More than 10,000 properties owned by the Government's state housing agency are on flood-prone land and it has plans to build more.
Kāinga Ora says all of its houses are built with climate resilience in mind but some are concerned they are delivering the bare minimum.
When the Auckland floods hit, Kāinga Ora resident, Natasha Keating’s Grey Lynn state home was inundated.
“Maybe four to five weeks into it, I got a call from Kāinga Ora, I thought they were coming to fix everything up but they were saying no, we're going to re-house you, and so that was really upsetting,” she said.
It wasn't just her property that was damaged, more than 650 other Kāinga Ora homes were affected.
In Auckland’s Māngere, about 19 properties are set to be demolished after being hit hard by the January floods.
It comes after the housing agency commissioned a report on the impacts of climate change on its homes. Of its planned investments, it found almost one in six were at risk of flooding from rain or rising rivers.
“Developing in a flood prone area is not a problem per se, in fact what it does is it allows us to design to make sure we mitigate for the flooding impact,” says Kāinga Ora’s general manager of urban development and delivery Mark Fraser.
Māngere housing advocate Jo Latif says some of the houses were lifted off their foundations while families were still inside trying to escape.
Latif is part of a group advocating for Māngere’s state housing residents.
“I've heard from Kāinga Ora that they have done the minimum council requirements for their new houses and frankly, you know, in Māngere, we are sick of the bare minimum."
Fraser says Kāinga Ora has been making sure that any decisions it’s made on housing since the middle of last year, with any business case for housing, includes climate resilience.
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