Youthtown sports development manager Mark Ama watches over year 8 Wairau Intermediate pupils Cohryn Bonsay, left, and Elia Talafou. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Youthtown sports development manager Mark Ama watches over year 8 Wairau Intermediate pupils Cohryn Bonsay, left, and Elia Talafou. Photo / Jason Oxenham
The inner-city youth centre is disappearing, a victim of both lead contamination and changing times. Simon Collins reports on the death of an Auckland icon.
Youthtown is being demolished - and Mike Tait is angry about it.
He believes the downtown Auckland youth centre where he started playing basketball as a teenager, and where he later coached for a decade, has "lost the plot" as it has become dependent on its pokie business and government contracts.
Its Nelson St centre is being demolished because of lead contamination caused by a shooting club in the basement. Youthtown says it is "not financially viable" to reopen it, but that it will continue its youth programmes elsewhere.
Mr Tait believes the organisation lost its way after the death of long-serving manager and weightlifting coach Doug McConnell in 1999.
"Youthtown was a place where youth could go and do what youth wanted to do," he says.
"When Doug died, that changed. The kids who used to bus in from Otara were not allowed to play when the holiday programme was on because they didn't have the money to pay, and they started user-pays. The kids that should be in there were not allowed in, so basically now it provides a babysitting after school and holiday programme."
An Auckland icon
Youthtown's website traces its origins to the Great Depression in 1932, when 60 per cent of Auckland's male school leavers could not find work. A "Community Sunshine Club" took over the old Nelson St School site to hand out soup and run "physical culture classes, arts, crafts and a varied programme of technical subjects".
The current building was built in the 1960s when visiting American millionaire Clement Stone offered 30,000 if the public of Auckland could match it. It boasted a 25m swimming pool and a gym used for basketball, volleyball, badminton and indoor soccer.
When Mr Tait, 59, was a teenager in the 1970s, there was a weights room that produced several Olympic weightlifting champions. There was a boxing facility. There were pool and table tennis tables, even a trampoline. Later there was an art centre with ceramic kilns, a dance studio, and a learning centre with computers and library.
For basketballers like Mr Tait, his wife Tui and their son Lindsay who now plays for the Tall Blacks, Youthtown was the hub of their sport. Former Auckland basketballer Peter Joseph says: "Anyone in Auckland who played basketball played at Youthtown."
Rapper King Kapisi (Bill Urale), also a "hooper", says there is nowhere else in Auckland where you can go at any time of an evening and join a game for $2 or $3.
"I still play three or four times a week. Now we play at Onehunga or over in Waitakere Trusts Stadium. But you have to travel far, sometimes you go to courts and there's no one there," he says. "At Youthtown you could go for a swim, play squash - they had a dance studio."
Mike Tait believes Youthtown has "lost the plot". Photo / Brett Phibbs
Pokie business
Mr Tait believes Youthtown began to lose its way when it bought its first pokie licence in 2002. Today, its pokies at 21 gambling parlours from Albany to Oamaru earned $18.8 million of its $22.5 million gross revenue in the 18 months to last June.
Paula Kearns, Youthtown's chief executive since 2013, says the organisation was "financially challenged" for years and appointed a business development manager in 2000 to find "new revenue streams".
At the time, pokies were the new bonanza. Youthtown's total revenue leapt from $3.4 million in 2004 to $21 million by 2009, and its purpose changed. It no longer existed just to run a free youth facility; it set up "youth services" to use the revenue generated by its pokies in Taupo, Upper Hutt, Greymouth, Christchurch, Oamaru and Dunedin, as well as across Auckland.
It runs fee-paying after school and/or holiday programmes in a nearby Nelson St office block and at most places where it has pokies.
Its strategy for 2014-2020 includes a target of 50 gaming venues, although Ms Kearns says that has since been reduced to 40.
At first, the pokie venues were contracted out to Premier Gaming Ltd, which was majority-owned by bar owner Mark Forshaw. But this structure was criticised by Internal Affairs regulators because Mr Forshaw owned three of the venues, Africa Bar and Vinos in Albany and The Highlander (now Palm Bar) in Highland Park. So in 2012, Youthtown took the gaming team in-house.
But the business has not been easy. New Zealanders' spending on pokies has fallen from a $1 billion peak in 2004 to $808 million last year.
Youthtown's gambling revenue peaked at $14.6 million from 25 venues in 2009. Its $18.8 million pokie revenue in the 18 months to last June works out at $12.6 million for 12 months.
Health hazard
Youthtown hired out its Nelson St basement to Central Shooters in 1999.
Ms Kearns says the basement had been used for shooting since it was built in 1968, initially by the police who helped set up Youthtown. She says the ventilation system was changed in 1984 from an external to an internal outlet, channelling the air into ducts underneath the youth centre.
But Mr Tait says the basement was only used for "pellet guns" until Central Shooters dug out a larger area and started firing lead bullets. In the early 2000s, when he was coaching basketball upstairs, he noticed dust on the floor.
"We'd be sliding around like it was an ice hockey gym," he says.
In 2010, the Auckland Regional Public Health Service was alerted to an increased number of lead poisoning cases involving indoor recreational shooters. Medical Officer of Health Dr Julia Peters says investigators visited Central Shooters in 2011 and notified Auckland Council, and what is now Worksafe, of the hazard.
The shooting range was closed in July 2012. Ms Kearns says further tests after she started in April 2013 showed the contamination was "much more extensive than we originally thought", and the building was closed in February last year.
Although all staff were offered lead testing, Youthtown has never offered the same tests to the young people and contractors who used the building.
A contractor who installed a new filtration plant in the swimming pool, which required crawling around in the ducts above the basement in 2006, died of blue cell carcinoma in 2013. His widow declined to be named because the family has no proof his death was linked to Youthtown, but she is angry the contamination was "swept under the carpet".
Youthtown CEO Paula Kearns. Photo / Jason Oxenham
A new mission
Youthtown's 2014-2020 strategy has moved away from bricks and mortar. Its six goals are "excellence in youth development" (with youth now defined as 5 to 18), "become a recognised national brand", "growth in key communities", "engage and develop exceptional people", "financial sustainability" and "safe place, safe people, safe programmes".
Ms Kearns says more than half the people using the old building at the end were actually over 25. Research found most parents did not like children being bussed to specialist after-school centres and preferred services at schools.
Youthtown still buses children from surrounding schools to its after-school centres on the North Shore and at Panmure and Taupo. But, elsewhere, it now runs the programmes in schools or offices.
In 2008, Youthtown won a contract from Counties Manukau Sport to run sports programmes in 21 low-decile South Auckland primary and intermediate schools which do not have their own dedicated physical education (PE) teachers.
The funding has stopped because Auckland's four previous regional sports bodies have been merged into a single entity, but Youthtown is still running the programmes in South Auckland and at four schools each on the North Shore and Howick-Pakuranga.
At North Shore's decile 7 Wairau Intermediate, teacher Judy Carter says the Youthtown programme on Mondays also teaches the school's teachers new skills to use on the other four days of the school week.
"Our kids are always engaged in PE because we do it every day anyway, but they look forward to Monday because the Youthtown guys play the games with them, they interact with them, and they are not their teachers," she says.
Youthtown has also started seven teen "youth squads" to organise events and to work towards Duke of Edinburgh awards.
Youthtown chairwoman Bonnie Bradley does not feel there is any need to rebuild a physical facility like the old Youthtown.
"We don't really perceive it as a gap because we have relocated our programmes," she says.
Youthtown still owns the Nelson St site. "Soft demolition" of interior walls has begun and a permit to fully demolish the building is being sought.
Ms Bradley refuses to comment on a rumour SkyCity has expressed interest in buying the site. Only low-rise buildings at 84-86 Wellesley St, owned by Femme Fatale brothel owner Kim Pickard, stand between SkyCity's planned new convention centre and the Youthtown site.
SkyCity says: "We don't publicly comment on commercial matters, but SkyCity is currently focused on the [convention centre] project and we have all necessary land for this project."
But Auckland Council and its Waitemata Local Board believe the building's closure leaves a big gap to fill. Deputy Mayor Penny Hulse says she tried to connect Youthtown with developers who could have built offices or apartments above a rebuilt youth facility, but Ms Kearns says developers did not like that idea.
"They didn't think it would be that attractive to apartment owners," she says.
In the last census, 14,800 people aged 15 to 29 lived in the central city bounded by the southern and port motorways. More than half (53 per cent) of the total 26,300 people in that area were Asian.
Local Board chairman Shale Chambers says his board has $15,000 in its budget for 2016-17 for a feasibility study into a possible central city "youth hub".
The board has also part-funded the YMCA to start another feasibility study into making better use of its Pitt St fitness centre and stadium, which is used for badminton, basketball, indoor soccer and other sports.
In the meantime, a newly formed Waitemata Youth Collective has started "mapping" existing central city facilities to produce an online guide for young people.
"Youthtown was filling a great need," Mr Chambers says. "The programmes are mostly still happening, but a central site is also important for profile and longevity."
