When the ceiling of an upstairs bedroom in Dean Kahukiwa’s public housing unit in Sydney collapsed during a storm in February, the father of three immediately started calling for help.
“I was watching it as it was happening, first the water started to come in through the window. Then it sort of spread across the ceiling towards the light and all of a sudden a crack started to appear. Then ‘whooosh’ it went,” he told the Guardian.
“I was in tears mate. I’m on the phone to housing, trying to get them to do something, they said we can send someone in 48 hours. I had to get the SES to come out and they did an inspection but they said it was too unsafe to go on the roof because no one had fixed the gutters.”
A month later, nothing had changed. The room was covered in mould and debris from the storm, and mushrooms had begun to grow in the skirting boards of the bedroom.
Yet Kahukiwa, a quietly spoken man, continued to live in the unit with his three boys, their belongings stacked up in the living room while the upstairs room remained uninhabitable.
“I just feel embarrassed about it,” he said. “I know it’s not our fault but it does make me feel really down.”
When the Guardian contacted the NSW Land and Housing Corporation last week, a spokesperson said it had been aware of the damage since 9 February and had planned to complete the work by this week.
Kahukiwa was relieved on Monday when the repair work began, but he disputed the department’s claim that it had “commenced” repairs only five days after the storm.
He said that before the damage occurred, he had repeatedly requested the gutters of the townhouse to be repaired, without luck. Two weeks after the storm, the gutters were repaired but the collapsed ceiling remained, he said.
While housing – through rental and home ownership reforms – has dominated much of the looming NSW state election, the state of public housing has been largely absent from the agenda.
But there have long been concerns about the state of the sector. New data released a few days before Christmas last year revealed there are now more than 50,000 people on the waiting list for public housing.
Last week the Guardian reported new figures from the Community Housing Industry Association which revealed an 8% increase in the social housing waitlist in Sydney’s western suburbs, and 15% across the state.
Previous reviews also paint a dire picture of the state’s failure to maintain an ageing public housing portfolio.
In 2021, a parliamentary inquiry found the “current state of the housing portfolio and the lack of adequate resources to keep it in a suitable condition for occupation”.
“The combination of an ageing housing stock and increasing demand for public housing has created a situation where the resources available cannot meet the needs of a vulnerable population,” the inquiry’s chair, Lake Macquarie independent MP Greg Piper said at the time.
Maryanne Stuart, Labor’s candidate in the seat of Heathcote where Kahukiwa lives, came across his property while door-knocking in the lead up to the election. She was moved to tears when she realised he was still living in the property and had not been moved to crisis accommodation.
“I do not believe that if someone from the department had actually come and looked at the property that Dean would still have been living there,” she said.
“He was calling them daily, trying to get in contact, and no one had been out to see his home.”
In its statement, the department spokesperson said Kahukiwa had remained in the property “as the two other bedrooms at the home are unaffected”.
“The NSW Government and LAHC take all tenant concerns about safety within our properties very seriously,” the spokesperson said.
Key to the 2021 inquiry’s concern was the split between public housing maintenance and tenancy services in NSW, which was “seen to be counterproductive by adding further layers of complexity and creating additional confusion for residents”.
Labor has promised to address that problem by creating a new agency, Homes NSW, which would oversee the sector. It has also said it would require more new housing developments to include a proportion of social housing, while saying it would walk back the planned sale of some existing properties.
Ned Cooke, from the Inner Sydney Tenants Advice and Advocacy Service at the Redfern Legal Centre, said stories like Kahukiwa’s were “extremely common”.
“It’s a major issue and has been for a long time, and typically it’s the most major repairs where it’s really affecting the liveability of the housing are when it’s the hardest to get any action,” he said.
While the issues with public housing maintenance were “multi-faceted”, the lack of coordination between the tenancy and maintenance services created a level of “accepted inefficiency” within the system.
“It really is unacceptable and I suppose the devil is in the detail [on Labor’s policy] but anything which can remove that inconsistency or blockages in the system will help,” he said.
