When compliance officer Gina Woolston first met Fred* in January this year, he was lying on a bench in Aotea Square under a blanket. As she always does when she sees someone new sleeping rough, she said hello and asked if he needed help with food or housing.
“He didn’t want to engage, so I let him be,” says Gina, who is the council’s dedicated compliance officer for homelessness.
“But I came back and tried again the next morning, and the day after that, for about 10 days straight until one Saturday when I saw him outside the library reading a book. He said he remembered me, and that’s when I was finally able to sit down on the ground with him and hear his story.”Gina learned Fred was a cancer patient going through chemotherapy. He’d recently lost his flat in west Auckland as he couldn’t afford rent on top of the transport to and from the hospital for treatments. He was usually too tired and sore after the chemotherapy to travel anyway, so had been coming straight from the hospital to sleeping rough in the city.
“He told me he was in pain, and that all he wanted was a warm bed to lie down in,” Gina says.
After that, things moved quickly. Together with the council’s Regional Partnerships Lead for Homelessness, Gina referred Fred on to an outreach provider who placed him in emergency accommodation the following day. He was able to stay in a motel near the hospital for the remainder of his treatments and has since returned to his flat.
Empathy over enforcement
Working with outreach agencies like Kāhui Tū Kaha, Auckland City Mission and Lifewise NZ, the council’s compliance team have assisted around 25 rough sleepers from the city centre into housing in the past five months.
That success can be linked to a range of recent safety initiatives in the area, including a mayoral-funded increase in compliance wardens patrolling the central city.
It also reflects a shift in the compliance team’s approach to dealing with rough sleepers, where empathy is prioritised over enforcement, says Compliance Manager Adrian Wilson.
“Instead of focusing on addressing issues associated with rough sleepers through compliance action, staff are taking a more compassionate approach and looking to find longer-term solutions for these individuals.”As part of this approach, Gina has been working closely with new compliance wardens in the city centre, introducing staff to street whānau and teaching them how to engage effectively.
“Everyone has a story, that’s what I teach our compliance wardens when they come on board,” she says. “You work an eight-hour day, you have 15-20 minutes to sit there and listen to their story because that's when you're going to pick up key information to give them the help that they need.”
A balancing act
Adrian admits they must walk a “tightrope” in compliance, with some groups calling for more enforcement and tighter bylaw controls around rough sleeping and begging – two separate issues which are often incorrectly conflated – and others who would like to see more lenience due to the vulnerabilities of those involved.
“I think we tread that tightrope well,” he says.
An example is their approach to dealing with encampments, which he says the council will address and clear as a priority, “but again, it’s done with compassion.”
Recently, compliance staff disestablished an encampment on Quay St, but put significant effort into engaging outreach support before clearing the site. Three rough sleepers from that group agreed to take up accommodation when the site was cleared, and seven more went into housing when a new encampment was set up and the following month and cleared again.
Cr Josephine Bartley, Chair of the Regulatory and Safety Committee, says any other approach would be a band-aid fix only.
“Taking the time to engage with the individuals and arrange outreach support does take longer than just marching in and clearing everything away, but it’s more effective in the long run. Unless our staff are addressing the cause of an encampment – which is homelessness – they would just be moving the problem from one place to the next.”
Light in the dark
Once they are successfully referred on to outreach partners, Gina often loses touch with the people she has helped to take that first step off the streets. Occasionally, however, she will get a message like the one she received from Fred the day after he was placed into emergency housing:
Dear Gina. The outreach team met with me last night and drove me to a motel, so I'm very grateful to you for finally having a shower and laying down in a bed for a restful sleep.It was nearly a week on the street, but the city had my back thanks to you and Kāhui. But you made it happen Gina. You listened. It felt like a stranger reaching down into a dark place where I was, grabbing my arm and saying, I've got you, brother.
While the council’s compliance team are just one of many groups working to address homelessness in Auckland, Adrian says messages like this reinforce the important role his team can play.
“There are always going to be people who, for any number of reasons, will experience homelessness for a period of their lives. There is no silver bullet solution, but I do know that when it comes to how we interact with our street whānau, compassion trumps compliance every time.”
*Not his real name.
