For years, the Oceanic Hostel in downtown Auckland was one of the city’s worst flophouses, full of bedbugs and used syringes. Things are slowly getting better, writes Steve Braunias.
The first thing to notice about the Oceanic Hostel, a three-storey, 120-room joint on the lower slopes of Anzac Ave in downtown Auckland, was a row of 21 bottles of booze on a window ledge.
Wine, spirits, beer; the morning light caught the glass, and the glint looked quite cheerful, and made it a pretty sight, but the reality behind that powerful thirst was likely something sick and dirty, more dead than alive.
One of the tenants arrived at the front door. She looked familiar, too; she was barefoot, with long grey hair. She walked with a slow and medicated step. It was when she turned to face the street that recognition kicked in: she sometimes begs further down the road, lying sprawled on the pavement outside a burger and sushi bar.
The bottom end of Anzac Ave has long been a deserted, kind of hostile place, nowhere anyone lingers, with a very wide street, the Walker & Hall diamond showroom, and a dark and narrow Asian food hall.
The police know it pretty well. Quite a lot of their interest is due to the Oceanic. It's operated as a boarding house for about 23 years and for much of that time it's built up a well-deserved reputation as a complete dive.
Violent incidents and drunken behaviour have been constant, and so have complaints from residents about the filth.
One guy who stayed there, Jevan Bowley, who plays in heavy metal bands, set up a lively Facebook page in May 2011, titled SHUT THE OCEANIC HOSTEL DOWN. He appeared in a few stories at the time, basically saying the place was unhygienic and dangerous, and that management didn't give a stuff.
His Facebook page inspired comments from visitors and guests, such as, "Your health could be compromised by staying there ... The owners should not be allowed to operate in this country ... The building should be busted ... It's a rathole and should be knocked down by a crane with all the crackhead losers and rude, idiotic, greedy and callous management. This place is despicable".
A petition to close the Oceanic was created in April 2015. It attracted 11 signatures, and fizzled out.
Meanwhile, complaints to Auckland City Council continued to mount up. In July 2011, inspectors saw food waste and dirt on the kitchen floor, the toilets and showers were "unsatisfactory", and hand basins had no soap or towels.
Evidence of bedbugs prompted council to order the owners to fumigate the place. There were similar complaints and inspections in August 2012, December 2014, and two in January 2016.
The Oceanic Hostel at 79 Anzac Ave in Auckland City is cleaning up room by room. Picture / Greg Bowker
Grant Barnes, general manager of licensing and compliance services at council, summarised the recent history: "These complaints were all raised by residents about the general state of uncleanliness, unhygienic conditions and the presence of cockroaches. With each complaint we found grounds to take action, requiring the operator to improve conditions.
The frustration here was that the improvement was only short-term and the property went back into an unsatisfactory condition."
Maybe the hassle of council inspections, or the widespread reputation he earned as a slum landlord had got to him; in any case, the former manager sold the business in February last year.
The new guy in charge is Ted Chen, 38, who came to New Zealand from China 16 years ago. He has worked as a cameraman, and owned a dairy in Newmarket.
Now he lives at the Oceanic, where he collects rent from about 100 tenants; a sign on the wall at reception advises there are separate rates, one for rooms with a window and one for rooms without a window. The cheapest long-term rate is $165 a week.
Yes, said Ted, the place still has problems with bedbugs. Yes, he said, the place still has problems with violent residents - just last week he had to evict a guy who got drunk, and went for another tenant. But he was trying to improve things, to make the place better.
The interview with Ted had to be delayed while he lashed a couple of foul mattresses to the back of his 4WD; two rooms had become empty, and he was throwing out the garbage.
He's also routinely ripped out carpets, got the painters in, made repairs. "We got three levels and we can't just clean it all up overnight, but we are not dirty."
Ted was asked, "Is this a moral issue for you? Is it a matter of wanting to do the right thing?"
Such talk was a nonsense. Ted was a practical man. He said, "What is right and what is wrong? I don't know these things. Our job is providing a clean place."
ALMOST CERTAINLY the very worst boarding house in Auckland - the most dilapidated, the most vile, the most crawling with really big rats - was recently exposed in the Weekend Herald, complete with moody photographs of the St Joseph's lodge at 454 Great North Rd in Grey Lynn.
A council inspection led to an order for the owner, Rentyn Turner, to immediately fumigate, clean, and generally restore some level of human decency to the hovel.
A separate and subsequent threat from Housing Minister Nick Smith's office to prosecute continues to hang over Turner; the case has been referred to investigators from the Tenancy Compliance and Investigations Team.
Ever since the story appeared, Turner has been spending a lot more time at the lodge, supervising the arrival and loading of three skip bins. The second bin was topped with a mattress even more squalid than the ones Ted Chen took out of the Oceanic.
Informed of the attempt to tidy the place up, Chris Farrelly of the Auckland City Mission rather gasped, "Oh! Really? That's - that's just - that is so good. It's phenomenal, isn't it. I think what your article did - it's like it turned the lights on.
And one of the challenges of the story was that it sent a message to places like St Joe's and others like them: clean up your act. You don't have to create a palace, but create something that's clean and safe."
The council's Grant Barnes confirmed that Turner has complied with requirements. "We are very pleased with his response so far, and his acknowledgement of the problem."
New manager Ted Chen in the kitchen/dining room at the Oceanic Hostel. Picture Greg Bowker
He also said, "What we've seen and what you've seen indicates chronic issues that will take some time to resolve satisfactorily."
Inspectors arranged to meet Turner at the property, and have taken before-and-after photographs. "Subsequent visitations," said Barnes, in his comically formal way, "will be unannounced."
There are about 130 boarding houses in wider Auckland. Some, such as St Joseph's and the Oceanic, are considered by the City Mission as places of last resort for the homeless.
They're the only affordable option for people down on their luck, on P, on meds, on bail. Barnes said, "Most of the boarding houses we inspect show a high level of compliance.
The non-compliance we sometimes see is usually in terms of fire safety requirements - a fire door that's non-functional, or smoke alarms that aren't working. But St Joseph's stands out on its own.
"I'm just going to call out a question." Barnes then got all informal, almost casual. "Hey, Mervyn. St Joe's, St Joseph's, was one of the worst we've seen, eh.
"Yeah. He's nodding his head. My officers were frankly appalled by the conditions they saw. I can't think of a boarding house that is anywhere close to what you observed."
But what about the Oceanic? Barnes ran through its poor record before it changed hands, and said there's been one complaint since, in February, when a resident alleged there were bedbugs.
Council went in and didn't find any. The woman had left the hostel; Ted and his team went in and sprayed.
Barnes said, "We found the property itself to be in a good state of cleanliness, hot water was operating, and we cited pest control records that demonstrated operators were keeping up with their obligation. So we're very pleased with where the new management is at. It's a good outcome."
THERE'S ALWAYS someone milling around on Anzac Ave outside the Oceanic. There was Josh, a big, strapping fellow, 28, who wore a grey Knight's league hoodie.
He was born in Rarotonga and went to school at Mt Albert Grammar; he moved to Australia, "and then I got mixed up in stuff and was deported".
His first stop off the plane home was the Oceanic. He'd visited a friend there six years ago and remembered it was cheap, also that it was rough as hell.
"Oh man, it was bad then. When they showed me my room, you got to ask yourself, 'What the f*** am I doing here? How did I end up in a place like this?'"
They were good questions. What was his answer? "I had nowhere else to go," he said. "It was my last resort."
Josh moved in six months ago. What was his assessment?
"I got it good here. Power, water, good kitchen - I got a TV in my room. It's changed a lot, eh, for the better. Ted's doing a good job. You need anything, he's there straight away, 24 hours."
His rent was $220. He was with an attractive woman in a polka-dot dress. How was life? "Well," he said, "I'm still trying to pick myself up."
Also on Anzac Ave outside the hostel was Stephanie, 24, bare-legged and wearing a long black Kathmandu jacket. She's lived at the Oceanic for eight months, and said, "I love it. I love it here. It's just like home."
That was a startling remark to make of a place which routinely houses dead-beats and the mentally ill, but then she said, "My mum used to live here. But she left me here and went to live in West Auckland, its better for her out there. She's a diabetic."
When she first arrived, from Hamilton, fights and drunkenness were common. "Bro, if you'd come here then you'd of seen it all. But Ted's getting better people in. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this place. I don't wanna move, this is ideal."
The rooms are along long, thin corridors. They are really just cells. Joe Cao, at front desk, opened up an empty room that had just been cleaned. It had a single bed in it, a table and chair, a closet, and a small frameless mirror on the wall.
It was pointed out to Joe that the room was very small. Joe looked around the room. There wasn't much to look at. Finally, he said, "It's not big."
Downstairs, in the basement, was the lounge and kitchen. Charles, 39, long-haired and giggly, was frying up potatoes, carrots, kumara and baked beans at one of five gas stoves.
He said he'd been homeless, sleeping beneath Grafton Bridge: "It's very warm there. And if you don't want to be seen or heard, it's a good place. So I was okay." Winz sent him to the Oceanic four months ago.
"I heard bad things about it. But for me, it's been good. I've met a lot of people. Good people. We can watch TV any time of day, can cook anytime you want." He was about to enter detox for eight weeks. "They're gonna keep my room for me. That's good."
Bill Perry, 73, a tenant for about a year now, had come down to the kitchen to cook some chicken stir-fry. He had the ingredients in a plastic bag, and in his other hand was a frying pan.
He was a tall Maori man, elegantly dressed, a dude perhaps; a Waikato house painter in his working days, he'd drifted to Waiheke, but things went bad there one morning.
"I woke up and felt woozy. Next thing they've choppered me to the hospital. They gave me something and it knocked me out, and I woke up seven days later.
"I still don't know what I went in for."
The Oceanic, he said, was okay. "Not too bad. They're in the process of cleaning it up. But this," he said, jerking his thumb at a young woman asleep on a couch at 11 in the morning, "is what you've got to live with."
Sometimes he goes to a daughter's house in Mt Wellington for dinner. Other outings include the fortnightly South Auckland country music club. He said his guitar was in his room. He led the way.
It was a windowless cell, dark, with an army blanket on the mattress, a pack of three Big Ben pies on the floor, an iron on top of the closet, and a white plastic coathanger hanging off a pedal steel guitar.
The remains of the day, the end of the road. A question hung in the air like the white coathanger: How had it come to this? But then he picked up his black Ibanez electric guitar, and played.
Live at the Oceanic, a brown-eyed, handsome man - he was like the ghost of the recently departed Chuck Berry. In fact he used to play rock 'n' roll, but he switched to country. What style? Perry smiled, and answered: "Nashville."
He said it with real pleasure, scratching at his arm bitten by bedbugs. The word was like a magic spell, a flash of silver and gold. "Yep," he repeated, in the windowless room on Anzac Ave, "Nashville".
