Breaking away from the traditional model of sentencing, it sets up the offender with a plan to help them with addiction and finds them a place to live.
The aim is to get the homeless off the streets and back into society. So far, the two-year pilot has been lauded for its achievements.
The scheme runs in Auckland and has helped deal with minor crimes among the homeless, seeing a decrease in nights in prison and repeat crimes.
HOMELESS Kiwis in Queensland have been flown back to NZ as they have no support from the Australian system.
Agencies said New Zealanders often found themselves in dire straits because of a lack of government support, family breakdowns and unemployment.
Business leaders in Washington, DC and around the US and Canada will sleep rough in support of homeless teens.
“It’s our duty, as a community, to help and respond to suffering young people on the streets. If we don’t, they will never stand a chance. But, if we as business and community leaders take the time to understand where they are coming from — figuratively and literally, by sleeping on their streets — we’ll take the first small but important step toward ending the scourge of homelessness,” says Daniel Brannen, Executive Director of Covenant House, Washington.
The Downtown Community Ministry in Wellington, New Zealand has noticed an increase in homeless people begging just to make ends meet.
‘‘These people really, generally, are struggling. For poor people … when you have got much less disposable income, it’s much easier to get into a spiralling debt situation,’’ Ms McIntyre said.
‘‘Is [the recession] the reason — I don’t know. [But] I think that the poorest of the poor in our society are getting poorer.’’
The Dominion Post reported on the trend recently and noted that the Wellington City Council is aware of the problem. Question is, what action are they going to take?
Homeless advocates in NZ are asking the Government to really commit to finding workable solutions for the escalating problem of homelessness.
Housing minister Phil Heatley says, though, that it is doing more than enough.
“Our commitment is huge. We are upgrading our stock social housing, we are upgrading our community housing and we’re looking at accommodation supplement and income-related rents,” Heatley said.
Canadian studies show it can cost upwards of $120,000 per year in health, emergency and justice system services to support a chronically homeless person. It costs less than $43,000 per year to provide permanent housing.
Auckland’s new super-city council wants homeless people off the streets by 2020.
The new council’s homeless plan will, among other things, seek to raise public awareness of homelessness, find permanent accommodation for vulnerable people living in temporary accommodation and aim to “empower vulnerable groups”.
“Those who sleep rough are at the sharp end of poverty and are the most visible to the public,” the plan reads.
But homeless people need permanent solutions, not just to be made invisible.
The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports that, based on a national push to provide stable housing for the homeless and then address obstacles to employment, 180/180 leaders plan to provide housing for 180 people by July 2014 and turn their lives around 180 degrees. The programme aims to help those with longterm medical problems and who have been chronically homeless for some time.
With no new source of money for Santa Cruz County’s 180/180 project, the campaign has brought together leaders from the Santa Cruz Homeless Services Center, the county’s Homeless Persons Health Project and three nonprofits: the Santa Cruz Community Counseling Center, Santa Cruz AIDS project, and the behavioral health agency Front St. Inc.
The first 10 people have now been homed.
Costa Mesa’s Mayor Eric Bever calls charities that help the homeless nuisances, as they attract “undesirable” out of town residents, but the charities involved say he is misinformed. They claim to help a lot of Costa Mesa residents, especially elderly, who have fallen on hard times.
In a letter to the Editor of the Guardian in the UK Bob Baker, Director of The Simon Community, which has worked with the poor and homeless in the UK since 1963, criticises a new UK policy which criminalises squatting, although over a million properties remain empty in the face of a housing crisis.
It is difficult to grasp the thinking behind the fierce application of this iniquitous law. Clearly it can only swell both the numbers of people experiencing homelessness and the population of our already overcrowded prisons. In addition, the consequences of handing out criminal records to people whose behaviour up until this month has been completely outside the criminal law, will blight lives and destroy the reputations of potentially thousands of ordinary people. Despite attempts to demonise those who take empty houses back into use, the truth is that the majority of squatters are responsible people who, in a time of realhousing crisis, squat as a last ditch attempt to prevent homelessness.
The most common causes of death are alcohol and drug addiction – accounting for a third of all deaths, according to the study commissioned by homeless charity Crisis.
They are also three and a half times more likely to commit suicide than members of the general public.
jean eltringham 