A long way to go home
The first time I saw someone sleeping rough was in London. A bearded man slept on cardboard in a doorway of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. It shocked me, because I had never encountered homelessness in New Zealand in the early 1990s. Thirty years later in December 2024, approximately 112,496 people, or 2.3% were severely housing deprived. Nearly 5000 people are now living without shelter, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in 2025. In Dunedin during…