When You Don’t Have a Place to Call Home’: Measuring Severe Housing Deprivation/Homelessness in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 2023 Census

Rosemary Goodyear, Statistics New Zealand
Miranda Devlin, Statistics New Zealand

This paper presents the latest homelessness estimates for Aotearoa/New Zealand, building on previous research by University of Otago researchers Drs Kate Amore, Helen Viggers, and Distinguished Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman. In 2009, Stats NZ defined homelessness as: a living situation where people with no other options to acquire safe and secure housing are: without shelter; in temporary accommodation; sharing accommodation with a household; or living in uninhabitable housing (Stats NZ 2009, updated 2015). When estimates were first produced based on the 2006 Census, only the first three aspects of homelessness could be measured. Stats NZ has worked closely with researchers to enable the extension of these estimates. In 2018 Census, a question was added on access to basic amenities to measure the fourth dimension of homelessness – uninhabitable housing. On Census night 2018, 102,123 people (2.2 percent) were identified as severely housing deprived. For the 2023 Census, Stats NZ introduced an emergency and transitional housing indicator to better measure people in temporary housing situations. Additionally, new questions on gender, sexual identity and intersex were included in the census for the first time. This paper will present the 2023 homelessness estimates, including homelessness rates by ethnicity and for New Zealand’s rainbow population.

Keywords: Census data, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination, Children, Adolescents, and Youth

See extended abstract.