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Building a block of council-funded pensioner flats announced with the aim of easing Dannevirke’s housing shortage has taken double the amount of time the council expected.

In late 2021, Tararua District Council announced six new flats were being built in Swinburn Street.

According to a council agenda in mid-2022, the flats were expected to have been finished by July 2022, a build time of nine months.

Eighteen months on and the flats are largely constructed, but are not ready for tenants to move in.

Tararua District Mayor Tracey Collis said there were initially delays in developing the site, and the current delays were due to waiting for a contractor to complete work on the units.

The new units are not quite finished. Photo / Leanne Warr

There were 19 people on the waiting list for pensioner housing in the district, with seven just in Dannevirke, but Collis was confident the list would be much smaller once tenants were able to move into the new units.

The delays in the new units form part of a wider problem with a shortage of housing within Tararua.

Property Brokers branch manager Kerry Sutherland said rental demand was extremely strong in the district, with a constant waitlist of tenants seeking adequate accommodation.

 “Landlords are being very selective around who gets houses due to there being such a strong demand.”

He said the demand was also reflected in the market rent, with figures from February this year showing that rents had increased by 17.5 per cent compared to the same time last year, and a “staggering 37 per cent growth over a two-year period”.

Wairarapa MP Kieran McAnulty said the issue reflected the fact that there were simply “not enough houses”.

“So when demand is high, rent is able to be charged at a much higher rate.

“When there are many more houses, then rent doesn’t become so competitive like that.”

Wairarapa MP Kieran McAnulty has been working to get Kāinga Ora back in the Tararua District. Photo / Mark Mitchell

McAnulty has been strongly advocating for more social housing in the district, as there was no Kāinga Ora presence.

“My focus is to bring Kāinga Ora back to the region because I’m firm in the view that if we can have social housing at adequate levels in the district, that frees up the private rental market.”

He said Kāinga Ora had purchased sites in the district, and the Government-owned social housing provider had announced last year that they intended to build nine new houses in Woodville.

McAnulty said there were ongoing conversations with developers across the district.

“I’m actually quite confident that there’ll be some pretty good news coming in that area in the not-too-distant future.”

He said there were a lot of Government initiatives on the way, but in on-the-ground terms, the high demand was exactly why he’d made moves to get Kāinga Ora back, because it was a major concern “and has been for a long time”.

While Trust House also provided social housing and had done since 1999, they hadn’t expanded their footprint in Dannevirke, McAnulty said.

“The difficult thing was to get Kāinga Ora to expand into the Tararua District. Now that they’re there, they’re actively looking for sites.”

He was convinced that the solution to the issue was having a strong social housing presence in the region.

“There are people that are renting in the private market that would qualify for social housing if it were available.”

McAnulty said those who were struggling with accommodation costs to contact Work and Income and see if they qualified for an accommodation supplement.