Dr Liz Gordon: Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes… EVERYWHERE
Oh! how that song takes me back to the 1960s, when my friend’s parents used to include me in their holidays, due to my own family’s catastrophic breakdown. On our drive down to West Wittering (I am not making this up) we would sing our hearts out in the car.
My mother’s family lived for years in terraced housing (little boxes) in Anfield, Liverpool (yes, close to the famous football ground). The address was 34 Feltwell Road, a white, single fronted house with a bow window, built in the 1920s or 30s. See the aerial picture of the area. This was middle class housing – not for the poor, but for tradespeople, artisans, civil servants. The richer people got a double frontage and the poorer got Council flats and houses (Liverpool was a pioneer in civic housing), most of which are now demolished.
When visiting, the streets appear tiny, the houses huddled together with no garages or front gardens. The houses in Feltwell Road are white (presumably some kind of finish over the ubiquitous red brick) and pretty, but utilitarian. I remember stories about how related families moved into the same streets and they became the centre of extended families who shared stuff and were very close.
All of this is in contrast to the housing in New Zealand. I live in an ex-state house, with a large frontage, four bedrooms and a large section. It (now) has a garage and a flat at the back. There is still plenty of room. It was built in 1940. While here in NZ. we immediately identify houses like mine as ‘state houses’, through the eyes of my sister, who lives in London, they are spacious paradises where one can breathe, have BBQs, play and enjoy the sun.
I took my sister last year through the very poorest part of Christchurch, and she said to her eyes it looked wealthy, with all the land and the detached houses with big gardens. Such things are highly valued in the UK.
So why is it that most new developments, here in Otautahi at least, appear to be mirroring the terraced houses of my parents’ youth? I was exploring on Google street view, and I saw rows of three-storey attached houses in Hobsonville, not a garage or a front garden in site, the bow window of Anfield replaced by balconies on the second and third floors, which overlook the busy roads below (why have a balcony if there is no view?).
I am sure this has to do with affordability in Auckland, and especially the cost of land. But it raises questions about, in particular, the value of space for families. I think these places are sold on the superiority of the internal fittings, nice kitchen, ‘new build’, no fuss and so on. Proximity to local cafes and so on is important, though surely there are few city-dwellers in NZ who are more than a km from a good cup of coffee? (No, we don’t want to hear from you deprived folks, thanks).
The question in my mind is to what extent are people choosing to live in neo-terraces, as opposed to being driven out of spacious properties by the price of land? And if it is mainly the latter, does it mean that a significant lifestyle change for our nation is being driven essentially by the profit motive of developers? How many units can I get on this piece of land?
All of these properties are young yet – this kind of development is very much 21st century. How will they last? Will they look as good as Feltwell Road in 90 years? Or even as my house in 80 years, the all-rimu build and concrete roof in perfect condition?
I have to get someone to mow the lawns as they take forever (but not so long for the energetic young immigrant who holds down numerous jobs and is just happy to be here). I have contemplated inner city living, or an older person’s unit, but really I don’t want to move from my spacious property and four-bedroomed house. Where would you rather live? Are my boomer views out of touch?
And those of you who read my column on Ihumatou a few weeks ago, I am also increasingly pondering the uglification of our cities. The location of most of our large cities is stunning. Christchurch is on the plains and the Port Hills (extinct volcanoes), with braided rivers north and south, beaches, the harbour and the Southern Alps visible on the western horizon. But except for the lucky/wealthy ones, our cities are not beautiful. There are beautiful spots, but what price that if you are crammed into rows of little boxes with no space to breathe?
Dr Liz Gordon is a researcher and a barrister, with interests in destroying neo-liberalism in all its forms and moving towards a socially just society. She usually blogs on justice, social welfare and education topics.
Way back in the eighties when I was at school, in social studies we studied social changes caused by urbanization in the UK during the industrial revolution. We were taught that one of the motives of migrants to New Zealand back then was to escape the squalor of the cities in the UK. This was represented in Victorian cartoons as rows and rows of terraced housing under a cloud of pollution and coal smoke. This is what our ancestors had risked six months on a ship to the other side of the world to escape. I always recall this when I look at the homes we are building today. Homes, ironically, that in many cases leaked as soon as they were finished. When ever you do see examples that you would be happy to live in, they are not “entry level”, but priced “realistically” at $850000 and up. Council explaining the constant reduction in minimum section size state the “need of the developer to make money”. This does not seem to prevent them going bust. This size reduction was meant to make land cheaper by increasing supply, but lost on them is the fact that existing houses with sections are now priced as though you can fit four to five homes on the site. Jimmy down the road sees what that home in their street sold for and prices his house accordingly. Ironically this shrinking section size has also infected rural towns, where land is not in short supply and cheaper to buy. More irony is in the fact that the building industry is now one of the major drivers of our post industrial economy, driven by the new migrants we need to bring in to keep the broken growth model afloat. We appear to have come full circle. BTW, what we used to have here wasn’t communism, it was a mixed model economy, still popular in countries where they haven’t managed to create the problems we have over the past thirty years.
Those boxes of various colours just east of Colombo street on Brougham are a bloody disgrace. These tacky places would never ever have been built in Merivale but Sydenham they are poor they can have anything. A bloody disgrace.
Idyllic it would be if we could wind the clock back to the quarter-acre paradise of New Zealand in the 1960s. But we can’t. Our population is 5 million, not 3 million, and a great proportion of that 5 million want to live in the main cities, especially Auckland. Already, Auckland is a mess of cars and motorways. That’s what a sprawling metropolitan supersuburbia inevitably is: motorways, and thousands of hectares of farmland ruined. New Zealand, Auckland in particular, is suffering the urbanisation that Liverpool experienced 200 years ago. Densification, with rows of terraced houses, is the price we must pay if we are to prevent Auckland and Hamilton reaching out to conurbate at Huntly.
See this article below: “Higher density housing (building closer and higher) is going to remain a very important part of meeting New Zealand’s housing needs.”
https://www.interest.co.nz/property/101812/anz-senior-economist-miles-workman-says-despite-fact-land-costs-make-significant
Growth isn’t inherently bad, but if you look at the sizes of our next major cities after Auckland the size disparity compared to Auckland is concerning. I had imagined cities up to twice the populations they actually are until I checked. This should be evened out a bit by people who do want a more traditional property voting with their feet and new arrivals bypassing Auckland for cost reasons. In the longer term continuing disparity may create serious logistical and structural problems.
Dr Liz Gordon. You are right in saying that the problem is increase in land price not house price . Because a home is one of the essentials in life, a shortage of homes will mean that the only constraint on the price of a house is capacity to pay.
Not long ago when a woman ceased working when she got married, it was possible for the husband to buy a home to house a family of four dependants on just one wage. That one wage was his constraint on a mortgage. Now the woman continues to work and contributes her wage to help repay a mortgage. Their constraint is now two wages yet it buys only the same house. In effect the entire wage earned by a working woman is lost by boosting the price of the home (or the land actually) .
The only solution is to continue building State houses until there is a surplus and ensure that there is always a surplus. The land price would fall dramatically but will probably take decades the way the government is going about it. Converting shipping containers as temporary accommodation would do the trick – anything that gets people off the “homeless list”.
Ideally land should never be sold to anyone. We are selling off our nation in pieces. All of our land should belong to all Kiwis and our Government be custodians of it. People would then occupy the land on long term 99 year lease. Of course they should have thought about that in 1840.
No one should own land. Read Henry George. Kirk did and talked about moving to a better and fairer economy where all land was rented from Govt as needed. No speculative profiteers and high land costs.
Density – by itself – isn’t the problem. Density and badly designed houses and community spaces is. Along with badly designed stand-alone homes with access to accessible community spaces is.
When researching the population to community reserves ratio that existed in a previous district council plan, I discovered it was based on a London population/park ratio from back in the 1930’s. Given the high density living there, it was fairly easy to see why the district reserves were not fit for the purpose of providing good community space within walking distances. Also, compared to European countries, or the British common which are spaces accessible to all, and used by many demographics, many of our reserves are “active parks”, used by sports codes and organisations.
We have a country built on access to open land, and for many generations without the financial or planning restrictions that would have put a value on thoughtful development. Now we are at a point where environmental impacts, housing unaffordability and community disconnection are not able to be ignored for much longer. However, we still haven’t addressed the equity of access to transport and facilities. An affordable (cough) house – is made even more expensive to those living in it, if access to work, school, transport, facilities and community activities is not easily traversed.
We also can’t import the high density building development, without aligning it with access to public transport. Auckland planning outcomes suffer due to the separate CCO of Auckland Transport. How people live, and how they move should be planned at the same time.
All in all, it comes down to design, and clear understanding that houses built without community can often develop into parking spaces for people. And as such, they are both a waste of resources and a failed attempt to both plan and build for people.
Auckland has had to emplement a new unitary plan to essentially deal with the high price of land effectively wiping away the previous 200 years of planning and building. To have the open plan community architecture that you’re after you kind of have to build it in from the beginning and as I say the earlier development models have been wiped away. Could you imagine the price of a new Auckland war memorial or a passenger rail network on trays land prices. That’s why you have to plan for it from the land use from the beginning.
The Unitary Plan is nit going ti deliver. It has too many concessions to the status quo.
And we need to stop importibg ideas from other countries with different histories and social cultures. We should identify the problems and create solutions that will work for NZers.
Well I don’t think heavy rail to the airport is a solution. I do think 2 heavy rail lines from Whangarie through Auckland and on to Hamilton for heavy rail and passengers done to bring Whangarie and Hamilton with in a 1 hour express journey of Auckland effectively making them a suburb of Auckland. Y’know electric trains with the engines sunk into the wheel housing can easily do 180km per hour, there are many, “international” examples.
Y’know I also think we should bring back trams but that will only likely extend from the inner city to the airport as that’s what Auckland roads was designed to do. We may have ripped out all the old tram lines but Auckland roads was still designed with the space to be able to cater for it. So we just have to bite the bullet and put that back in.
I also think it’s a mistake to put lime scouters and Ebikes and cycle ways in with the est of the pedestrians and vehicle traffic. I think it’s a mistake because we will be inviting disaster. You can find any number of road rage incidents involving cyclists and motorists and increasing the likeliness of road rage by pairing them would be a huge mistake. I think Ebikes need there own tracked network so we can increase the amount of bus lanes.
As for the composition and quantity of housing I leave that up to the free market. There’s something attractive about high density living that attracts people into cities that I can’t put my finger on. No matter how congested Auckland is people still want to move there. So I think increasing the purchasing power of everyone by progressively raising the minimum wage while dumping a hundred billion dollars on Auckland Infeustructure will help people pay for there rents and mortgages.