I’ve suspected something for a while, and now that I’ve watched the Sunday programme on the emergency housing disaster in Roturua, I’m convinced.  Rotorua will not recover from this.  It will not go back to being the city it was. 

It’s just not possible.  This has gone too far now. 50 motels on or near Fenton Street are housing the homeless. There are about 1100 people in Rotorua in these motels or similar.

All of these people need houses. The council reckons it’s going to take them 5 years, at least, to build enough homes which means for the next five years those people are still in those motels, trashing them like we saw on Sunday. Causing fights on the street outside. Freaking neighbours out so they sleep with baseball bats by the door.

So for the next five years they will also keep trashing Rotorua's reputation.  

Who of us are going to want to go on holiday to Rotorua? If we can afford to go to Hawke's Bay or New Plymouth or Queenstown, why would we go to Rotorua? Which means there will be no other business for those motels, really, other than to keep doing what they’re doing .

Eventually - if it hasn’t already happened - this will drive families out of town.  Parents will take their kids and find jobs and schools in towns that are safer and have a future. They will sell their houses before the value falls too far. And the people who will be left behind will be those too cash strapped to leave, the emergency accommodation people, the moteliers and the security guards.

National and the Maori Party are right to call for an inquiry into what’s happened here.  This is as Rawiri Waititi says "a train wreck". We will probably for decades talk about what the 6^th Labour Government did to Rotorua.  

But no inquiry will rescue Rotorua.  The damage is done. 

The one time jewel in our tourism crown seems destined to end up like Patea: a town that ran out of opportunities. Rotorua is just a bigger version.