Tourists push locals out of Waiheke Island

A recent article from a BBC News Australian correspondent profiled a “frail 71-year-old” woman in Perth who has been homeless and living in her car for several months, with no hope of finding a warm and safe home. Since her landlord evicted her (legally) to rent her small apartment for holiday stays, she can’t find an affordable place to rent, and a Western Australia government report estimates that 40 percent of renters on low incomes are now at risk of homelessness.

For longstanding Waiheke residents, this situation is not new. Over the past 10 years, Waiheke locals have been forced increasingly to live in cars, damp caravans, or share overcrowded houses, just to remain where they’ve lived for decades. And increasingly it is the island’s low-income over-65s who are affected, with some resorting to advertising on the streets.

How overtourism causes a housing crisis

Homelessness on Waiheke is the highest per capita in the Auckland region. And it is not due to poverty or unemployment; it is a direct result of overtourism, as Waiheke homes have been bought up by absentee owners seeking capital gain and rented for short-stay.

Waiheke’s Gulf News reported that Trade Me rental housing listings for Waiheke in early April included only nine properties seeking long-term tenants, while “Airbnb groans with 698 Waiheke listings”. It highlighted the harm to the island community, “whether it is a tradie paying a mortgage, a solo mum who rents out the room downstairs, or a chef who sleeps in a car. Waiheke’s housing crisis affects us all.”

The problem is exacerbated in summers when tourism sector employers snap up available rental housing for hospitality and vineyard workers.

This relentless trend has been raised with Auckland Council for more than six years, by the Waiheke Local Board, the Waiheke Community Housing Trust, in three-yearly tourism impacts monitoring research by Waiheke community research organisation Project Forever Waiheke (PFW), and even by the council’s own research teams.

In PFW’s 2021 resident survey, one third of residents reported trouble finding long-term accommodation. In January 2024, more than one third of residents reported losing friends, family or co-workers from Waiheke in the past year alone, specifically due to the lack of long-term accommodation.

Most concerning to locals is the insidious erosion of Waiheke community capacity, cohesiveness and resilience, when so many long-term locals – people with stable jobs on the island – are forced to move away and be displaced by ‘ghost’ houses.

Waiheke’s predicament is a well-recognised phenomenon that is playing out in tourism hotspots like Greece, Italy, France, Portugal and Japan. In Spain locals are resorting to shaming short-stay landlords, and local governments have been limiting the number of short-term rentals and increasing taxes on tourists to prevent home communities from complete collapse due to the displacement of locals.

To date, the only significant initiatives to address Waiheke homelessness have come from a local community housing trust and a church group. Residents (up to 10 percent) are converting garages and even garden sheds into accommodation to keep family and friends on the island.

Overtourism seriously disrupts locals’ everyday lives

Auckland Council’s tourism strategy – Destination AKL 2025 – acknowledges the “carrying capacity limits of … destinations such as Waiheke Island …” and “growing concerns that tourism is impacting on Aucklanders’ liveability [in] pinch points such as Waiheke Island”.

But none of the council’s tourism or housing strategy supports ‘liveability’ for the tiny Waiheke Island community of just 9700 trying to cope with incrementally vast numbers of tourists – reported by council as being 1.3 million annually in 2016/2017, and now over 900,000 annually post-pandemic. Daily visitor arrivals are often four times the island’s population, making major congestion and competition for services inevitable and everyday lives increasingly unliveable, in a community that relies on rainwater, essential ferry travel to people’s jobs and medical appointments, limited food suppliers, and decreasing numbers of locals willing to undertake the unpaid kaitiakitanga of Waiheke’s natural environment.

PFW’s tourism impacts research since 2018 has repeatedly identified pervasive damage to the Waiheke community from unrelenting tourism growth – not only a housing crisis, but major disruption from tourism to locals’ everyday lives, from ferry congestion, noise pollution, irresponsible visitor parking, littering, overcrowding in recreation areas, and increasingly, as in overseas hotspots, rude and drunk behaviour by tourists, as well as damage to native wildlife and the sea.

As essential services have been increasingly prioritised to tourists’ consumption, in PFW’s 2024 survey, 83 percent of locals each reported multiple disruptions to ‘liveability’, including difficulties in getting to work, school or hospitals in Auckland (72 percent), finding parking spots (61 percent), unsafe visitor road use (45 percent), and even delayed access to health and ambulance services (12 percent), and having to wait weeks for essential water deliveries as priority goes to hospitality services. A fifth of island residents (21 percent) experienced significant emotional distress due to overtourism.

Locals who worked in tourism were consistently less affected than other residents by the various problems arising from overtourism. The view within the sector that tourism was necessary, or an advantage, was not shared by other residents, nor supported by Auckland Council’s 2022 economic analysis. Only 3 percent of Waiheke locals not working directly in tourism identified any economic benefit to them in 2023/24, highlighting the inequity of the island’s infrastructure maintenance burden falling entirely on ratepayers, not the tourism industry or tourists themselves.

The failure of ‘destination management’ planning

The tourist numbers are not driven merely by visitor demand. Over the past decade, the council’s economic development agency – Tataki Auckland Unlimited (TAU) – has aggressively promoted tourism on Waiheke, positioning it as the ‘jewel in [Auckland’s] crown’, and highlighting its huge value to the supercity’s economy.

In 2021, TAU identified overtourism on Waiheke as a significant problem and commissioned a Sydney-based tourism marketing company to develop a ‘destination management plan’ for the island.

The draft Waiheke DMP, shelved by TAU since May 2023, has a clear focus on growing tourism, despite consistent community feedback on an urgent need to limit it.

A 2023 New Zealand Geographer article described the council’s failure to address the overtourism damage to the Waiheke community as ‘Plucking the golden goose – alive’ – when the locals who are the caretakers of the island’s natural environments are relentlessly displaced by tourists who drain the island’s limited resources and make no contribution to its sustainability. The researchers proposed a co-governance model for managing tourism on the island, similar to successful models for Rottnest Island in Australia, Salt Spring Island in Canada, and now Rekohu Chatham Island.

Internationally, tourism experts are now highlighting that the only way to prevent irreparable harm from overtourism to so-called ‘destination communities’ is for governments to regulate and limit tourism activity. A majority of Waihekeans answering PFW’s 2024 survey agreed, calling for Auckland Council to act urgently to avoid collapse of a unique community whose kaitiakitanga is essential to sustaining the island’s natural treasures.

Following international examples, councils in Nelson, Christchurch and recently Rotorua have all responded to homelessness due to oversupply of short-stay rentals by imposing higher rates for those homes.

Council’s tourism strategy fails to propose limiting unmanageable tourist numbers to Waiheke, even when the council’s own research suggested a cap on visitor numbers was critical to the sustainability of Waiheke’s increasingly damaged natural environments and its eroded community. So why isn’t Auckland Council acting, when the problems are chronic, acute, and borne out by council’s own research?

It is past time for Auckland Council to start ‘flipping the narrative’ on tourism – reversing the tourism management focus from prioritising the demands of tourists, to supporting the rights and needs of the local communities to survive and thrive.