardship deserves serious consideration. An unconditional income could weaken the most degrading aspects of the welfare system and give people breathing space. It could reduce the power of employers to coerce workers into unsafe or underpaid jobs. It could create room for care work, community activity and political organising. These are not trivial gains. But we must resist the temptation to treat them as endpoints rather than footholds.

The fundamental problem is that capitalism organises life around exchange value rather than use value. Housing exists to generate rent, not simply to shelter. Land appreciates because it is scarce and privately owned, not because its value derives from community life. As long as these premises remain intact, homelessness will reappear in new forms. The system can tolerate a certain level of misery, but it cannot tolerate a challenge to property relations. That is why even the most generous reforms are carefully calibrated to avoid undermining the sanctity of private ownership.

A genuinely transformative approach to homelessness would start from the principle that housing must be de-commodified. That means large-scale public and community, controlled housing construction, not as a residual safety net but as a dominant form. It means taking land out of speculation and placing it under democratic stewardship. It means supporting hapū-led and community-led housing initiatives that reflect tino rangatiratanga and collective control rather than market dependency. It means confronting the political power of developers, landlords and banks rather than courting them.

Such a programme cannot be delivered solely through parliamentary manoeuvres. The history of social change in this country, from union rights to Māori land struggles, shows that gains are won through collective action. Tenant organising, occupations of vacant buildings, and solidarity networks that redistribute resources outside the market are not romantic gestures, they are practical challenges to the logic that treats shelter as a commodity. When communities occupy empty houses while families sleep in cars, they expose the absurdity of a system that protects property over people.

Worker power is central to this picture. Homelessness is tied not only to housing costs but to wages and job security. An economy built on precarious contracts, gig work and underemployment produces constant risk of eviction. Strengthening unions, building worker co-operatives, and demanding wages that reflect real living costs are essential components of any serious anti-homelessness strategy. Without shifting power in the workplace, income supports risk becoming permanent patches on a leaking boat.

There is also a cultural battle to be fought. Capitalist ideology frames independence as individual self-reliance and dependence as personal failure. A basic income can be sold within that framework as a tool to help individuals “get back on their feet,” but the deeper truth is that none of us survive alone. Housing, like healthcare and education, is a collective good. It depends on shared labour, shared infrastructure and shared land. Reclaiming that understanding is part of dismantling the moral narrative that justifies homelessness.

The Scoop article gestures toward compassion, and compassion matters. But compassion without structural analysis can slide into technocracy. It asks how to administer poverty more efficiently rather than how to abolish it. Anarcho-communism insists that homelessness is not inevitable, not natural, and not the result of insufficient managerial finesse. It is the outcome of deliberate choices about ownership, profit and power. Those choices can be reversed, but not without confronting entrenched interests.

In the end, the debate over basic income in Aotearoa is a test of political imagination. Are we prepared to see housing as a right rooted in collective ownership and democratic control? Or will we settle for cash transfers that leave the architecture of inequality untouched? The answer will determine whether homelessness continues to haunt our cities as a managed crisis or recedes as a relic of a system we chose to leave behind.

If we are serious about ending homelessness, we must move beyond tinkering. We must challenge the commodification of land, the wage system that disciplines through scarcity, and the punitive apparatus that criminalises poverty. We must build networks of solidarity that meet needs directly while organising for deeper transformation. A basic income may be part of that struggle, but it cannot be its horizon. The horizon must be a society in which no one’s right to shelter depends on their capacity to pay, and where collective care replaces market logic as the organising principle of life.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, youth justice policy is often dominated by sensational headlines, alarmist rhetoric, and calls for punitive crackdowns. Yet a recent study from Otago University cuts through the noise and offers a radically simple insight: when young people have access to safe, stable housing, they are far less likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system. This finding, though unsurprising to anyone who understands the roots of social harm, exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of government approaches to both crime and housing.

The study analysed national-level data across multiple housing interventions and justice outcomes. It found that youth living in emergency housing, such as motels or shelters, saw no significant reduction in offending. But those placed in public housing—secure, long-term homes—were significantly less likely to be charged with offences over time. Three years after entering public housing, youth offending dropped by 11.7%, and court charges by 10.9%. Similarly, those receiving the Accommodation Supplement saw an 8.6% reduction in charges and a 13% drop in alleged offending.

In short: if you want to stop crime, give people homes. If you want to build a safer society, invest in community wellbeing, not punishment.

Housing Deprivation Is Structural Violence

What the state likes to call “youth offending” is often nothing more than the logical result of poverty, dislocation, and systemic neglect. It is not a coincidence that Māori and Pasifika youth, those most systematically excluded from stable housing, are overrepresented in our youth justice system. It is not a coincidence that areas with underfunded public infrastructure, precarious employment, and unaffordable housing are also the areas with higher rates of criminalisation.

The dominant narrative, however, frames these young people as the problem – unruly, disrespectful, in need of discipline. From this position, the solution can only be control: boot camps, ankle bracelets, curfews, youth prisons. But this narrative is not only wrong, it is actively harmful. It diverts attention away from the social and economic structures that create conditions of desperation in the first place.

Dr Chang Yu, lead author of the study, put it bluntly: “Cutting public housing supply threatens to reverse the progress achieved.” And yet this is precisely what the current government is doing. While touting a tough-on-crime stance, it is simultaneously slashing funding to Kāinga Ora, gutting public housing development, and restricting access to emergency accommodation. The contradiction is glaring – the same politicians who say they want to stop youth crime are dismantling the very social systems that keep young people out of the courts.

Crime Is a Failure of Capitalism, Not Morality

From an anarcho-communist perspective, this contradiction is no accident, it is a feature of the system. Capitalism produces inequality, and then punishes the poor for the conditions it has created. Housing, under capitalism, is not treated as a human right, but as a commodity to be bought, sold, speculated on, and hoarded for profit. Landlords profit from scarcity; property developers are incentivised to keep housing expensive; banks encourage debt servitude in the form of thirty-year mortgages.

In this environment, public housing becomes a threat. It challenges the idea that homes must be earned through market competition. It represents a form of collectivised provision, however flawed or bureaucratic, that sits uneasily alongside neoliberal dogma. That is why public housing is constantly under attack: not because it is ineffective, but because it works. Because it represents a crack in the logic of capitalist accumulation.

If we follow the logic of the Otago study to its conclusion, we are left with a radical proposition – crime prevention doesn’t begin with more police, more prisons, or more punishment. It begins with material conditions. It begins with food, housing, education, and care. In other words, it begins with communism, not in the abstract, but in the everyday sense of shared resources, mutual support, and collective flourishing.

The Punitive State Is a Dead End

Despite the clear evidence, the state doubles down on carceral logic. In the past year alone, the government has reintroduced the “Three Strikes” legislation, launched a Ram Raid Bill targeting youth with harsher sentences, and announced plans for military-style youth academies – boot camps in all but name.

These moves are not only ineffective; they are actively counterproductive. Boot camps do not reduce reoffending. What they do is isolate, traumatise, and entrench state power over the most marginalised. What they do is funnel youth into a pipeline of surveillance, punishment, and lifelong exclusion. All under the pretence of “restoring discipline.”

But discipline is not what young people need. They need stability. They need to know where they’re sleeping next week. They need food in the fridge, books in their bag, parents who aren’t being evicted or working three jobs just to cover the rent. They need a system that sees them as people, not problems to be fixed, or threats to be neutralised.

Imagining Housing as a Commons

If we are serious about building a future free from cycles of harm, we must go far beyond tinkering at the edges of state policy. We must decommodify housing entirely. Homes should not be sources of profit—they should be embedded in community control, operated through co-operatives, trusts, and iwi-led organisations accountable to those who live there.

This is not utopian. Across the world, examples exist – tenant-run housing collectives, land trusts that resist gentrification, squats transformed into thriving community centres. In Aotearoa, these ideas are not new, they align with traditions of papakāinga, of whānau-based living, of collectivised land use long suppressed by colonial and capitalist interests.

Imagine a housing system where land was not sold to developers but returned to hapū and iwi. Where tenants had real decision-making power over their homes and neighbourhoods. Where housing was integrated with education, health, gardens, and community care. Where “crime prevention” meant supporting people before the crisis hits, not punishing them after the fact.

This is the foundation of a non-carceral, post-capitalist society. A society rooted in tino rangatiratanga and class solidarity. A society that puts relationships before profit, and justice before punishment.

Organising for Real Change

To reach this future, we must organise. Tenants must unionise. Public housing residents must demand accountability and democratic governance. Land occupations, squats, and mutual aid projects must be supported, defended, and multiplied. We must call out the government’s lies when they slash housing budgets while claiming to protect the public.

We must push for a politics that links housing with prison abolition, colonial reparations, and ecological justice. Because these struggles are not separate, they are part of the same terrain.

We are told that justice looks like punishment. But justice, real justice, looks like housing. It looks like the absence of handcuffs, and the presence of home-cooked meals. It looks like young people painting murals, not waiting for court dates. It looks like warm, dry bedrooms, not boot camps. And if we want that world, we will have to build it together.