Rubbish thrown from the apartment building has included burning cigarette butts. Photo / supplied
Rubbish thrown from the apartment building has included burning cigarette butts. Photo / supplied
Food, rubbish and burning cigarettes have been launched from an award-winning 20-level Auckland apartment tower, sparking a warning from management at the Freemans Bay Hereford Residences to stop, for fear of an accident.
“Owners and, where applicable, tenants are requested to please take more care and avoid [disposing] throwing ofany items from their apartments, which affects units below you.
“We have received a complaint regarding food, rubbish and cigarette buds [sic] being thrown from apartments onto lower decks and in one instance burning a hole in a resident’s canopy this past week,” the 8 Hereford Committee wrote.
John Gray of the Home Owners & Buyers Association told the Herald it was “revolting to discharge cigarettes and whatever over the balcony. We’ve seen this sort of thing before and it’s the inadequacies of the body corporate rules which often mean this sort of behaviour can’t be stopped. This should be banned in the rules,” he said.
Public amenities like footpaths and roads could be affected and he is worried about people’s safety.
Rubbish is being thrown from higher levels of the Hereford Residences.
“The possibility of damage to people and property is a risk. The body corporate needs to consider its obligations under the Health and Safety Act.”
A burning cigarette butt could cause a fire within the tower if it landed on a deck below, with serious consequences and potential financial loss, he said.
Gray knew of one North Shore block where teenagers threw bottles from decks without thinking about the consequences.
He wrote body corporate rules for a Queenstown terraced housing block that he said protected owners and residents “even down to not planting plants that were potentially injurious to people’s health in terms of allergens”.
Hereford Residences’ body corporate chairman Chris Freke said objects being thrown over the side of balconies did not occur that often.
“There are however 120 or so apartments in the building and so there is the odd instance of anti-social behaviour from time to time. It’s hard to identify offenders in this sort of case as there are no external CCTVs covering the building with sufficient resolution to pick them up. So we tend to send out a message just reminding all residents to have better regard for their neighbours,” Freke said.
The Auckland tower is at 8 Hereford St, between Hopetoun St and Karangahape Rd, and is home to civic and media personalities.
In 2018, the tower won the Asia Pacific Property Award for best residential development. A year before that, it won the Trends international design award.
Marketing for Hereford Residences showed this pool, not yet built.
Hereford Residences also won a Property Council multi-unit residential excellence award. The conversion project was by developers Tawera Group.
Units are marketed as sophisticated and contemporary, sometimes selling in the millions and the building has a spectacular rooftop pool.
The block is the conversion of 15-storey offices into a 20-storey mixed-use development, including 14 levels of luxury apartments, four floors of car parking and two floors of office space.
The ex-commercial office building was familiar to many Aucklanders because it had a revolving restaurant on the top floor.
Victopia workers in action after a large panel was blown off in a storm in 2019. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
In 2019, a panel blew off the high-rise Victopia apartments on the corner of Victoria St and Nelson St. No one was hit but traffic was diverted.
This week’s Hereford warning follows problems in March at the inner-city 57-level $300 million The Pacifica between Commerce St and Gore St.
Found inside The Pacific: ceiling vibrator or thumper. Photo / supplied
Management sent out a concierge notice in March, apologising for problems on level 42 and 43 but residents say people on other floors have suffered stifling conditions within the double-glazed glass-clad tower.
“We understand how frustrating and difficult having no air conditioning during summer must be,” the concierge’s March 3 notice said.
A resident said temperatures inside soared into the 30s. Chris Ivers, body corporate chair, told the Herald: “There have been some outages. These are being worked on.”
It was also that block where an electric humming vibrator designed to upset neighbours operated for about a month and drove locals “just about insane” before it was discovered and disabled, a resident says.
A photo of the deviceshowed it jammed between two books and the top of an internal window, high up in the tower.
* Anne Gibson has been the Herald’s property editor for 23 years, having won many awards, written books and covered property extensively here and overseas.
