Worse, the user-friendly option of assisted home ownership tied people down and forced them to take pride in the care and upkeep of what was now their own castle.
Yes, these state houses in Auckland suburbs like Mt Roskill, Owairaka and Blockhouse Bay are now thankfully being on-sold for the thick end of $1 million - or in the case of the Orakei state houses, $2 million.
And good riddance to these burdens on the economy. Enlightened district offices of Housing New Zealand, as in Whanganui, are pro-actively front-footing the potential problem of state houses ever reaching comparable nuisance value by rightly dumping them before they fester on the body community.
Even more astutely, Housing NZ is keeping the front door of its Whanganui downtown office firmly closed.
And who can blame them? Goodness knows what riff-raff might actually turn up with all manner of outlandish requests concerning getting a roof over their tousled heads.
It's a shameful indictment of an uncaring community that taxpayer-waged local Housing NZ staff now have to slink in and out of the back door and wend circuitous routes through back alleys after dark in order to not provide state housing as per their job description.
Reports have even come in that a temporary alternative office has been set up in riverside shrubbery under the Aramoho rail bridge, although apparently staff are complaining about the lack of a fan heater.
But we don't pay Minister Paula Bennett a wage of Kardashian proportions for nothing. In a mistress-stroke of unalloyed brilliance, she has cut this Gordian knot and ushered in the brave new world of state ... of state, ahhh ... accommodation!
Yes, Government is kissing goodbye to the clunky old state housing model and embracing the now. Friends, welcome to our new corporation - Motelling New Zealand.
Today's go-ahead punters are voting with their wheels.
Nightly on the 6 o'clock news we see evidence of upwardly and horizontally mobile families wishing to never be too far removed from their vehicles - be it for dining, recreation, sleeping or possibly even for time-honoured reproductive purposes.
What an elegant solution to therefore channel all previous Housing NZ funding into the construction of state motel complexes.
We taxpayers are already forking out big-time for emergency accommodation in private sector motel units, so why not own them and lose the middle men?
The one Housing NZ staff member I managed to find under the Aramoho bridge (hunched over a damp driftwood fire) outlined the minister's thinking.
This is a way, he said/she said, of capitalising on today's families desire to stay flexible and responsive, able to uproot themselves at a moment's notice and whisk their kids into exciting strange new schools willy-nilly.
No more being tied down to the pesky tribulations of permanent housing.
People want the intimacy of 10-to-a-unit living, with unlimited access to free sachets of white sugar and instant coffee.
As we were talking, a watery sun broke through the leaden sky, shafting the desultory driftwood smoke with luminous rays.
Suddenly, I too could see a golden future of state motelling stretching far ahead, paving the highway to prosperity unit by unit ...
