Mobile Home Association
The Mobile Home Association was established to speak for NZ manufacturers of mobile homes, but also to speak for the voiceless – the struggling class whose housing alternatives are living in cars, tents, garages, sheds and overcrowded conditions. Until about 2017, it was an invisible industry serving the hidden homeless. But then something changed.
Public servants in Wellington and district councils began to make life very difficult for this underclass. Indeed, a reading of the consultation documents (link see p 47) generated by Ministry for the Environment makes it clear when they redefined the meaning of building, they were targeting the people specifically named in the Human Rights Act 1993 Part 21(1) as subject to discrimination.
- (f) race: rural Māori and urban Pasifika
- (h) disability: disabled persons needing limited family supervision
- (i) age: older persons needing semi-autonomous family supervision
- (i) age: school leavers force to leave their community due to housing costs
- (l) family status: solo parents (mostly mothers) facing hidden homelessness
- (b)(v) dissolved relationship: older divorced women lacking resources
By effect, if not by intent, these people are being denied their human right to adequate housing because they cannot afford the $5,000 minimum to hire a consultant, nor the deposits required for the council to consider granting consent. In effect, these costs are no different than Jim Crow Poll Taxes. Of course, the public officials would be appalled to be told they are racist, ageist and elitist in their actions, but they are so because they have blinkers on – never asking what classes of people live in mobile homes.