Our ‘gender-blind’ social housing system is failing women

June 20 | The Post

Victoria Crockford is project director at Coalition to End Women's Homelessness.

OPINION: Scrutiny Week is one of those political calendar moments that often flies under the radar - largely reserved for the politico-tragics.

But this past week, it has found its way into the mainstream conversation through Labour MP Kieran McAnulty’s insistent questioning of Associate Minister for Housing Tama Potaka on reports the Ministry of Social Development had denied emergency housing to women attempting to escape domestic violence because they had “contributed to their own homelessness”.

Minister Potaka was unequivocal in his response that the decision to leave a violent household was not a “contributing factor” that could be applied to deny an emergency housing application.

At the Coalition to End Women’s Homelessness, we applaud the minister taking a strong stand, but we’re also clear that the complete absence of a cohesive response to women’s homelessness is a driving factor behind how this story came about in the first place.

It is a symptom of the gender-blind approach we take to providing housing support. The MSD staff reportedly denying women fleeing violence were applying the logic of a policy directive without any framework that takes gender differences into account, and in doing so they exposed exactly how flawed that logic is. And a one-off memo is not going to resolve it.

Research released by the Coalition to End Women's Homelessness in December 2024, Ngā Ara ki te Kāinga: Understanding Barriers and Solutions to Women's Homelessness in Aotearoa New Zealand, revealed confronting truths about the reality facing 57,000 women experiencing severe housing deprivation - or just over half of all those women living without a roof over their head, on someone’s couch, or in an uninhabitable living situation.

We can argue the definition of homelessness, as this and previous governments have done, but we can’t argue with some of the gendered drivers of it, of which domestic violence is one.

Women are 2.4 times more likely than men to experience intimate partner violence, and many women who took part in our 2024 research shared heartbreaking stories of how violent and abusive relationships shattered their ability to find and keep safe, stable homes.

Picture this: you've been living in fear, caught in relentless cycles of violence that leave you fearful for your life. Then your partner damages or destroys your rental home, and suddenly you're not just a survivor of violence - you're homeless too. Evicted through no fault of your own, blamed for destruction you’re now on the hook for financially and emotionally.

Yet, housing policies and interventions remain stubbornly gender-blind. They’re built around generic contracting models rather than the realities of women’s lives.

One of the other glaring failures of our gender-blind housing system is the severe toll it takes on single mothers. Severely housing-deprived women are far more likely than men to have children – and more likely than other women to be raising four or more.

In 2018, 17% of severely housing-deprived women were receiving sole parent support, compared to just 2% of men - a pattern that remained unchanged in 2023. Overall, 20% of housing-deprived women receive the sole parent benefit, compared with only 5% in the general population.

The consequences of these statistics for our children are significant. With women more often the primary caregivers, housing instability becomes a direct path into the material hardship that successive child poverty reports have investigated.

The Government says women and children are a housing priority and the Social Investment Agency has been mandated to focus on the first 2000 days of life. Taking these stated commitments at their word, we call on them to start by following up relentlessly to ensure that no women and no children fleeing domestic violence are being turned away. Then, we call on them to apply that same gendered logic more broadly.

We need to ask what other different “symptoms” show up differently for women and how we might create and fund a response that will treat those symptoms so that intergenerational cycles of housing precarity and poverty are broken.

We need to ask whether housing providers are adequately funded to support pregnant women in their care and whether women have other, different health needs from men that are not addressed in our policies or funding.

We need to ask whether there are enough accessible houses for older women who are living longer and with less money than men.

We need to ask if the experience of rural women is the same as that of urban women, and whether there are different interventions needed to ensure they aren’t seeing a spike in homelessness following natural disasters such as that which happened in Wairoa post-Cyclone Gabrielle.

We need to ask why Māori women are over one-third of all women experiencing homelessness and what we need to do to address that.

None of us wants to hear one more heartbreaking story about a woman being turned away from receiving emergency housing support because she has “contributed to her own homelessness”. But the housing system is failing women, and on that we must be loud and clear.

With that clarity, we need to take action. We need to redesign an approach that recognises differences and targets investment where it’s needed most.