The Auckland City Mission's new HomeGround building on Hobson St, with the restored old building that is still part of the complex. Photo / Mark Smith
When architects Gary Lawson and Nicholas Stevens saw the room, they knew it wasn’t going to work. It was 2007 and they had been shortlisted for a big competition: to design a new highrise home on Hobson St for the Auckland City Mission.
Now they were in a room with a lectern and rows of chairs, all set out very formally. And the selection panel, they knew, was Establishment Auckland: the mayor was on it and so was the bishop, along with some big money types.
Lawson and Stevens also knew they were up against some of the biggest architectural firms in the city. The ones that do all the work for the Establishment. Whereas, these guys? Their partnership was only five years old and they’d never designed a tower block. They’d never even done a building that needed a crane.
For the mission to choose Stevens Lawson would be an enormous risk. So the architects embraced it. Before the panellists arrived, they rearranged the chairs into a circle. They had a large wooden model, which Lawson had been up the previous four nights making, and they stood it in the middle.
It meant that when the panel came in they had to reorient their thinking. And they were captivated by the model.
The late Rewi Thompson, an architect working with Stevens Lawson, did the mihi whakatau and talked up what good people they were. Stevens explained their idea: two strikingly designed residential towers, with the mission’s medical and other services at the base, along with a public courtyard and shops.
The mission believed the new building would need to include some kind of commercial operation, to pay for everything else. Car parking, perhaps, or apartments for sale or lease to the general public.
Stevens and Lawson also had Terry Gould with them. He’s a property developer and he’d done the numbers. He told the bishop and the mayor and their esteemed colleagues that their idea wouldn’t work. He went further. He said it shouldn’t work.
He said they should forget about all that complicated, compromising business stuff. It would always be a distraction. He challenged them: Why don’t you go with the vision? You know what you want. Nick and Gary and Rewi here, they’re offering you the chance to make it work.
The vision was Diane Robertson’s. She was the city missioner and she wanted to build homes for the homeless, with services available to help them heal and prosper. It’s called “Housing First” and it is, now, the world standard for dealing with chronic homelessness. Back in 2007, it was new and not well understood.
But here’s the thing about the Auckland City Mission. Despite having all the trappings of an Establishment religious charity, under Robertson it was committed to taking risks. Those people in that room believed in bravery. So did the board they represented.
They had $5 million in the bank: nothing in the scheme of things, but it was a start. And on the selection panel there was a man called Richard Didsbury. A property developer himself, a philanthropist, a risk taker. A man who did not believe Auckland should be prepared to tolerate chronic homelessness. A man who knows how to raise money.
Didsbury sat there, light bulbs popping in his head. He thought, “I know how to do this”.
Stevens Lawson Architects got the gig.
But that didn’t mean the whole thing was about to happen.
I WAS invited to write a book about HomeGround in June last year. I met Didsbury and the architects, on a day of such driving rain the water rose in the streets and everywhere you looked animals were lining up two-by-two, hoping to jump on a passing ark.
Or so it seemed. I walked through that biblical storm, arriving like a half-drowned cat, and sat there with these keen, expectant, highly impressive people, pretending I had my wits about me.
They didn’t throw me out. I knew a little about this project already: I’d been at the meeting in the rickety, rat-infested old mission building four years earlier, when Jacinda Ardern, still a new prime minister and just 10 days shy of giving birth, announced the Government funding that would allow it to proceed.
The architects had their model in the room that day, too, along with a lot of very excited mission staff and supporters.
Now, with me sitting there damply stewing, we agreed to begin the book. First, I would visit the building, then still a construction site, so I had personal experience of the project before I started on a long list of interviews.
I would deliver the manuscript in early January, in good time for the book to be published and available when Ardern returned to open the building in September.
Then came Delta. The new strain of Covid-19 swept the country that same month.
Covid had already slowed construction, through lockdowns, worker shortages and supply chain problems. Now it was doing it all over again.
For one Covid-related reason after another, I didn’t get into the building until February this year, when it was almost finished. Needing that first visit, I couldn’t start the interviews until this year, either.
IN 2007, while Stevens Lawson Architects drew up their plans and Didsbury put together his fundraising ideas, Robertson was busy promoting the virtues of Housing First.
The old view was that if you’re on the streets, you will need to prove your reliability before you can be trusted with an apartment. Clean yourself up and we’ll give you a place to live.
But if you’re an alcoholic, or you have mental health issues or you’ve been abused all your life, how are you going to do that?
Housing First says, here’s a home. You don’t have to be sober. You don’t have to stop drinking. But now you have a home, we can wrap the help you might need around you.
Jacqui Dillon, the mission’s head of health and social services today, puts it this way: “This building says, ‘You matter’.”
A lot flows from this: respect, love, medical and social services, opportunities to thrive. And it works.
The missioner who succeeded Robertson was Chris Farrelly. He pointed me to a five-year evaluation of Housing First in Brisbane, done by Queensland University. “The results were just outstanding, in terms of change of life, keeping people out of prison, healthwise, attendance at emergency departments, forming new relationships, getting jobs, all those things.”
All because they’d recognised the fundamental value of having a home.
By October 2008, the mission was ready: the philosophy in place, the plans approved, the building consented, the funding promises flowing.
And then? The global financial crisis came crashing down around them. Funding sources dried up and so did the general spirit of confidence. Everything got too hard. The plans were shelved.
But Ardern wasn’t the only politician who wanted the mission to succeed. Before her, Diane Robertson had been close to Bill English and he was a big fan.
It’s one of the remarkable things about Housing First: it enjoys genuine bipartisan political support. It’s a social policy that requires good funding, skilled and respectful intervention and loving support, and it works. And on the left and the right they know it.
HomeGround is the physical manifestation of this. There are 80 apartments with their own kitchenettes, bathrooms, beds, balconies and TV. A large dining room serves everyone who wants a meal and there’s a rooftop garden.
A laneway runs through the middle, joining Hobson St to the newly renovated top end of Federal St. It’s open to the public and provides access to the large medical centre, pharmacy, activities rooms, showers and toilets and a small chapel. A cafe and dental services are planned. Above them are two floors for “withdrawal services”, also known as detox.
Having all this together is a world first. Far more than 80 people use the services of the mission; those who don’t live here come in for the company, the meals, the help they need.
HomeGround is like a lighthouse in the city, one person told me. A mothership, said another.
NICK STEVENS and Gary Lawson always wanted to make their building beautiful. But that wasn’t their only goal.
They wanted to honour the mana whenua and to relate the building to St Matthew-in-the-City, the church next door. And they wanted to make an environmental statement.
Under the guidance of Graham Tipene from Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, they have a mauri stone under the front entrance. Throughout the building, stories of mana whenua are evoked in symbols, colours and patterns.
Tipene suggested naming each floor after a part of the natural world: ngahere, moana and so on. Artist John Reynolds painted murals to represent that and hand-painted the names and the numbers on all the doors.
If you stand outside and look up, you might see tukutuku patterning in the building’s diagonal exoskeleton. Or perhaps the roof lines will remind you of a wharenui. If you’re in the laneway, you might think of a cathedral. It’s our Big House, said Stevens.
Look closely in the stairwell and you can see the framing and even the stairs themselves are made from what looks like giant slabs of plywood. It’s cross-laminated timber, or CLT, a material becoming popular in Northern Europe but still quite new here.
The strength of the CLT frame allowed HomeGround to become the tallest wooden building in New Zealand. It will also have 80 per cent lower carbon emissions over the course of its life. Lawson told me that before long everyone will be using CLT and other timber products. “It’s the way of the future.”
Not that it was easy. There were arguments about the risk right down to the wire. They had to persuade the factory in Nelson to keep producing and then the truck carrying the very first load of CLT slabs skidded off the motorway into a ditch. “The stuff was spread for miles into the fields,” said Lawson.
I INTERVIEWED Richard Didsbury at his home near Snells Beach, where he has established the Brick Bay vineyard and sculpture walk. He had lots of information to give me, but beyond all that was his great sense of wonder: that people could come together to do this marvellous thing.
“It was just so gutsy,” he said more than once.
The board had recommitted to the project over 2015-2016, with the inspirational Bishop Jim White in the chair. Diane Robertson had retired and Farrelly was brought in: Farrelly and White would be the ones to lead the project to reality.
Stevens Lawson were recommissioned and board member Celia Caughey invited Didsbury back to work with her to raise the money.
They agreed early they couldn’t do it with a big general appeal. That would risk cannibalising the mission’s existing public appeals. And Didsbury was always keen not to limit himself to the usual suspects: the people most likely to give to galleries and theatres.
So they built a new list of donors, and kept them all anonymous. “There won’t be an honours board for this,” he told me. “It’s pure philanthropy. The people who gave for HomeGround hope their grandchildren don’t end up there, seeing their name on the wall.”
Most people they approached got it, although one said he would make a very generous contribution if they named the building after him. That didn’t fly.
The biggest single amount, Government excepted, came from Foundation North, the agency that dispenses funds for community projects in Auckland and Northland. The mission went in hoping for $5 million; the foundation told them to change it to $10 million.
It was the largest grant it had ever made and it gave others the confidence to get involved.
The board pushed the Go button at a meeting in the crypt at St Matthew’s. They were still well short of the necessary funds, but they knew they had to do it. What was the point of being the City Mission if they didn’t?
In the end, about half the $115 million they needed came from Government, in several tranches that started under National and continued with Labour. Fundraising found the rest. As the building got under way, companies all over the city donated services and materials or contributed their work at cost.
The city missioner today, Helen Robinson, likes to say it’s Auckland’s City Mission. HomeGround was built by a community far larger than most people who are part of it ever knew.
In March I went to visit Chris Farrelly, who lives in Whangārei Heads. We sat on his deck overlooking the beautiful harbour and he talked, quietly and urgently, about his time at the mission, the history of the project, the people who made it happen and the people it’s for. “Many of them are the most traumatised people in our society,” he said. “It’s easy to forget that.”
Farrelly retired before the building was finished, which is unusual, and handed over to Robinson. “Stay and cut the bloody ribbon?” he said. “I didn’t want to do that. She’s got to run the show.”
He said he got the idea watching the America’s Cup. “When they cross that start line, they’re already at full momentum. I wanted Helen and the team to have full momentum as they go into HomeGround.”
The official opening was in September, as planned, but the book was still at the printers and the PM was in London for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth.
IT WAS a privilege to work on HomeGround. To get to know, a little, an inspirational group of people who believed they could make a big impossible thing happen, so they did. A privilege too, to work with the fabulous photographer Mark Smith, who spent a lot of time in the building, falling in love with it, I think, and with the people in it.
For her skills and the love within her. Helen Robinson might just be my favourite Aucklander. She’s quite a speechmaker, too. At a powhiri to welcome detox centre workers, she said, “We stand with people who are desperate and we help them”. And, she said, “I declare our beauty, our history, our warmth, our light, our whakapapa and our vulnerability”.
I talked to Ivan Tepu, aged 57, Ngāti Rereahu, who lives at HomeGround. He’s an ex-truckie whose health has collapsed and he wonders if it’s because he played too much rugby when he was young. Though he also said, “I listened to the doctors and in the end I knew. Old. I’m getting old.”
Walking is hard for Ivan. Speaking Te Reo isn’t: he’s fluent. But being around other people is also hard. “I like making them think I’m a grumpy old bastard,” he said. Which may not be entirely true: he laughs a lot, tells great stories and is very good company.
And now he has a home. “Only one complaint,” he said. “The fire alarm goes off quite a bit and we have to walk down the stairs.” False alarms, someone having a laugh or getting pissed off about something. It’s true, I’ve been there when it’s happened.
Robinson told me that even while facing the challenges of making HomeGround work, she is also thinking about what’s next.
“We have 11 sites. HomeGround is not the mission, it’s a part of the mission. Our distribution centre in Grafton is totally not fit for purpose. It’s a warehouse to put 50,000 food parcels together and it’s leaking.”
I talked to Lisa-Marie Peerdemen, aged 53, Ngāpuhi, a bright kid ignored at school, “because we were Māori”, and a life of sexual abuse, violence, drugs, gangs and living on the street. Which she has survived.
She’s funny, angry, generous, indomitable.
“When I wasn’t cooking and cleaning,” she said, “I was a grease monkey. I used to restore vintage hot-rod motors. I have lots of abilities lots of men don’t have. Engineering, welding. Farming. I’ve done milking and calving, everything on a farm. I helped build a boat in Westhaven marina.”
She also said, “I’m tired of being hurt. Too many beatings, five miscarriages.”
Lisa-Marie helped set up the rooftop garden and is training to be a peer-support worker. HomeGround, she said, was “the safest place I’ve had since my Nan died”. That was 44 years ago.
Want to help Te Tāpui Atawhai Auckland City Mission? Want some help from them? Visit www.aucklandcitymission.org.nz
The 19-year-old disappeared without her wallet or mobile phone.