The Government is expected to contribute $25 million earmarked in its social housing plan last year for "specific larger developments and/or possible asset transfer initiatives".
Most of this seems likely to comprise transfer of the land to a new consortium led by the NZ Housing Foundation, mental health housing provider Community of Refuge Trust, the Tamaki Collective of Auckland iwi, and the Onehunga Hostels Endowment Fund, which has been administered by the Maori Trustee since early last century.
The Housing Foundation, which was set up by Warehouse founder Sir Stephen Tindall's Tindall Foundation, is expected to offer shared-equity housing, allowing first-home buyers to start by owning only a part-share in a house, paying a mix of rent and mortgage payments until they can afford to buy the rest of the property.
The foundation, the Community of Refuge Trust and other community housing groups will also provide rental housing, using a new policy announced in this year's Budget giving them the same subsidies as Housing NZ to rent to low-income households at 25 per cent of their income.
Community Housing Aotearoa co-chairman Warren Jack said it would be the country's biggest community housing development yet and his own agency, Habitat for Humanity, was keen to be involved.
"We have been involved in discussions and are excited by the thinking that is going into it," he said. "It's a decent-sized project and something that the community housing sector can really use as a means of demonstrating its capacity for working together collaboratively."
A Weymouth resident and trustee of the Auckland Community Housing Trust, Alan Johnson, said the project had taken years to come to fruition after Child, Youth and Family sold 10ha of the 15.6ha site to Housing NZ in 2006 for what was initially planned as a state housing development.
The rest of the site was sold to the Ministry of Education and had been earmarked for a Maori-language high school which was now building at a new site in Browns Rd instead.
