To paraphrase Norman Kirk, people need somewhere to live, food to eat, clothing to wear and something to hope for.
Water and housing are the ‘new gold’, and homes are profit making commodities.
What does ‘home’ mean to you? Do you flit from house to house or do you grow deep roots in a particular piece of soil connecting you to your community? I advocate for this community to protect my ‘home’.
If you ask people to “draw home” in a simple outline in less than a minute, most will draw the classic ‘Playschool’ house with smoke out the chimney. Some will include stick-figure family and pets. I’d draw that house behind a wall of roses with a giraffe peeking over the top, my ‘Snael’ car and my cat, Jasper.
Our city is full of vulnerable people without a roof over their heads, partly from the closing of mental institutions. Auckland has 100,000 empty ‘ghost house’s, and one of the worst offenders is Kainga Ora. Rather than being landlords, leaving properties vacant, profit making from housing as a commodity.
10 years ago, I started advocating for state housing by supporting state house tenants in Glen Innes being evicted. They were ‘guinea pigs’ in this failed ‘social/public’ housing rebuild experiment. The first 156 tenancies given 90-day-notices resulted in at least 20 deaths. Understandably, elderly people being given three months to move from the only ‘home’ they have known, took its toll. I have been asking politicians for a coroner’s enquiry since 2015 but they have conveniently turned a ‘blind eye’, protecting profits of their campaign funders.
I understood their attachment to their homes because my father always said the only way he was ever going to leave his home was in a box, and he got his way. When Dad came home from the war, like other veterans, he was offered a state house for life on 1/5 of his income or a cheap ‘State Advances Loan’ to build his own home. He chose the latter.
The successful experiment of state houses ‘pepper potted’ amongst the general population in Ponsonby, Grey Lynn and Westmere is how we got our desirable character. Unfortunately it's why housing prices here have exploded. Houses that cost $2,800 in 1970, are now an astronomical $2,800,000. It’s out of control. Owning the quarter acre Kiwi dream home is unaffordable for most Kiwis. A young Westmere couple bought their first home in Warkworth, being all they could afford, they’re now faced a with bleary eyed daily commute, from a lack of sleep. The biggest life purchase is not the house, it’s the mortgage. Most of our banks are Aussie owned and they’re ‘laughing all the way to the bank’ at the profits they are making.
For low income people, not just families, that dream is impossible. State housing was that fall-back not living in cars and garages. There were 21,957 applicants on the September Housing Register, 237 in the Waitemata Ward. ‘Kiwi Build’ was a failure because it started as a principle of putting young middle class people on the ‘property ladder instead of building homes and communities. Instead of returning HNZ into a government department, the Kainga Ora failed experiment took HNZ ‘into bed’ with developers starting with demolishing the best built houses in NZ, with at least 100 years life left in them. Relocating them out from the city or adding bedrooms for multigeneration families with small units built on the back of the sections. Instead of what has essentially been a ‘landgrab’ by developers who have replaced them with an inferior ‘dog box’ with 50 year life (if you’re lucky) then sold off 2/3 of the land with new-builds, to pay for it.
Recently , I visited the Tamaki experiment. To add ‘insult to injury’, the new-builds are without off-street parking. The main road has unused cycleways and ‘in-line bus stops’ blocking the traffic, instead of parking. These people can’t afford bicycles, let alone electric bikes for the whole family, they can barely afford the big old gas guzzling Holden that they all fit in. Why are we spending billions on wrecking their neighbourhoods and not giving them anywhere to park?
In Pt Chevalier they’re building monstrous blocks of ‘shoebox’ apartment without parking, They have the hallmarks of future slums and the next round of ‘leaky buildings’. It’s already started, the Kainga Ora block by the Richmond Road supermarket has been cleared of tenants for post-flood foundation repairs.
We’re ‘Fast Tracking’ to a city of ‘dog-box’ slums and ghost houses as commodities rather than homes, pushing the very people who gave our city character further out while land grabbing state assets from people who need homes.
Gael Baldock, GaelB@xtra.co.nz