Auckland Mayor Phil Goff has announced the city's first region-wide homeless count to tackle the crisis.
Led by Housing First Auckland, 'Ira Mata, Ira Tangata: Auckland's Homeless Count' will take place on Monday 17 September and include a survey and tally of those living without shelter.
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"Our goal is to end homelessness, not just manage it," Mr Goff said on Thursday.
"To do that we need robust data informing policy and services. This count will significantly improve our understanding of the shape and scale of homelessness in Auckland."
On the night of the count, volunteers will speak with people who are living without shelter on the street or in cars to gather data on the size and nature of chronic homelessness across Auckland.
Fiona Hamilton, project manager for Housing First Auckland, says this count is extremely important to tackling the problem.
"Measuring the extent of homelessness is essential to ending it. When data is used to inform service delivery and national policy-making, we can have the most significant impact," she says.
"Counts are a well-established approach internationally for understanding unsheltered homelessness and an important step to ending unsheltered homelessness in a community."
The count will cover the Auckland region from Wellsford in the north to Waiuku in the south, Piha in the west and the Hunua Ranges in the east.
The survey will cost $375,000. Funding will come out of the $500,000 Auckland Council gives Housing First Auckland each year.
Approximately 750 volunteers are needed for the count and Phil Goff says he encourages Aucklanders to get involved.
"In the first 12 months of the Housing First programme we have housed 420 homeless adults and children," he says.
"That is a great start, but this survey will spell out more clearly the scale of the problem we have to address and the extra efforts we as a community must make to deal with homelessness."
Newshub.
