Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has promised to get officials to look into the case of a family that's been stuck living in cramped emergency accommodation for three months.
Susan Mackay, mother of four and pregnant with a fifth, has been turned down by landlords and property managers more than 30 times.
Her partner makes $65,000 - a decent income - and she works as a contractor in between looking after the kids, but hasn't had any luck.
The family share a single room, pushing the beds together so they all have somewhere to sleep.
"I suffer claustrophobia so some days it really feels like the walls are closing in," she told The AM Show on Friday.
Mackay's family is not alone. More than 14,500 clients were put in emergency housing last year, and its getting worse - more than 6700 were housed in the first three months of this year alone, data released to Newshub last week showed.
"We've always had fundamentally an opposition to the fact we're even having to use these in the first place," Ardern told The AM Show on Monday, blaming the lack of public housing available when they took office in 2017.
"Our standing start wasn't great because our stock was lower when we came into Government."
Between 2009 and 2017, under the National-led Government, the number of state houses fell from 65,324 to 63,209 - despite housing spokesperson Jacqui Dean's bizarre false claim they actually built 30,000.
Ardern said they're building new homes "as fast as we can", but in the meantime, emergency accommodation in motels was necessary.
"One of the things that we did during COVID of course was to make sure people who were chronically homeless were housed. It demonstrated that we can do that - we can get everyone into shelter... No one wants to be in hotels, but nor do we want people in cars."
Ardern said she'd get officials to look into Mackay's case.
"It's our job as politicians to understand and do what we can on cases. What we can do is, I can certainly ask the minister of housing and the associate minister to look into the case... No trouble.
"We try and move families out of those situations as quickly as we can. It's not good for kids."
New figures from realestate.co.nz out Monday show asking prices for homes are at all-time highs, with Kiwis coming home to avoid the COVID-19 pandemic overseas and a lack of supply available.
