A West Auckland food bank that has been operating for more than a quarter of a century says it has never been as busy as it is right now, with demand for parcels having jumped from around ten requests a week when it opened to about fifty every week today.
Waitākere Community Outreach coordinator Victor Davies, who has been running food banks for 26 years, told RNZ his service is now handing out more than 200 parcels every month. He said the people walking through the door are not who many New Zealanders might picture when they think of foodbank clients.
“I call them the working poor,” Davies said. “You’ve got two people working, and they still can’t make ends meet.” He said the squeeze is being driven by housing costs more than anything else. “It is the exorbitant rent that people pay,” he said, with food the first thing households cut once the rent and the power bill have been paid.
Davies said he has seen families forced to move repeatedly between rentals as rents climb out of reach, and in some cases two families now share a single house so they can keep a roof over their heads. “People can’t afford rent, they get evicted. They’ve got to look for something else. They’re actually couch surfing, so they move from one accommodation to the other,” he said. “I don’t know where people would be if we didn’t have food banks.”
The picture from Waitākere matches what is showing up nationally. Median rent in Auckland is now sitting at around $630 a week, while a three bedroom house typically rents for between $700 and $760 a week, according to myRent’s market data. For a family of four, weekly grocery bills can easily land between $260 and $420 even when households shop carefully and skip takeaways.
The combined cost of rent, power, transport and food is what is pushing dual income households into the food bank queue. When two adults are both in paid work and still cannot cover the basics, the problem stops looking like a benefit issue and starts looking like a structural one. Davies has been clear that he is not seeing more beneficiaries so much as more wage earners who have simply run out of room in the budget.
Food insecurity is now well documented across New Zealand. Ministry of Health figures released late last year showed that roughly one in five Kiwi children live in a household where food sometimes runs out. The same survey showed Pacific children carrying the heaviest burden at around 44 per cent, with Māori children at around 32 per cent, but the underlying driver in every group is the same. Lower wages and higher housing costs leave less money for food, and food is almost always the line item that gives way first.
The New Zealand Food Network reported last year that the country’s food banks are now feeding 165 per cent more people than they were before the pandemic began. That figure has not eased since, and frontline coordinators like Davies say it has continued to grow as the cost of essentials has outpaced wage growth.
Waitākere Community Outreach relies heavily on donations, both food and money, and on volunteers willing to pack and deliver parcels. The food bank has previously flagged that even running its delivery van has become a strain, with fuel costs climbing during the various flare ups in the Middle East and on global oil markets over the past two years. Every dollar that goes into petrol is a dollar that cannot be spent on tinned goods or fresh produce.
The Auckland picture is mirrored in many other parts of the country. Food banks in Christchurch, Wellington, the Bay of Plenty and the Far North have reported similar increases, and several have warned over the past 12 months that they may have to cut back the number of parcels they hand out if their funding does not lift. The Foodbank New Zealand network now lists hundreds of distribution points around the country, a level of coverage that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
What has changed, as Davies points out, is that the people lining up are no longer just the long term unemployed or those living with serious illness. They are couples in their thirties and forties working full time hours in supermarkets, warehouses, hospitality and aged care. They are renters paying close to half of their take home pay just for shelter, with very little left for anything else. They are families that look entirely ordinary on paper but who have simply been priced out of the basics.
For Davies, after 26 years of seeing who comes through his door, the message is straightforward. New Zealand is not running out of work and it is not running out of generosity, but it is running out of headroom in family budgets, and food banks are filling a gap that should not have been allowed to open this wide.
Have you used a food bank or supported one in your community? Are you seeing the same squeeze on working families in your own neighbourhood? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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