Hours after firefighters finally put out the blaze, smoke was still rising from the roof of the Loafers Lodge in Wellington, and the smell of burning remained. Firefighters guided a drone through the clear skies, trying to calculate the extent of the building’s collapse, while the bodies of at least six people lay inside the hostel’s walls, unable to be retrieved.
On the top floor, the ageing brown exterior was stained black by smoke, the paint blistered and peeling from the heat, with windows smashed out and empty. It was from these fourth floor windows that Tala Sili jumped, realising that his only options were to take the fall or die in the flames.
Leaning on crutches outside an evacuation centre in Newtown he described the fire’s heat, its flames made invisible by thick, acrid smoke.
“It smelt like poison,” he told national broadcaster RNZ. “I was on the top floor and I couldn’t go through the hallway because there was just too much smoke so I jumped out the window,” he said. “It was just scary, it was really scary.”
At least six people have been confirmed dead, and eleven remain missing after the fire ripped through the hostel in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The complex had more than 90 rooms, each equipped with the barest of facilities: a bed, a heater, a desk.
The Loafers Lodge is one of a network of hostels, motels and boarding houses that are home to some of New Zealand’s most vulnerable communities: those on sickness and disability benefits, elderly people, the previously homeless, ex-prisoners, those deported under Australia’s “501” deportation policy.
Homelessness charities in the city have confirmed they had at least 40 clients registered to the address, which had acted as housing for highly vulnerable people.
Situated just a block away from Wellington city hospital, the lodge had also become home to a number of nurses and hospital employees, who were unable to find accommodation in the capital city’s competitive housing market.
‘If there’s a fire it’s like a rabbit warren’
Conflicting reports have emerged from residents over whether alarms went off when the fire broke out; some said they were woken by the alarms but that they came after a number of false alerts, while others said they did not hear them at all and were woken instead by the yelling of other residents. Fire and emergency said on Tuesday that they could not confirm whether alarms had gone off.
“The alarm[s], they keep going every week, two times, three times,” resident Tamrat Isse Adan said.
Wrapped in a white shawl and speaking to a cluster of reporters outside the evacuation centre, Adan said he escaped with nothing but a jacket and phone. “I’m very sad, very sad. My neighbour, he’s missing, maybe he’s dead, police say there’s a lot of people missing,” he said.
As smoke crept under doors, no sprinklers came on. Older buildings like this one are exempt from having to retroactively fit sprinkler systems in the way that new buildings must – even when they house many people, including elderly people and those with complex health needs or disabilities. Wellington City Council said on Tuesday evening that the Loafers Lodge was issued with a Building Warrant of Fitness in March this year, indicating that it met minimum safety standards at the time.
“I often used to think when I used to visit: God, if there’s a fire it’s like a rabbit warren,” said one hospital worker, who knew a number of nursing and hospital staff who had lived there over the years. She said it was also a place to house at-risk people, or discharge patients who did not have other places to go.
“It was used for people who needed accommodation that couldn’t otherwise find it or afford it – people with disabilities, physical, psychological,” she said. “People that have had poor mobility … people on emergency housing lists”.
As police and emergency services launch into an investigation of the fire’s causes and spread, prime minister Chris Hipkins said there was “no question” that the fire also raised wider, ongoing issues of tenuous housing around New Zealand.
“There will always be a group of people though who are in more transient housing,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to protect them.”
For some, fury is growing alongside questions of how the fire could have occurred – and what it says about New Zealand’s care for its most vulnerable people.
“What kind of country are we that we allow this kind of thing to happen?” said Green party leader James Shaw, speaking to parliament on Tuesday afternoon. “What kind of country are we where those people have so few options in life, but to live in substandard accommodation, with a reasonable chance of lethality?”
New Zealand’s housing crisis – caused by unaffordable property prices, a chronic shortage of state housing, and sky-high rents in major cities – has created waitlists for emergency housing almost 30,000 people long. The government’s policy has been to place people in motels and hostels, but what began as a temporary stopgap has become a long-term solution, with families’ time in these facilities stretching out to months or years.
By the start of 2023, 3,336 households were living in short-term, emergency accommodation, including more than 3000 children. Nearly 500 of those households had been there for over a year, and more than 120 had been there for more than 2 years. The policy has been enormously costly: over the course of 2022-2023, payments made by the government to these private motels and hostels were about $1m a day.
Conditions in many of New Zealand’s transient housing facilities are grim, violent and unstable. In recent years, there have been numerous media reports of violence, intimidation, drug trades, sexual violence and robberies at emergency, transitioning or temporary housing facilities.
The Loafers Lodge had been used as one of those sites by the ministry of social development between 2017 and 2020, according to Ministry of Social Development data. The minister in charge, Carmel Sepuloni, said on Tuesday morning that the hostel was no longer contracted to the ministry – but it remained part of a wider, less formal network of temporary accommodation.
“For me it’s about the New Zealand government for the last eight years shoving people in a place that’s got walls and saying they’re housed,” said Filipa Payne, from Route 501, an organisation that advocates for New Zealanders deported from Australia under that country’s controversial section 501 law.
Many of them arrive in New Zealand with no work, no financial support, and no family connections to the country – and crash immediately into transient accommodation like the Loafers Lodge. Payne said she was in contact with two 501 deportees living at the hostel who had escaped the fire, but others were still unaccounted for.
For housing activists, this tragedy more than a single building, but reflects a wider system of social neglect and crippling housing shortages.
“This calamity is a result of a seriously defunded, unplanned and privatised housing system,” said Heleyni Pratley, spokesperson for advocacy group Public Housing Futures. “We do not have enough houses for people.
“The government immediately came out and said this is not an official emergency housing provider [but] even if it’s not officially emergency housing, it functions as such. This is a complete tragedy, but also a manifestation of a crisis, a breaking point.”
