Editorial: Central Auckland Reborn - A city centre to enjoy again, with no one left behind

People gathered outside a cookie outlet in downtown Auckland City. Photo / Greg Bowker

EDITORIAL:

Many of us will remember our first visits to Queen St.

Most will recall a teeming bustle of people - shopping, rushing to business meetings, making deliveries, or a few standing around gawking, like us, at the sheer vibrancy of it all.

Some of us may have encountered homeless people for the first time on Queen St. Yes, the unkempt have been downtown denizens for decades, cadging for coins in untenanted shop doorways or sprawled across the sidewalk with ragged clothes and blankets.

But recent, radical changes to the area have exaggerated their presence. The disappearance of those bustling shoppers has the "streeties" seeming to dominate the streetscape.

With Covid lockdowns, foot traffic fell by 95 per cent and the concrete jungle became a ghost town, almost exclusively inhabited by the down-and-out.

In reality, the number of rough sleepers in the central city is estimated at 30 or 40 around Queen St, according to the Auckland City Mission.

Compounding this, however, is emergency housing in the CBD, where hundreds of homeless from all over Auckland were bundled into emergency accommodation during the pandemic to keep them safe.

One housing advocate suggests some of these tenants are "using the street as their living room" because their lodgings have no living spaces.

With the pandemic response moving into reopening sectors such as tourism and international education, these hotels, motels and serviced apartments will be needed for their primary purposes again.

It should not be a case of simply "moving these people on" as some suggest.

Despite their unfortunate circumstances, and more often than not as a result of misfortune rather than individual choice, these people are members of the team of five million who faced down a pandemic in world-class style.

As we look to renew our aspirations for downtown Auckland, these inner-city citizens must also be provided with what Auckland City Missioner Helen Robinson calls "appropriate housing" — affordable, healthy, and in the right location.

With health and social services for those who present with mental problems, addiction or trauma, we can build our people back better, as well as our city.