At first it was just Monday nights, but the level of demand – feeding up to 80 cash-strapped Northlanders at a time on some nights – has seen the Koha Cafe system running every day, while Manukau and volunteers drive around town sourcing food parcels.

Sadly, what sounds like a wonderful solution wasn’t deemed wonderful by everyone.

Manukau was approached by the Far North District Council (FNDC) not long after the Northern Advocate published a story about the cafe feeding poor people.

“The council told me I couldn’t do free food. I had to stay in my business registration of where was my food coming from [and establish] was it from reliable sources and suppliers? The council told me other businesses were complaining about me doing free food.”

The FNDC confirms this, with group manager delivery and operations Ruben Garcia saying, “Under the Food Act 2014, a registered food business is not permitted to give away free or donated food while the registered part of the business is operating.”

The council suggested the couple give their food away in the park behind the store, which is uncovered with no kitchen or seating.

“My husband and I decided we would continue regardless. For us, it was about the people, the struggle, y’know?”

Tane Manukau agrees.

“We went to Whangārei three to four weeks ago and I saw something I’d never seen before – a whole family down in one of the backstreets. We saw they had four trolleys, mum and dad pushing one, another with kids in it – clothes, blankets, pillows. That was a real eye-opener for me. Then just recently I started seeing it in Kaitāia for the first time.”

Far from being the “winterless north”, many are finding that the perfect storm of high unemployment, shortages of housing and, well, storms, is making people desperate. In the week this article was being prepared, the Kaitāia Seventh Day Adventist Church was burgled for the third time in three months, with thieves stealing – among other items – food intended to feed the community.

Northland pensioners are finding living expenses tougher still.

“I have one well-dressed Pākehā lady who always comes in on a Monday for free meals,” Maryjane Manukau says. “She told me because of her benefit, she can’t [afford to] come into town all the time. She asked me if she could take home something hot for her husband because he’s not well and he can’t come out. These poor people might not look like the stereotype of homeless. A lot of them look like me.”

Even Manukau’s 83-year-old arthritic mother, Elsie Leef, sells Māori bread, apple pie and rhubarb pie at the Kaitāia Saturday Market to get by.

“It’s a side-hustle so she can make ends meet because her benefit doesn’t cut it,” her daughter says.

When the Herald visited on a sunny September Saturday, Kaitāia’s main street was sleepy, though tidy. The Saturday market space was a ghost town minutes after it wrapped up at noon, and a ranting homeless man, with drug paraphernalia at his side, headed for the Returned Services memorial to sleep after the market finished.

One of the few places bustling on that Saturday was MJ’z cafe, where semi-retired farmer Mark Gould, 67, handed $50 to Manukau for a pay-it-forward meal, something he does most weeks.

“I first come up here in the 80s when there was a real bad recession on and it was still busier then than it is now,” Gould says. “New Zealand’s people are the friendliest in the world. Kaitāia just needs a clean-up and some help.”

In the town’s op shops, Far North Hospice reports a downturn in sales, with the store manager saying, “A lot more desperate people are looking for things for free if possible,” combined with fewer donations of furniture.

Homeware is in short supply. A new hospice op shop in the wealthy harbour town of Cooper’s Beach/Mangonui is flourishing, people in Kaitāia no longer have money for luxury things or nice-to-haves, the manager says.

“I encourage my team to give things away when some whānau need it.”

Ninety minutes south down State Highway 1, in the town of Kawakawa (population 1500), great-grandmother Gail Olliver, 73, runs Nine Lives Recycle Boutique on the town’s main street where she sells boots and dress-up gear, often for events such as Hokianga’s Wild West and country music festivals.

Olliver has to run the store six or seven days a week, gets volunteer help, and doesn’t draw a wage from the business. She has a home on a 2.4ha site, but even having boarders paying rent doesn’t balance the books. She is planning to downsize, she says.

“I can’t survive on a pension, simple as that. With rates and insurance and power a third more expensive than Auckland, even with a rental house on my property, it’s not enough. I’ll have to sell,” she says.

“My insurance is $750 per month, it’s ridiculous. I’m going to try to cut it down – I’ve got to, I can’t afford to keep it.”

Olliver says she’s cut right down on power, but it is still more than $300 a month.

“I turn lights off, I use less hot water – and I’m on solar power anyway. Power is astronomically expensive up here, and with all the thefts up here, insurance is high as well. You need two incomes to survive these days.”

Not far along State Highway 1 is Ōhaeawai, where the long-time town butcher recently shut up shop and the pub/hotel is asking for long-term renters. One renter is selling his car tyres on the street outside.

Inside a strange, almost windowless, archaic building at Ōhaeawai’s crossroads is a tiny op shop with a story of resilience. The unnamed shop is run by Stewart (Stew) Hohepa, who was a painter until he had a stroke seven years ago, which paralysed his right side and left him unable to speak for two years.

The premises used to be “Te Coffee Shop” (sic) and ran successfully when truckies used to call in for their regular kawhe, though Stew’s stroke led to wife Anita closing the coffee business in 2017.

The chirpy Hohepa seemed anything but downtrodden when the Herald visited. His secondhand shop is almost museum-like, featuring an array of its owner’s passions. Because Hohepa used to be a painter, tins of paint crowd the store, as well as fishing gear and memorabilia, selling for extremely low prices.

“What Stew does in here is to help his rehabilitation,” says Anita, who has lived with Hohepa in Ōhaeawai for 24 years and seen the changes in the fortunes of Northland’s towns.

“After Baz the butcher moved out, the next shop only managed a few months being open before folding,” she says. “And when Bunnings left Kaikohe a couple of years ago, it put a lot of people out of work when they couldn’t travel up to Waipapa.”

Ten kilometres west is the once-grand town of Kaikohe (population 4700), which is trying to emerge from its doldrums to once again become “the hub of the North”.

Kaikohe’s main street – the promisingly named Broadway – shows all the signs of depression when the Herald visits. A stray dog runs into the community wellness centre; graffiti and rubbish decorate the street and buildings. A few vape shops and laundromats are dotted between the many empty stores (which are scheduled for waterblasting and beautification this summer).

Good news, then, that the brand new Kaikohe Spring Market kicked off last month. Still a work in progress, the market takes place on a disused lot owned by Te Runanga O Iwi O Ngāpuhi on the site of the former Kaikohe Hotel, in the middle of the main street opposite an Instant Finance shop and a soup kitchen.

Clean-ups are ongoing and volunteers, including Kaikohe Business Association (KBA) chair Mike Shaw, are filling in potholes and cleaning up rubble while kids frolic on a bouncy castle, musicians play and locals serve up oysters, hāngī, pāua, raw fish and “Taniwha burgers”.

Shaw – like many interviewed for this story – wears numerous hats and is, among other roles, a pastor with the Heart of the North Celebration Centre.

He’s been working with Ngāpuhi and Northland Inc to try to make Kaikohe “a destination, not somewhere you just drive through”. His long-term wish is that cruise ships calling in to the Bay of Islands will bring their tourists over to Kaikohe.

Opinions vary on the town’s potential. A local Kaikohe lawyer cited the town’s climate, water, soil, geothermal potential and people as its greatest assets; and stray dogs, dirt bikes and “people saying to me they can get more on the dole than working” as its biggest flaws/drawbacks.

Brian Warren, who owns many local businesses – including, until recently, Betta Electrical – says he’s had to close his business at a great loss and will still have to write off a lot of stock. Only service businesses and food outlets are surviving.

KBA deputy chair Linda Bracken says wage stagnation, retail crime and transport costs, aggravated by roading collapses and delays on the Brynderwyn and Mangamuka mountains, have eradicated businesses’ profit margins.

Bracken cites numerous good-news nuggets, however, with Māori streetwear label Cuzy T moving into larger premises due to online sales soaring; Ngāpuhi’s Te Wā merchandise shop doing well, and Turners & Growers Fresh partnering with a recently created berry farm, nurtured by the nearby Mahinga Innovation Centre, which has created jobs.

There’s a bit more optimism around the Twin Coast Cycle Trail, which runs through Kaikohe from the affluence of Opua to the impoverished Hokianga town of Horeke.

Trail manager Tracy Dalton says several grassroots entrepreneurs “have hung in there and grown their ideas into sustainable businesses”. Successes include young mum Azaria Reilly, a trained chef who makes cyclists packed lunches and pies, the Wairere Heights Airbnb offering meals, mead, soaps and bee products, and Riverhead Villa, a Māori incorporation-owned historic bed and breakfast at Horeke, which Dalton says “pivoted from pine forestry to creating employment opportunities for beneficiaries”.

Highway 15 south from Kaikohe leads to another district where Kaipara Mayor Craig Jepson straddles two very different communities. Mangawhai has a median house price of $1.08 million; Dargaville’s median house price is half that.

Median annual incomes in Dargaville have dipped as low as $22,000 in recent years.

“God knows how people live on that,” Jepson says. “There’s a lot of living off the land going on. People are doing whatever they need to get by. I think there’s a lot of bartering and trading – communities tend to help each other out. Swapping eggs for wild pork, for example.”

Little money goes around in Kaipara, and even Jepson’s own council has reduced staff numbers by 15%.

He refuses to be dour about it all, though, citing the markets at Paparoa and Ruāwai, the Brethren businesses and new school at Maungaturoto, a new Tai Tokerau water scheme, and the successful Mangawhai Opportunity Shop.

“We’ve still got good, strong communities; people work hard at keeping the community thriving. I feel really positive about our future.”

Dargaville Food Bank co-ordinator Fiona Melville isn’t so sure.

“The mayor is out of touch,” she says. “He comes from Mangawahai, where everything is wonderful. But it’s not so wonderful here. There are a lot of unemployed; jobs are hard to get. Even if you can, many are only part-time.”

Melville points to a shortage of rental homes, high rental costs and power expenses, and regular shutdowns of the Silver Fern Farms meat works as causes for poverty.

“The cost of living has had a dramatic effect on how people aren’t surviving … It’s so difficult for people to find their own home. If you don’t have the ability to save, for a family, you’re f*****,” Melville says. “People are supposed to put money aside, but they either don’t or can’t afford to.

“I get Nuttelex on special for $3.90 and put it in the freezer, which is better than $10 for butter. You’ve really got to shop around. Meanwhile, some people are selling their furniture to make ends meet.”

Melville names eggs as one of today’s most overpriced items in small towns, partly because of the supermarket duopoly eroding traditional small farm supply direct to customers, an issue numerous interviewees cited in the same breath as thanking supermarkets for helping stock their food banks.

“I buy my eggs from the Warehouse instead of Woolworths now,” Melville says. “And $8 for a cabbage? And it’s half a cabbage when you actually cut into it. We grow them, for goodness’ sakes, in this country. A lot of people aren’t eating meat any more because they can’t afford it.”

Those spoken to for this article listed butter, milk, power, car repairs, rates, power and school uniforms as being New Zealand’s most difficult expenses.

Even in supposedly affluent Warkworth, the Mahurangi Hope Church food bank manager, Lara Armstrong, says families with two working parents who are paying childcare and school holiday programme fees are often left struggling as much as those on lower incomes with family assistance and additional financial support.

“This means you can end up in the same position as people on the benefit with many children.”

Armstrong named school trips, tyres and dental fees as some of the killer costs for her clients, and says she’s heard that many Matakana home owners are struggling with large mortgages.

On the poorer rural outskirts of West Auckland, a cost-of-living crisis has been creeping into Helensville. Areas of deprivation have worsened since Covid and as a result of storm damage.

People like the effervescent Gemma Donaldson have been fighting to restore optimism, though, through organisations including South Kaipara Good Food, which distributed 100 tonnes of food last year alone.

What started as a food bank is now a community centre, tackling food poverty from several angles. The organisation runs a huge greenhouse and gardens, working with people from the Department of Corrections, volunteers and the local community to not only create food parcels, but also to bring hundreds of seedlings to sell at its Koha Market.

Donaldson’s team even go into people’s backyards and plant gardens for them.

She named car insurance, tyres and school uniforms as being some of the worst cost-of-living expenses.

“Uniforms are big. One of my kids’ school shirts was $62 – which is a lot. School shoes: my son wears them out or loses them. It all adds up.

“And if you need to drive to work out of our district, petrol and diesel is exorbitant at the moment.”

Still, ordinary Helensville people are constantly finding entrepreneurial ways to make ends meet, Donaldson says.

“A local organisation called ‘Our Village’ takes uniforms and repurposes them for other people. Our community is very giving. People pick each other up and give each other lifts; we may be rural, but we’re very tight-knit. This morning twins came early to a family, and straight away people responded, ‘Yup, I’ve got a bassinet, I’ve got clothes, I can help.’

“I live in South Head, and the deprivation index around Parakai is at a 9 out of 10 – very high … But we have incredibly wealthy farmers volunteering, helping with clients.”

A great example is Kaipara Ki Mahurangi (renamed from Helensville) MP Chris Penk, who brought his ute to help after Cyclone Gabrielle. Even local police help drop off food parcels in the community.

“After the cyclone and the floods, we bonded,” Donaldson says.

“There’s the saying, ‘you’re only as strong as the weakest link.’ And when individuals are thriving, the whole community thrives.”

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