The Good Citizen

It’s a place ready to bestow its golden glow on people who attend sports games or concerts or any of the other events that might be held under its ethereal-looking roof. The softly lit renderings carry an implicit promise of an exciting future beyond the Ports of Auckland’s big red fence: a place for people to wander and commune and dip a foot into the sparkling harbour. What’s not to like? 

Not so fast. Auckland has been down this road before: in the early 2000s, then-sports minister Trevor Mallard pitched the idea of a stadium on the end of Queens Wharf for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. The proposal was rejected by the city, and I must confess I found the idea insane. A stadium by its nature faces inwards, meaning it has absolutely no use for a harbour view

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New Zealand’s housing crisis is a systemic failure on so many fronts: a rapidly growing population, insane house prices, a drastic shortage of quality homes, a volatile renting market, tight lending restrictions, no capital gains tax and so much more. 

All of it is interdependent and complicated, which is partly why, at a national level, it’s been put in the too-hard basket for too long. But in Auckland, one hapū has been tackling these obstacles – financial, structural, psychological – in innovative ways with remarkable results. It’s been hard, painstaking work at a relatively small scale, but if offers lessons that could be applied across the country – and shows that our housing problems, when tackled one by one, may not be as intractable as we think. 

Up on the papakāinga at Ōrākei, 30 new warm, dry and generous terrace homes are testament to the determination of the members of Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei to begin to deal with the housing crisis in their own way. 

“There’s so much pressure on the housing market that people are looking for different ways of doing things,” says Anahera Rawiri, who works for Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei’s development arm. “We knew we had to build some houses, and it was good for us to do that. [But] the only way we could get around some of these barriers was to fund it ourselves.”

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Landscape architect, housing advocate and aspiring local body politician, Jacqueline Paul (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Heretaunga), isn’t sitting around waiting to be heard. She’s speaking up, and speaking loudly.

She doesn’t want to hear about hope. In fact, she’s over it – so much so that she asks people not to speak of it, as she has heard too many aspirational statements that haven’t been followed up. But this doesn’t mean she is in the depths of despair. Instead, the 25-year-old wants to see less hope and more concrete action. 

Because hope is a luxury in increasingly scarce supply for many of the people she knows – rangatahi Māori from south Auckland especially. Paul grew up and still lives in Papakura and has seen the debilitating effects of what happens when hope starts to dry up. The housing crisis is a prime example. “It’s actually had a huge impact on us,” she says, “where it’s so far out of reach now that we’ve lost that dream and that hope. Some people might say, big deal, just rent. [But] it’s a sense of stability, a place of belonging ... these massive big-picture things can really affect your wellbeing.”

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WH Auden once said “we would rather be ruined than changed”. It’s a quote urban designer Ben van Bruggen refers to when I ask him about how we might change the minds of Auckland’s legions of NIMBYs, opposed as they are to increased density, e-scooters, cycle lanes, and anything else that represents a new way of approaching urban problems. But van Bruggen, the Manager of Auckland’s Urban Design Strategy at Auckland Council, says he isn’t going to expend a lot of energy in trying to change these people’s minds. “They are the vocal minority,” he says. “There are a group of people who actually want change but they’re not as vocal or not as demanding, because they may not have seen or been told the stories of what that future might look like. We should appeal to them.”

Van Bruggen is an optimist in a job where optimism is most certainly required. Auckland is in the midst of some acute growing pains, with a burgeoning population putting huge pressure on housing and transport infrastructure in particular. Van Bruggen isn’t daunted by this. In fact, he is so excited about Auckland’s potential that he moved here with his family from the UK in 2017. “I was just captivated by what Ludo [Campbell-Reid, Design Champion at Auckland Council] and his colleagues were saying about Auckland and where it was going. [There was] a discourse around what design meant in a place like this. As an urbanist you don’t get that many opportunities to have a city-wide perspective on what you’re doing. Auckland is small enough to understand, but big enough to matter.”

That said, the city faces challenges on multiple fronts. The population is growing by about 2.6 percent each year which, van Bruggen says, is “a lot to be contending with” for any developed nation. In the 1950s Auckland had a terrific tram system with one of the world’s highest rates of ridership, while nowadays some people (looking at you, Judith Collins) are still resisting a single light rail line down Dominion Road and through Māngere to the airport. The road toll is abysmal, and everyone knows we’re in the midst of a severe housing crisis. Still, van Bruggen’s optimism remains.

On housing: “The global finance approach to housing as commodity exists, so we have a housing crisis,” van Bruggen says. Auckland Council is already acting, he adds, as the planning regime allows for a million homes to be built within the city limits right now. So why do we have a crisis still? “We’ve given over much of our housing development to the private sector ... they focus on a very narrow bit of the market. If we perhaps take more of a lead from Germany or Holland, where the public sector has a much higher role in enabling people to build for themselves – and it enables a rental market in high-quality renting and secure tenancy. Generally the government [there] owns the land and doesn’t sell it off ... it takes a long-term estate management role in the city.”

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From a mostly-Māori rural community to the centre of one of the country’s biggest banks: in the latest episode of The Good Citizen, Fonteyn Moses-Te Kani tells Jeremy Hansen how we can do diversity better.

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“We need to stop chickening out.” Landscape Architect and Urban Designer Henry Crothers is playing a guiding role in the creation of many of the best bits of a whole lot of New Zealand towns and cities, but he thinks it’s time for more bravery when it comes to the reinvention of the places we share. He’s been instrumental in the design of much-lauded projects including Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter, Westhaven Promenade and Te Ara i Whiti (the pink cycle path), and now his firm, LandLAB, is immersed in the rehabilitation of central Christchurch, as well as new master plans for Tauranga and Queenstown. A little more courage, he says, could change these places from good to great.

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In the first episode of The Good Citizen Jeremy Hansen talks to Jade Kake about how the work of the Māori design movement can make life in Aotearoa better for all its citizens.

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