For years, disabled people in New Zealand have been told that accessible housing is a priority.
That Universal design standards exist.
Ministerial answers in the House cite modification numbers.
Community housing providers report annually to a regulator.
On paper, there is a system for Accessible housing.
Disability Politics can now reveal from information recieved from the Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions, and Transport (MCERT) — the successor to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (MHUD) following its closure on 1 July 2026 — that this system does not, in any meaningful sense, exist…. yet.
The Ministry does not know how accessible New Zealand’s community housing stock is.
And, It has never known!!
And until this year, it never meaningfully asked for that information!!
What the request asked for, and what came back
Disability Politics (DP) requested the total number of dwellings in each registered Community Housing Provider’s portfolio, broken down by accessibility classification, across every territorial authority in the country.
DP asked for that same breakdown cross-tabulated against dwelling type and bedroom count.
And for any accessibility data the Ministry held on Kāinga Ora’s stock, And for any aggregate reporting or ministerial briefing built on this data.
DP also asked how the Ministry quality-assures the accessibility field it collects.
The response, released on 7 August 2026 under reference MCERT2026-010065, confirms the following:
First, the Ministry held no aggregated dataset of housing accessibility at the time of the request.
And, It had to build one specifically to answer the request, collating raw returns across sixty-two providers because no such collated national picture existed.
So Disability Politics can report that New Zealand now has a national aggregated dataset of housing accessibility because of this request.
Second, there are no performance standards requiring Community Housing Providers to report on accessibility at all.
The 2025/26 regulatory year — the one just gone — was the first year providers were even asked the question, and it was asked only to give the Community Housing Regulatory Authority:
“a more complete picture of community housing sector capability,”
… not because providers are being held to any accessibility standard.
Third, the data is entirely self-reported, with no quality assurance process.
The Ministry does not check whether providers have physically assessed a dwelling before recording its classification, and providers may leave the field blank.
There is, in other words, no way to know whether the figures reflect reality or simply reflect who bothered to check a box on a form.
Fourth, my request for any aggregate national reporting, ministerial briefing, or Treasury- facing analysis built on this data was refused under section 18(g)(i) of the Act — the Ministry says the information is not held, by it or by anyone else.
No one, it appears, has ever pulled this data together to ask what it means.
Fifth, my request for the proportion of dwellings nationally recorded as “Unknown” was also refused under the same section — not because the Ministry doesn’t have the underlying data, but because it has never calculated the figure.
DP has calculated it, from the raw data the Ministry did release and here is what the numbers actually show
The dataset the Ministry released covers 19,629 dwellings across 62 registered Community Housing Providers — the current, most complete national picture of accessibility in the community housing sector.
It does not include Kāinga Ora, whose vastly larger stock was transferred to a separate request under section 14 of the Act.
Of those 19,629 dwellings:
58.5% are recorded as “Unknown/unspecified.”
The Ministry does not know, and by its own account has no means of finding out, whether well over half of the community housing sector’s homes are accessible in any way.
33.1% are recorded as “Not modified.”
5.9% are “Partially modified.”
Just 2.3% are “Fully modified.”
When we strip away the unknowns and look only at what has actually been assessed: looking only at the dwellings with a recorded status, fewer than one in fifteen are fully accessible, to any degree, either partially or fully.
The picture varies sharply by city,
Wellington — the seat of the Ministry that produced this data — has 2,125 registered dwellings, of which 86.3% are unknown and just 0.1% are fully modified.
Porirua’s is worse still: 94.9% unknown.
Christchurch, at 3,257 dwellings, sits at 77.2% unknown.
Auckland, the largest portfolio at 8,232 dwellings, has the most complete reporting of the major centres at “only” 51.9% unknown — but 41.6% of what has been assessed is confirmed as “not modified”, meaning that the total of fully accessible stock in Christchurch is effectively a rounding error.
Rotorua is the exception that proves the rule: only 9.9% unknown, the best reporting completeness of any major centre. however, 88.4%, of Rotorua’s stock is confirmed “not modified.”
Where providers have actually done the work of assessing their portfolios, the accessible housing crisis becomes visible rather than obscured.
Why this matters
This is not a technical footnote about data collection methodology.
This is the difference between a policy problem the government can see and one it cannot, but ultimatly its about building enough houses for our population to live in with dignity both today and into the future.
You cannot plan for the housing needs of disabled New Zealanders today and everyone aged over 65 tomorrow and into the future, if you cannot target capital investment based upon a pipeline of investment, and that investment has to start with a baseline measurement of existing housing stock.
At the moment we can’t report on the state or quality of our public housing assets from an Accessibility perspective.
Until that is possible its impossible to hold Kāinga Ora and community housing providers to account for accessibility outcomes, if the responsible Ministry does not know — and has built no mechanism to find out — what its own regulated sector’s housing stock actually looks like.
This gap sits alongside findings I have previously reported from Kāinga Ora and Te Toi Mahana OIA / LOGOIMA responses:
Agencies hold small pieces of accessibility data but no coherent, quality-assured, nationally aggregated picture of it.
To adopt the old adage, you cannot manage what you don’t measure, And at the moment Officials are not measuring Housing Accessibility, therefore Ministers cannot be held to account for outcomes that no one is tracking.
When Parliamentary written questions ask how many Kāinga Ora homes meet universal design standards, or how many partially accessible homes providers have delivered, the answers are given are in fragments — because fragments are all that exist.
New Zealand ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008. The Committee’s Concluding Observations have repeatedly called on New Zealand to ensure accessible housing is available and adequately monitored.
Seventeen years on, the agency responsible for housing policy has confirmed, in writing, that it cannot tell the public how Accessible the community housing sector is, it has no standard requiring providers to make it Accessible, and does not check the one piece of self-reported data it does collect.
What should happen next?
The Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions, and Transport should be required to set a performance standard for Accessibility reporting by registered Community Housing Providers, with a mandatory, verified — not self-certified — Accessibility field.
The Community Housing Regulatory Authority should be resourced to spot-check reported classifications against physical assessment, in the same way it enforces other performance standards.
And the aggregate national picture that does not currently exist should be built, published annually, and reported to the Housing Minister and to Treasury as a matter of course — not withheld from a request because no one has ever thought to compile it.
I have lodged this data with the Ombudsman’s office for context alongside related requests and will continue tracking the responses from Kāinga Ora on the transferred portion of this request. The full dataset, and the Ministry’s response letter, are available on request.
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