Escape from the ghetto

The Government is about to spend millions of dollars on state housing. CHRIS BARTON looks at what the new tenants will be getting

Housing minister Steve Maharey is wearing a sharp suit and quietly pleased attitude. He looks like a real estate auctioneer, but what he's selling is an idea - the Government's new social vision.

"As you can see, these are good new homes," he tells the assembled throng - staff from the Waitakere City Council and Housing New Zealand, representatives of social agencies, and the media.

Indeed they are. Solid brick-and-tile construction two-bedroom units with a ranch-slider from the living/dining area to a deck or courtyard and a garage - just like private units you find everywhere around Auckland. We're at Regents Park Place, Westgate, at the end of the Northwestern Motorway - a newish suburb of brick-and-tile housing as far as the eye can see, so the 24 units for the elderly blend in well.

It's hard to believe these are state houses, but that's how they want it. Housing New Zealand chief executive Helen Fulcher tells me the one-size fits all, mass-produced state housing is long gone: "There's no one state housing design - you won't find that in what we are building now and what we've been building in the past few years."

Since the early 90s, Housing NZ has been building homes like those at Regents Park, contracting out the design and construction.

Architect and development planning manager John Tocker calls it "design by remote control" - supplying contractors with a range of control documents and design guides. He's comfortable with the notion of an unrecognisable state house: "People ask me what I do for a job and I say, 'Have you noticed any state houses getting built lately?' and they say, 'No' - and then I say, 'Well I'm doing my job'."

Maharey avoids the "state" word, preferring the jargon of the times - "social housing" for people in need. Today he's spelling out details of an extra $126 million funding over three years to provide an extra 500 homes in Auckland. Combined with existing funding, that means 2406 state homes will be added in Auckland over the period.

Nationally, about $834 million will be spent over the next three years on additional or improved housing. It's all part of Labour's programme to redress the sell-off of some 13,000 state houses by the previous National-led Government. When Labour took power in 1999, it also scrapped National's 1991 market rents policy and reinstated income-related rents, meaning eligible state house tenants pay no more than 25 per cent of their income in rent.

But while the money - about $190 million this year for housing in Auckland, and nearly $600 million over the three years - shows state housing is very much part of the Government's agenda, the architecture tells another story.

This is a policy of state housing by camouflage - an architecture that is uneasy about stigmatising or even identifying the poor and needy and perhaps anxious about the role of welfare in 21st-century New Zealand.

It's in marked contrast to the the time when the state house, defiantly utilitarian, stood proud in the landscape - testimony to the welfare state in action.

Regents Park is the ultimate expression of an assimilation policy begun in the 70s known as "pepper potting". The units have been leased for 10 years from the developer, which in turn has sold the units to investors who get a guaranteed rental.

"Our leasing product and working with developers who've got land in different parts of Auckland means we're able to scatter houses around in a variety of locations," says Fulcher. It also avoids the up-front capital costs of building and allows Housing New Zealand to exit the development in the future.

"I think what we're trying to do is avoid marginalising our tenants and our customers," says Tocker. "There are always going to be people who require help. And the people who require the most help are those who are trying to transition from one stage to the next - as in having no home to having a rental home and having a rental to having a home that they own."

The incognito state house is all over Auckland, as we discover, when senior planner Stuart Bracey takes us for a tour. But the sprinkling of social housing among communities is not without problems.

Invariably the community objects with a variety of concerns - noise, crowding, property values, building quality and so on - all indirectly saying "not in my backyard".

Take 580 Hillsborough Rd. Bracey says the only way to mollify neighbourhood opposition was to change the three-level "tilt-slab construction" apartment-style buildings - originally designed with three bedrooms for families - to two-bedroom, elderly-only units.

At Oates Rd, Glen Eden, there were similar objections. No one, it seems, wants state-run family accommodation in their street. But in that case Housing NZ pushed on with the 11 three-bedroom and 14 two-bedroom two-storey units, making only cosmetic design changes.

"We got some more variety in the street frontages - those kind of things were done to allay concerns that they would all look the same."

Walking around the units, it's hard to see what the fuss was about. They're typical of medium-density unit developments all over Auckland - except that they're probably better designed and constructed and less likely to leak.

Of the 6293 units built since 1990, Housing NZ has identified 454 as potential leaky buildings. But closer inspections so far have been encouraging. Of the 158 (296 still to go) looked at, only seven have raised further concerns.

Next stop is Exminster St, Blockhouse Bay. Two rows of severely dilapidated and substandard bedsits are some of the 1542 pensioner dwellings Housing NZ acquired from Auckland City in 2002. The boarded-up eyesore is due for demolition and Bracey knows there'll be considerable interest in, and no doubt objections to, plans for the site.

At Talbot Park, Point England, the state house in a variety of traditional forms is unavoidably present. Here three-storey "star block" flats sit in clusters of three among two-storey, weatherboard-clad multi-units and some stand-alone houses. A legacy of the early 60s and a lower-cost housing policy, this is both state-house heaven and hell.

On the one hand it's an unashamed architectural statement of socialist policy - housing for the people. On the other it's a ghetto of poverty and social problems.

Talbot Park is getting a makeover. The star blocks are being refurbished, new roads and parks are being formed and the multi-units and other housing will be removed. In their place will be a model of urban design and new stealthy state house forms - apartments, duplex units, terraced and semi-detached housing. With 108 star flat units and 97 new homes, density will increase by 38.

If Housing NZ pulls it off, it will be a triumph of the architecture of disguise. An entire state-housing estate will in effect disappear - blended in to look like any modern, medium-density development.

But community renewal requires a much more interactive approach. Leading the charge at Talbot is community development manager David Zussman - regularly consulting the people who live there and community groups and agencies, developing work opportunities for some as the redevelopment progresses and managing like a benevolent landlord. Zussman believes the change is under way - noticeable in the tidiness of the properties and the decline in tagging.

The Talbot renewal also deals with the problem of providing locations for family and extended family accommodation, which is not as easily pepper potted into other suburbs as one and two-bedroom units.

Some of the demand for five-bedroom units - espoused in more detail in Housing's Maori and Pacific design guides - is being dealt with by infill housing, usually on existing standalone state housing sections. But as Bracey points out, it's a short-term solution. "You can only do so much before you run out of backyards."

Talbot Park will also demonstrate how to address the refurbishment needs of many of Housing's 63,500 state homes - especially those mass produced in the 60s with lower-cost materials.

Generally the housing is of a good standard and worth keeping. Many of the multi-units are relocated to rural areas where they are renovated with low-cost labour through work programmes.

The star blocks also have good bones. Their raised timber floors on top of concrete slabs mean they don't transmit noise and their good vertical riser ducts make them easy to retrofit. "It would be profligate to tear them down and start again," says Tocker.

The blend-in strategy brings with it landscaping, fencing, decks and courtyards - the indoor/outdoor flow so much a part of New Zealand housing, but so often lacking in the shelter-box designs of the multi-units and star blocks. But it all has to happen within Government budget constraints. It costs, on average $145,000 to $195,000 to build two- to four-bedroom properties, excluding land and development expenses.

Inevitably that leads to a modest design. The bedrooms in the Regents Park units seem awfully small. Similarly the new balconies on the star flats are a basic - some would say mean - addition.

"We build houses to supply our particular market and to protect the investment," says Tocker. "You try to get the best bang for the buck so we try to build houses that are robust, have predominantly low maintenance and that have inherent flexibility in their use."

Combined with assimilation by pepper potting, that tends to rule out cutting-edge design as too risky - resulting in a simple, bland aesthetic.

"State housing is pretty risk averse as a portfolio," says Tocker. " I think we try to have the beauty of the design in the way we use the money rather than to shout it from the rooftops."

It's a perfectly reasonable approach to needs-based social housing. But looking back at some of the finer examples of state house style - the houses so readily snapped up by buyers when they come on the market, the Dixon St flats in Wellington and the Symonds St flats in Auckland - one can't help wondering whether in this new era, we'll ever see state house architecture again.

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