Dialogue: Auckland planners must think beyond cheek-by-jowl dwellings

By ALAN SUTTON*

When I arrived here from the north-east of England 17 years ago, most New Zealanders were proud they didn't have terraced houses, tenement flats, high rises or semi-detached houses.

After all, they needed space to park their boats and their cars, and to have their barbecues. I agreed with them, even though their assumption that everyone from Britain lived in Coronation St-style housing was incorrect.

Times have certainly changed since then. Washing machines, television sets and cars are no longer classed as luxury goods and are recognised as necessities. They are readily available and do not have to be ordered from overseas. They can even be bought on Saturdays and Sundays.

This is all a plus. Not so is the way that the housing market has gone. During the early to mid-1990s, a lot of large, good-quality homes were built in upmarket areas of Auckland. This trend now seems to have reversed and new housing is becoming cramped. Little boxes and flats are cropping up everywhere.

Has everyone forgotten about the Great Fire of London and the Bubonic Plague? Are there not lessons to be learned from history?

These disasters were caused by the poor town planning which allowed high-density housing and cramped living conditions. Added factors were inadequate water and sewerage systems and almost non-existent health care, together with a lack of parking space for horses and carriages.

When the Great Fire burned London to the ground, at least it killed off the plague. It also gave a lot of work to unemployed architects, craftsmen and master builders (luckily there were no consultants in those days).

The planners had learned their lesson about cross-leasing, and started to construct fine buildings with character, quality and pride, using craftsmen and quality materials.

In England things went along reasonably well for about another 280 years or so. In the years following the Second World War, however, there was a housing shortage and the great thinkers decided to start building high-rise flats.

Some people who were living in the quality-built houses of the early 1900s, which were spacious but had no inside toilets and suffered from rising damp, jumped at the chance to live in the trendy, high-rise flats.

They did not have to waste time in the garden because there wasn't one.

A generation grew up in the flats, then watched them turn into slums.

Finally, 30 years after moving into them, some were jumping off the top of the flats.

The authorities did a few experiments, using rats, and concluded that having families live in such box-like conditions was not a good idea after all.

Councils eventually started to demolish most of the early and some of the recent high-rises and most of the old tenement blocks.

It's strange how many times history can repeat itself without anyone taking any notice until it is too late. Auckland's sewage system is 100 years past its use-by date and cannot cope. It needs complete rebuilding. There is a possibility of water shortages.

We have an unreliable electricity system, a dilapidated transport system and inadequate hospital, police and fire services.

Even the introduction of the Resource Management Act has not been able to stop the ever-spreading disease that is covering Auckland faster than gorse. As the old song had it, "Little boxes on a hillside and they are all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same."

Go to Albany and have a look around. Little boxes are everywhere. The Panmure Highway and Ellerslie are the same, crammed full of them. They are sprouting up all over town. They are on the waterfront. They are down gullies. They are on stilts. What are they? Studios, apartments, units, suites, one-bedroom villas, town houses or Lilliputian villages. Cream ones, brown ones, lemon ones, lime-green ones. A labyrinth of little barracks.

After the war, such buildings were called prefabs - prefabricated temporary accommodation. Have we gone full circle or have we gone mad?

Some of the dwellings in the city are no bigger than pigeon lofts; some of the site cabins where they are being built are more attractive than the dwelling themselves. Some look like mock Hollywood film sets and are built accordingly - construction ply, chicken mesh and plaster.

There seems to be masses of advertising pushing them. Some on the water were described as luxury apartments. They looked more like Alcatraz.

An advertisement for another claimed that "New Zealand hasn't seen anything like this." It was supposed to resemble large yachts or something nautical. The only thing it resembled was a block of high-rise flats I saw in 1978 while passing through the steel town of Newcastle in South Africa. These flats were used as bulk accommodation for hundreds of steel workers.

Who is going to buy all these people-storage units? More people have left New Zealand this year than came here. The yuppies have moved on. The old folk are happy in their swish new retirement homes.

They must be building the boxes for the new-age guys and gals or single workers without pets, cars or king-size beds. There is no room to bring up a family in them.

What about the future? If the average target age of the would-be box-dwellers is about 30, imagine Auckland in 20 years. The box-dwellers will have families and will have moved out into more spacious accommodation, leaving space for students and squatters.

By now the not-so-maintenance-free construction ply and chicken mesh will have weathered significantly. Some of the silicon and gap fillers used in abundance will have shrunk and deteriorated.

All the boxes, especially the light-coloured ones, will look shabby and be known as slums and sell for less than their original price.

Do we really need them?

* Alan Sutton is a freelance writer from Albany.