The director of a social housing trust in the Nelson Tasman area says the Government has ignored regions like his at the expense of tackling Auckland's housing shortage.
Finance Minister Bill English says the lack of affordable housing is the single biggest threat to the economy and he wants to work with social housing providers to fix that.
He says the Government is tackling the problem head on, including with its controversial plan to transfer thousands of state houses to the community sector.
The director of the Nelson Tasman Housing Trust, Keith Preston, says the regions have been starved of much-needed resources to tackle their own housing shortages.