The true State of Accessible Housing in Wellington

On 25 May 2026 I lodged a request under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 with Wellington City Council, seeking records relating to the accessibility of the housing stock managed by Te Toi Mahana, the Community Housing Provider established by the Council in 2023 to manage its former City Housing portfolio.

The Council remains the freehold owner of that stock and retains a contractual oversight and funding relationship with Te Toi Mahana. My request was made on that basis.

The Council was required to respond by 23 June 2026. On 23 June, the Council extended the response under section 14(1)(b) of the Act, citing consultation requirements, without specifying what consultation was needed or with whom.

I lodged a complaint with the Office of the Ombudsman the same day regarding the vagueness of those grounds. The substantive response arrived on 22 July 2026, the final day of the extended timeframe, accompanied by two documents.

This piece sets out each element of my original request, the response the Council provided against it, and what the pattern of response and non-response reveals about the state of accessibility oversight in Wellington’s social housing.

Here are the questions I asked and the responses the Council gave.

First: all records relating to the accessibility of Te Toi Mahana’s housing stock for tenants with disabilities, from 1 January 2023 to the date of the request.

The Council’s response to this limb consisted of a single email thread from March 2026, in which the Ngaio Crofton Downs Residents Association wrote to the Mayor, three councillors, and Te Toi Mahana raising concerns about a new development at 2 Thatcher Crescent. Accessibility was one of several matters the Residents Association raised, alongside density, privacy, communal space, and safety design.

Within that thread, an independent architect’s assessment commissioned by the Residents Association found that ground-floor units at the development identified as “accessible” did not appear to include accessible bathrooms, and that accessibility had been treated as unit-specific rather than considered across the whole site.

Te Toi Mahana’s reply, from its Manager Partnerships and Community, defended the development on the basis of planning compliance and build standards generally, and did not address the accessible bathroom finding or the whole-of-site point at all.

No other document was provided against this limb. No accessibility audit, no assessment commissioned by the Council or Te Toi Mahana, and no internal record of the Council’s own monitoring of accessibility across the portfolio was produced.

Second: any requests, complaints, or formal communications from Te Toi Mahana tenants, or forwarded by Te Toi Mahana, seeking accessibility improvements to individual properties, including ramps, handrails, doorway widening, or accessible bathroom facilities.

Nothing was provided against this limb. No tenant request, complaint, or communication concerning accessibility modifications was disclosed.

Third: any data, reporting, or tracking documents held by the Council, including those received from Te Toi Mahana under contractual reporting or performance monitoring arrangements, recording the number, nature, status, or outcome of accessibility modification requests made by tenants.

Nothing was provided against this limb. No tracking data, reporting document, or performance monitoring record concerning accessibility modification requests was disclosed.

Fourth: any assessments, audits, or reports commissioned or received by the Council concerning the proportion of Te Toi Mahana’s housing stock meeting accessibility standards, including standards under the New Zealand Building Code, the New Zealand Disability Strategy, or the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Nothing was provided against this limb. The only document bearing any resemblance to an accessibility assessment was the Residents Association’s own architect’s comparison of the Thatcher Crescent development against the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development’s Public Housing Design Guidance, which was not commissioned by the Council and was supplied to the Council rather than produced by it. No Council-commissioned or Council-held audit of accessibility standards across the portfolio was disclosed.

Fifth: any internal or external communications, briefings to elected members, or committee reports relating to the adequacy of Te Toi Mahana’s housing stock to meet the needs of disabled tenants.

The only document touching this limb is again the Thatcher Crescent thread, which was copied to the Mayor and three councillors. That correspondence was a reactive response to a residents’ group complaint rather than a proactive briefing on accessibility adequacy, and it did not originate from the Council.

No committee report, internal briefing, or elected member communication addressing the adequacy of the stock for disabled tenants generally was disclosed.

A second document, an email exchange from February 2023 between the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and a Council officer, together with a Bell Gully legal due diligence memorandum from December 2022 relating to the lease transfer to Te Toi Mahana, was also provided.

Neither document contains any content relating to accessibility. They concern portfolio statistics, disposal properties, and Healthy Homes compliance at a general level, and appear to have been included as background to the transfer of City Housing to Te Toi Mahana rather than as a response to any part of my request.

The scale of the problem the Council will not document

The Council’s inability, or unwillingness, to produce a single accessibility audit of its own housing stock is thrown into much sharper relief when set against the figures that do exist, obtained separately by myself from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development under the Official Information Act (reference HUD2026-009880).

That data covers Te Toi Mahana’s full managed portfolio of 1,606 dwellings across Wellington City, reported by the organisation itself for the 2025/2026 regulatory monitoring round.

Of those 1,606 dwellings, the number classified by the Ministry as “fully modified” — built or adapted to be accessible to people of a wide range of abilities at any stage of life — is zero. Not a low proportion. Zero.

A further 88 dwellings, or 5.5 percent of the portfolio, are classified as “partially modified”, meaning a single, tenant-specific adjustment such as a grab rail or a ramp has been fitted. The remaining 1,518 dwellings, 94.5 percent of the portfolio, carry no accessibility modifications at all.

This is the context the Council’s LGOIMA response should be read against.

A Council that owns a housing portfolio in which not a single dwelling is fully accessible, and in which fewer than one in twenty has received even a partial accessibility adjustment, has produced no audit of that fact, no tracking of tenant requests for modification, and no assessment of the portfolio against the Building Code, the New Zealand Disability Strategy, or the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The absence of Council-held records is not a neutral gap.

According to WCC’s own reporting, approximately 37,770 people living in Wellington are disabled. This is 1 in 6 Wellingtonians and that is consistent with national data collection based upon on Stats NZ’s 2023 Household Disability Survey finding that 17 percent of people in New Zealand households are disabled.

Now, not all of those 37,770 will be living in Council housing, but a large proportion do.

Against that population, a housing portfolio with zero fully accessible dwellings, and only 5% modified dwellings is not an oversight the Council can plausibly say it has no visibility of.

Either it does have visibility and has chosen not to disclose it, or it genuinely does not monitor accessibility across an asset base it owns and is responsible for.

Either way, neither position is defendable

The Minister of Housing’s response follows the same pattern

On 24 June 2026, I wrote directly to the Minister of Housing, Hon Chris Bishop, raising these concerns at a national level.

His reply, dated under ministerial reference HCB26-0770 and arriving some weeks late with an apology for the delay, confirms that the Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport, formerly the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, would respond to my related information request separately.

On the substance, the Minister’s letter contains no figures at all. It does not state how many social housing dwellings in Wellington, or for that matter, nationally, are fully accessible.

It does not engage with, or appear to be aware of, the finding already obtained from his own former Ministry that not a single dwelling in Te Toi Mahana’s 1,606-property Wellington portfolio is classified as fully modified for accessibility.

In place of figures, the letter offers generalities. The Minister writes that Kāinga Ora:

“incorporates practical universal design features into new developments where these can be delivered cost-effectively and continues to build fully accessible homes where site conditions and housing types allow”,

… and that Community Housing Providers such as Te Toi Mahana:

“play an important role in delivering housing that can meet a range of accessibility needs.” Neither statement is supported by a number, a target, or a timeframe. The letter points to the Housing Investment Strategy, the Housing Investment Plan 2025, and a broader review of the social housing system intended

… to “refocus social housing more tightly” around households facing “severe and persistent access barriers”,

… none of which are accompanied by any accessibility-specific commitment or metric.

The Minister states that his expectation is that, “over time”,

… government makes

“greater use of high-quality data and evidence to better understand housing need”.

Set against the figures already obtained directly from his former Ministry, this is an admission rather than a reassurance: on the Government’s own evidence, that high-quality data and evidence either does not yet exist in usable form or has not informed outcomes, because the outcome it should have informed, the accessible housing stock of Wellington’s largest social housing provider, stands at zero fully modified dwellings.

The letter also cites, as a New Zealand Disability Strategy action, work on

“improving data matching between disabled people and social housing properties with appropriate accessible features that meet their needs.”

Data matching connects existing accessible homes to the disabled people who need them; it does not create accessible homes where none exist. Where the fully accessible stock of a portfolio is zero, improving the matching process has nothing to match tenants to.

Presenting this as progress on accessible housing, rather than as a measure that depends entirely on supply the Government has not yet delivered, mischaracterises what the action can achieve.

The pattern, then, is consistent at every level I have looked into:

• Te Toi Mahana, as the provider, did not engage with a documented finding that its own new-build units lack accessible bathrooms.

• The Council, as owner and steward of the asset, holds no audit, no tracking data, and no elected-member briefing on accessibility across the portfolio it owns.

• And the Minister responsible for housing policy nationally, when written to directly, responded with recognition of the problem in principle but no data, no target, and no acknowledgment of the specific figures his own former Ministry has already disclosed.

What this reveals

Three of the five limbs of my request returned no responsive documents at all.

The two documents that were provided are not, in substance, accessibility records: one is a reactive email exchange in which accessibility was a secondary issue raised by a residents’ group rather than the Council, and the other predates Te Toi Mahana’s existence and has no bearing on accessibility whatsoever.

The Council’s covering letter did not identify a statutory ground under the Act for withholding any information, nor did it state that no further information is held. Under sections 17 and 22 of the Act, a local authority responding to a request must either provide the information, specify the ground on which it is withheld, or state that the information is not held. None of the three limbs that returned nothing were addressed on any of these bases.

Taken on its own terms, this response tells its own story.

If the Council genuinely holds no tenant complaints or requests for accessibility modifications across a portfolio serving more than 3,000 tenants,

If it holds no tracking data on the outcome of any such requests, and no audit of the proportion of its stock meeting Building Code, Disability Strategy, or United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities standards,

That is itself the finding: a Council that owns and retains stewardship responsibility for this housing stock that it is not monitoring, and has no visibility of its accessibility performance.

If such records do exist and have simply not been located or disclosed, that raises separate and equally serious questions about the adequacy of the search undertaken and the Council’s compliance with its obligations under the Act.

The one substantive piece of evidence that did emerge, incidentally, is troubling regardless of which explanation applies.

An independent architect’s assessment, put in front of the Mayor and elected members in March 2026, identified that units in a current Te Toi Mahana development marketed as accessible may lack accessible bathrooms and that accessibility had not been considered on a whole-of-site basis.

Te Toi Mahana’s written response to that finding did not engage with it. If this is representative of how accessibility concerns are handled when they do surface, then the absence of any systematic Council-held accessibility data is not a gap in record-keeping alone; it reflects an absence of the underlying oversight that the records would otherwise evidence.

The Council retains freehold ownership of this stock and, on its own account to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in 2023, considered the portfolio’s condition to remain relevant to it notwithstanding the transfer of management to Te Toi Mahana.

Asset ownership carries responsibility. A Council that cannot produce a single audit of accessibility standards, a single piece of tracking data on tenant modification requests, or a single accessibility-specific briefing to its elected members across more than three years, for a housing provider it created and continues to own the assets of, has a case to answer about whether it is exercising that responsibility at all.

I have raised the scope of this response, and the absence of stated withholding grounds for the limbs that returned nothing with the Council and with the Office of the Ombudsman.

I have also written to the Minister of Housing directly. At every level of the system, the answer is the same absence:

• the provider does not engage with the deficiencies its own residents identify,

• the owner does not audit or track the asset it holds, and;

• the Minister does not yet have, or does not yet offer, the data that would show whether any of this is being addressed.

After completing this piece I was so concerned about the Accessibility of Public housing in Wellington that I have put in requests for other areas around the country and over the coming weeks I plan to publish a series that highlights the state of Accessibility of our Public housing.