Car in Square ‘home’ for family

Press, 21 November 1981, Page 6

Car in Square ‘home’ for family

Three children lay nestled with their mother in a car in Cathedral Square late last evening because, according to the woman, they were homeless.

The woman, who declined to be named, said that she had been sleeping in the car which was still on hire-pur-chase, since Tuesday. She had had her children under care with a church organisation for two nights, but on Tuesday , night the children had slept with her in the car. The children are aged 15 months, three years and five, and. one is asthmatic. The house she had been renting had been sold from under her six months ago, and she had not been able to get another since because she was a solo parent with three children.

She had been staying with various people since then, but had had to leave her latest place because it had been sold and the woman renting it had had to leave. She had been “dementing” the staff at the Housing Corporation in her persistent attempts to get rental housing for herself and the children.

Yesterday she had been told that she was on the

urgent list, but would have to wait until a house became vacant. Her children had been fretting for her, and in desperation she had taken them from care and had parked in the Square, not as a protest but because it was regularly patrolled by the police and was a safer place for her family, she said. Mr C. E. Consedine, assistant manager (housing) for the corporation’s Christchurch branch, came to talk to the woman and persuaded her to go to the City Mission. At first the woman de-

dined, saying that as long as she had a roof over her head and a bed for her children she would not get State rental housing. However, she agreed to go to the City Mission after Mr Consedine said that she should visit him on Monday at his office. . Mr Consedine said that he could not get into his office to look at her file because the doors had been changed after a recent brawl had damaged the old ones, and he did not have a new key. He said that there were probably 50 people on the corporation’s urgent housing list.