Back in the days when I had a house, it was right next to Wellpark College, a place where students of all ages studied natural medicine and the like. They were good neighbours. People who are dedicated to studying massage and aromatherapy and naturopathy are gentle souls, in the main. There was one bats**t crazy woman of a certain age who clearly needed someone in her class to realign her chakras when she started yelling and ranting that we shouldn't have two car parks, that it was just greedy and she was going bankrupt paying parking fees. But she was not the norm.
The students were, in the main, gentle young men, clear-eyed women with lovely skin and the odd red-robed Buddhist. When the college was sold, we were dreading what would happen next. It was a huge block of land stretching a block from one street through to another. The site was close to public transport, close to town and close to shops and supermarkets.
Grey Lynn had traditionally been home to the halt, the lame and the dispossessed – when we moved to the street 20 odd years ago, there were two halfway homes and a brothel on the corner. We felt right at home. The gentrification of Grey Lynn is only relatively recent, so it would have made sense to put social housing on the lot and it would have made sense to put a lot of it.
We weren't averse to that – the only thing we were worried about was that an apartment building would look straight down on to our backyard. Over the years we'd been there, we'd put in a lovely garden and a swimming pool and the idea of being on display didn't appeal. But if the only reason for objecting to a social housing development was that we didn't want people looking in our backyard, it didn't seem a good enough reason.