Category: Housing

A piece of Christchurch that the property market abandoned after the earthquakes has become home to people abandoned by the property market. The old Bexley neighbourhood was largely cleared after liquefaction made conventional residential development impossible. Houses disappeared, streets remained and the land sat waiting for whatever official purpose would eventually be found for it. Into that gap came people who needed somewhere to live. They arrived in cars, vans, buses and tents. Some were working. Some were retired. Some had children. They did what people have always done when the institutions around them fail, they improvised. A community grew. Earlier this year about 40 people were living around Wetlands Grove; reports now put the number at more than 100. Christchurch City Council has told them they must leave by 28 February 2027 because the area is intended for wetland development. There is an obvious temptation to treat this as a story about homelessness, council planning or the difficulties of finding somewhere suitable for a group of people living in vehicles. It is all of those things, but underneath them sits a much simpler question. What is land for? The answer given by our economic system is that land belongs to whoever has legal title to it, and its legitimate use is determined by owners, planners and institutions. The people actually living on it remain secondary. They may sleep there, look after one another there and make the place usable through their own effort, but none of that gives them any meaningful claim to it. Their relationship to the place exists only for as long as the legal owner tolerates it. That distinction between ownership and use lies close to the heart of the anarchist criticism of private property.

The people living at Wetlands Grove have already demonstrated something that governments spend enormous amounts of money trying unsuccessfully to manufacture through policy documents – people can organise social life themselves. Earlier reporting described an informal community growing around buses, vans and cars, with neighbours helping one another through winter and a communal tent being established as shared space. One man who had been sleeping in a small tent was helped into an old car when the cold became severe. Council rubbish collection and portable toilets made conditions more bearable, but the social organisation of the place came largely from the people living there. Moko, one of the informal figures in the community, was working full-time on an on-call road crew. Others were pensioners. Ngawai Timu described abandoning a $470-a-week rental because she felt she was spending her life paying somebody else’s mortgage. Polly Stewart was surviving on the pension in a bus. Families were living there too, including a woman with several children living from a bus. These details matter because homelessness is constantly spoken about as though it were primarily a pathology of homeless people. Addiction, mental illness, poor budgeting, antisocial behaviour and bad choices are summoned as explanations because those explanations leave the social order intact. They allow us to imagine that housed people possess some quality that homeless people lack. Wetlands Grove makes that story harder to sustain. When people with jobs cannot obtain housing, when pensioners decide rent leaves too little for ordinary life, and when families find themselves competing with dozens of others for a private rental, the problem is no longer plausibly located inside the individual. There are certainly people living rough who struggle with addiction or serious psychological distress. There are also people who get up and go to work from a tent. A housing system that cannot reliably house either has failed at the most elementary level.

New Zealand has become remarkably skilled at describing this failure without challenging the institution producing it. We talk about housing supply, affordability pressures and housing need. We devise eligibility categories and waiting lists. We construct administrative pathways through emergency housing, transitional housing, community housing and social housing. Every stage acquires its own assessments and rules. The language becomes more sophisticated while people remain without homes. At the 2023 Census, Statistics New Zealand estimated that at least 112,496 people were experiencing severe housing deprivation, around 2.3 percent of the usually resident population. The estimate itself is likely conservative because hundreds of thousands of people could not be conclusively classified. As of 30 June 2026 there were still 19,002 applicants on the Housing Register, meaning people already assessed as eligible for social housing and waiting to be matched with somewhere suitable. Behind every administrative term is the same physical requirement humans have had for as long as there have been humans – somewhere safe to sleep. Capitalism has managed to turn that requirement into an investment class. A house can simultaneously be a place necessary for human survival and an asset expected to generate rent, capital gain or both. When those purposes conflict, ownership wins. Ngawai Timu’s remark about paying somebody else’s mortgage is therefore more politically perceptive than most discussion of the housing crisis. Rent appears to be payment for accommodation, but economically it transfers part of a tenant’s income to somebody who controls access to land and housing. The tenant works. The landlord owns. Money moves from the former to the latter because the legal structure of property permits one person to charge another for access to something they need in order to live.

Anarcho-communists have always distinguished personal possession from property used to extract income or control the lives of others. Nobody is proposing that a person should lose the bed they sleep in or the home they actually occupy. The argument concerns the social power created when houses and land can be accumulated and withheld by people who do not use them, then rented back to those who do. Wetlands Grove shows the opposite principle operating almost accidentally. The residents occupy land because they need it. Their claim arises from use. They have created relationships there and made forms of mutual aid possible there. Under capitalist property law none of this ultimately counts for much. Christchurch City Council owns the land and has another use planned for it, so the residents must go. There is an environmental complication here that should not be ducked. The council intends to restore tidal wetlands in an area profoundly altered by earthquake damage, and wetland restoration is worthwhile. The answer cannot be to demand that ecological restoration be sacrificed so people can remain indefinitely on land without proper sanitation or infrastructure. The revealing part is that we are being offered a choice between the wetland and the people living there. A wealthy society ought to be capable of restoring an ecosystem while guaranteeing every person displaced by that work somewhere secure to live. If it cannot do both, the problem is political. The ecological project becomes another deadline imposed upon people who already have almost no control over the circumstances of their lives.

This is where the word “choice” begins doing dubious work. Some Wetlands Grove residents have said they prefer living there. Ngawai Timu spoke about the freedom of the place. Polly Stewart compared the prospect of living in a Kāinga Ora apartment unfavourably with her life in the bus. Those views should be taken seriously. People should be allowed far greater freedom over how they live than either the private housing market or the bureaucratic state usually permits. Cooperative settlements, tiny homes, communal land, papakāinga, vehicle-based living and other arrangements should not automatically be treated as deviant because they fail to resemble a suburban house with a mortgage. Yet freedom requires genuine alternatives. Choosing a bus because conventional rent would consume most of your pension is a peculiar form of freedom. Choosing a tent because every rental viewing has another 30 applicants is not the same as freely deciding to camp. Capitalism routinely transforms constrained decisions into evidence of personal preference. A worker is “free” to accept an employer’s conditions because technically nobody forces them to take that particular job. A tenant is “free” to accept the rent because another landlord might charge the same amount down the road. A homeless person is “free” to reject temporary accommodation that is unsuitable for their life. Formal choice conceals the distribution of power underneath it.

The state cannot easily solve this because the state is one of the institutions maintaining the property relations that produced the problem. Governments can build public housing, and they should. They can regulate landlords, fund Housing First, provide emergency accommodation and prevent evictions. Those measures can keep people alive and they matter enormously to anyone who needs them. An anarchist criticism of the state does not require indifference to whether somebody has a warm house tonight. We should support measures that materially improve people’s lives while refusing to mistake them for the resolution of the underlying conflict. The current Kāinga Ora programme illustrates the contradiction. The Government says around 900 state houses a year may be sold as part of stock renewal while new construction and redevelopment will prevent the total national stock from declining. From an administrative viewpoint this is portfolio management. From the viewpoint of someone sleeping in a vehicle while houses are treated as units in a managed asset base, the language feels rather different. Housing remains something allocated through institutions according to scarcity. The scarcity itself becomes normal.

Wetlands Grove also unsettles another comfortable assumption that order flows downward from authority. The community appeared before the council had a plan for it. People found the place, negotiated relationships with one another and established ways of getting by. That does not mean it is an anarchist commune, nor should people living in poverty be turned into political mascots. There will be arguments there, difficult personalities and all the problems found anywhere humans live together. Anarchism does not depend on romanticising people. What matters is that social organisation emerged without a landlord designing it or an agency assigning everyone a place. The residents discovered one another through a shared material predicament and began constructing a community around it. Their circumstances are harsh, but the impulse underneath what they have made is recognisable. Mutual aid begins with the discovery that another person’s survival is connected with your own.

The bitter part is that once people create something workable in the gaps left by capitalism, authority often arrives to remind them that the gap was never theirs. Squatted buildings are emptied while people sleep outside. Informal settlements are cleared because they breach regulations written for a world in which everyone supposedly has conventional housing. People living in vehicles are moved from one parking area to another. Public space is made hostile to anyone attempting to remain there too long. None of this creates housing. It manages visibility. The homeless person disappears from one street and appears in another, allowing the first location to be recorded as a successful intervention. Wetlands Grove could easily follow the same pattern. On 1 March 2027 the council may possess an empty road ready for ecological work while the people who lived there are scattered across cars, spare rooms, emergency accommodation and some other piece of land where they will eventually be noticed again. If that happens, nothing will have been solved. Geography will have changed.

The anarcho-communist response begins somewhere else. Housing should be organised around use rather than profit. Land should cease to function primarily as a commodity. Housing that people need should not be held from them because somebody else possesses a stronger legal claim backed by money. Communities should have the power and resources to shape the places where they live, with decisions made by those affected rather than handed down through property ownership or distant administration. That does not supply a magic blueprint for Wetlands Grove. It does tell us what a decent outcome would look like. Nobody currently living there should be made homeless by its closure. People who want conventional housing should receive secure, permanent homes before they are required to leave. Those who prefer communal or vehicle-based living should be involved in establishing another legal, serviced site rather than being forced back into a model of housing they have rejected. Families should not have to demonstrate months or years of escalating desperation before they become sufficiently urgent for assistance. A pensioner should be able to rent without sacrificing the income needed to live. A full-time worker should not finish a shift and return to a tent.

Perhaps the most revealing sentence spoken at Wetlands Grove came from a resident who rejected the description of the people there as homeless. “We’re refugees in our own country,” he said. The phrase is uncomfortable, but it captures something important about dispossession. These are people surrounded by houses, roads, supermarkets and all the accumulated wealth of a developed society, yet somehow unable to secure a small portion of it in which to live. Nothing has physically disappeared. New Zealand has timber, builders and land. We have engineers and electricians. We know how to construct houses. What stands between the person and the home is a network of ownership, prices, debt and permissions that we have been taught to regard as natural.

There is nothing natural about it. Property is a social arrangement. Rent is a social arrangement. The rule that one person may own several houses while another sleeps in a car is a social arrangement. These things continue because institutions enforce them and because we have lived with them long enough to mistake familiarity for inevitability. Wetlands Grove briefly exposes the arrangement by turning it upside down. People found unused land and used it. They made homes where there were no houses. They built a community in the remains of one destroyed by an earthquake. Now the official city has returned with plans for the land and the authority to move them on. The question facing Christchurch is therefore larger than what should happen to a hundred people beside an old road in Bexley. It is whether the right to exclude people from land should continue to carry more weight than the human need for somewhere to live. Until we are prepared to answer that question, New Zealand will keep treating homelessness downstream. We will fund programmes, adjust waiting lists and move people from one temporary arrangement to another while leaving the machinery producing housing insecurity largely untouched. Then we will act surprised when another Wetlands Grove appears.

It will appear. It has to. People need somewhere to go.

An elderly woman in Gisborne recently told the local paper that she had hoped life might become a little easier. Instead, she fears it is about to become more expensive. Solo parents interviewed about proposed social housing rent reforms expressed similar concerns. They were not discussing abstract questions of planning law or economic theory. They were worried about whether they would be able to afford rent, power and other essentials if the changes led to higher housing costs. Their concerns cut through the technical language that usually dominates housing debates and reveal something much more important. For most working-class people, housing is not an investment strategy or a policy problem. It is the question of whether they can remain in their community, keep a roof over their heads and live with a degree of security and dignity.

Not just in social housing but also in private people are feeling the pinch. Politicians tend to discuss housing through the language of markets. We hear about supply constraints, incentives, development opportunities and investment. The people most affected by housing policy rarely speak in those terms. A pensioner living on a fixed income knows that if rent rises, something else must give way. The heater may stay off for longer during winter. Food shopping becomes more restricted. Medical appointments might be postponed. A solo parent faces similar calculations. There is no spare money waiting in reserve and no simple way to absorb rising costs. Every increase has consequences. The concerns expressed by Gisborne residents are therefore not the product of misunderstanding or irrational fear. They arise from lived experience. They reflect decades of watching housing become steadily less affordable while politicians repeatedly promise that the next reform will solve the problem.

What makes these concerns significant is that they point towards the underlying reality of New Zealand’s housing system. The housing crisis is often presented as a complicated puzzle requiring technical expertise to understand. In reality, the central contradiction is remarkably simple. Most people need housing because they require shelter. A smaller group derives income and wealth from owning housing. A tenant looks at a house and sees somewhere to live. A landlord sees rental income. An investor sees an appreciating asset. A bank sees mortgage repayments. These competing interests shape every housing debate in the country. The problem is not that nobody understands how to provide homes. The problem is that housing has been transformed into a commodity whose primary purpose is increasingly to generate profit.

This transformation did not occur by accident. Over the past four decades successive governments have encouraged the treatment of housing as an investment vehicle. Rising property prices became a measure of economic success. Tax settings, lending practices and public policy all helped create conditions where property ownership became one of the most effective ways to accumulate wealth. For those fortunate enough to own multiple properties, this arrangement has been extremely rewarding. For tenants, young workers and low-income families, it has produced a very different reality. House prices have risen far faster than wages, rents consume an increasing proportion of household income and secure housing has become more difficult to obtain. The benefits and burdens of the system have been distributed unevenly, with those who own property accumulating wealth while those who do not are expected to shoulder the costs.

The situation is particularly acute in regional communities such as Gisborne. Political discussion often focuses on Auckland’s housing market because of its size and visibility, but many provincial towns face similar pressures while possessing fewer resources to absorb them. Wages are often lower, employment opportunities more limited and public services less accessible. Under these conditions, even relatively small increases in housing costs can have significant consequences. An elderly tenant in Gisborne may have far less capacity to absorb a rent increase than a professional homeowner in one of Auckland’s wealthier suburbs. Yet housing reforms are frequently debated as though they affect everyone equally. They do not. The costs of economic change are usually borne by those with the least power and the fewest resources.

For Māori communities these issues cannot be separated from the longer history of colonisation and land dispossession. Contemporary housing inequalities did not emerge in a historical vacuum. The colonisation of Aotearoa involved the large-scale transfer of land into private ownership through confiscation, coercion and unequal legal arrangements. Communities that had previously enjoyed collective relationships to land were progressively alienated from it. The consequences remain visible today in patterns of wealth, home ownership and housing insecurity. When Māori are disproportionately represented among those experiencing overcrowding, poor housing conditions and homelessness, this is not an unfortunate coincidence. It reflects historical processes that continue to shape the present. Any serious discussion of housing in New Zealand must therefore confront the reality that the housing crisis rests upon foundations laid long before the current generation was born.

Yet despite these structural realities, responsibility for housing insecurity is frequently pushed onto individuals. People struggling with rising rents are encouraged to examine their budgeting habits, employment choices or personal decisions. Politicians and commentators often frame housing hardship as a matter of individual responsibility rather than collective failure. This narrative serves an important ideological function because it obscures the role played by property relations themselves. A pensioner worried about rent increases is not struggling because of poor financial management. A young worker locked out of home ownership is not failing because they lack discipline. The problem is that access to a basic human necessity has been subordinated to the pursuit of profit. When housing is treated primarily as a commodity, affordability problems are not an unfortunate side effect. They are a predictable outcome.

The fears expressed by elderly people and solo parents in Gisborne should therefore be understood as part of a much broader social problem. Their concerns reveal the gap between the way housing is discussed by policymakers and the way it is experienced by ordinary people. For those at the top of society, housing represents wealth, investment opportunities and financial security. For those at the bottom, it increasingly represents anxiety, uncertainty and struggle. This divide lies at the heart of New Zealand’s housing crisis. It is not primarily a crisis of supply or planning regulations. It is a crisis produced by a system that treats homes as assets before it treats them as places for human beings to live.

As long as housing remains organised around profit, stories like the one emerging from Gisborne will continue to appear. There will always be another reform, another policy announcement and another promise that the market will eventually deliver affordable housing. Yet the experiences of tenants, pensioners and low-income families suggest a different conclusion. Housing insecurity is not the result of the system malfunctioning. It is the result of the system functioning exactly as intended. A society that allows wealth to be extracted from one of life’s most basic necessities will inevitably produce winners and losers. The elderly woman worrying about her future and the solo parent wondering how to make ends meet are not unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise successful model. They are among its most predictable outcomes.

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.