Here and there one can see little outbreaks of "informal" housing in New Zealand, but generally the state's housing regulations repress it.
Recently, on the motorway to Auckland Airport, I observed rows of houses where the existing garages had been unofficially converted to second homes reminiscent of what you might see in the Pacific Islands.
Earlier this century I was driving over the Waione Bridge in the Hutt Valley when I spotted a ramshackle group of sheds around a small lagoon. They appealed to my builder's eye, so I went to investigate.
These boatsheds, it transpired, went back decades before the New Zealand Company settlers arrived. Before the Treaty of Waitangi, the sealers and whalers had used the lagoon as a base from the late 1700s and there was a commercial boatyard there in the 1820s.
It turned out the oldest and most rotten boatshed was for sale, so I shot into the Hutt City Council where I was told that the council would only agree to transfer the licence to occupy (it was on a public reserve) if I agreed to demolish and rebuild.
If that was the case, could I replace the single-storey boatshed with a two-storey structure, like the one next to it, I asked? The council agreed and a town planning arrangement was sealed with a handshake over the counter. Completing the paperwork took nearly as long as it took me to build my new boatshed.
The use change from a single storey to two storeys required an official consent. The boatsheds were now in a listed heritage zone and I had to get approval from a heritage consultant.
The building permit process then ran into the myriad of regulations imposed by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) but I was able to play my ace card -- I was building a shed, not a house. Fortunately, I managed to slip in just before MBIE changed the regulations making it that only licensed building practitioners were allowed to build.
The Hutt City Council, at all levels, was helpful throughout. Owners had to agree that the boatsheds were not for habitation but they turned a blind eye to people staying the occasional night.
Because my proposed design had two poles below mean high tide in the "coastal management zone" administered by the Greater Wellington Regional Council, I had to apply for yet another resource consent. Big mistake.
It turned out the regional council had an officer in charge of stopping people living in boatsheds and she didn't even know about the 20 boatsheds in the Hutt River.
When she discovered that my neighbour had built a deck over the water without a permit she made him demolish it -- for which he blamed me.
The regional council then declined my consent because my structure had "the potential to be lived in".
Technically, the regional council was making a decision outside their area of jurisdiction, but I got around them by shifting the poles to just above the high tide mark and out of their coastal management zone.
In the end, I managed to shoehorn a (fully serviced) habitable structure onto a piece of public land for a bit over $30,000 (not counting my labour).
If you want to solve the housing crisis, leave it to the local authority, not the regional councils or the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, I reasoned.
MBIE (a National Government creation) no longer sees housing as shelter; instead it is working for the banks and the building materials suppliers, not homeowners or those simply seeking shelter.
�When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller. In his spare time, he is co-chairman of the Whanganui Musicians' Club.
