Posted: August 23, 2025

Some thoughts on the homeless

He taonga rongonui te aroha ki te tangata

Yeah it's not cool walking or cycling under Peel St bridge, or using the Peel St library entrance, or hoping to enjoy your chicken-salt hot chips outside Golden Crust.

The homeless make up less than 1/2 a percent of our population, but the numbers are growing. For various reasons, our homeless aren't managing to have the sort of life we might expect.

Before rolling our eyes, we should accept that we have a system that will always chew up and spit out a small number at the bottom. Just like we accept a system that sees a small number at the very top accrue the bulk of the wealth.

So accepting our people experience extreme conditions at both ends, we can either moan about them and wish they were decent — the homeless, I mean — or we can support the kinds of samaritans providing them with some basic amenity, some dignity.

“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” —Matthew 25:40