Just inside the entrance there's a small pounamu tile set into the floor. It was designed by Waiheke sculptor Anton Forde and it's a marker for what lies beneath: a mauri stone, selected by tā moko artist and public art adviser Graham Tipene. A repository for the life force of
'Everyone loves these guys': The City Mission comes home to HomeGround
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The Auckland City Mission's new HomeGround building on Hobson St. Photo / Dean Purcell
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Eighty people will live at HomeGround, with five of the 11 floors devoted to housing. Half of them are chronic rough sleepers, the other half are drawn from the social housing register.
Every resident will have their own apartment, with a bed, a TV, a kitchenette and their own bathroom. Thirty square metres, with a balcony providing another eight.
They'll get a cooked breakfast in the dining room and a bagged lunch to eat there or take away. And on site, access to all the support services they might want or need.
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This isn't casual shelter. HomeGround will be their home and they'll live there for as long as they want.
For some, that will be the rest of their lives. But from the overseas experience, says city missioner Helen Robinson, they expect a turnover of about 25 per cent a year. Some people leave when they reconnect with whanau and move back home. Some develop relationships and go to live with their partner. Some move away for work.
"Very few go back on the street."
This is "supported living" on a grand scale and the concept has a name: Housing First.
The idea is: it's very hard to help yourself and it's very hard for others to help you, if you don't have somewhere to live. So Housing First says that to get the best outcomes from medical, social and vocational services, start by giving the clients of those services a home.
It's not a new idea. Robinson says more than 1000 people have already been helped by Housing First schemes in several parts of the country. Kainga Ora is building another block nearby on Greys Ave.
But there's nothing else in New Zealand like HomeGround. This is the flagship.
"Chronic rough sleepers" are defined as people who've been on the streets for at least a year, or have spent four periods on the streets in the past three years. Many have addiction and mental health issues.
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Jacqui Dillon, who runs the mission's health and social services, says it's wrong to think of these people as vulnerable. "They need help, but they're incredibly resilient."
The mission's role, she says, is to be "an enabler".
And, says Robinson, "it starts with the dignity of the experience. Every person who walks in here should know they matter."
Dillon: "And that they will be seen and heard."
Robinson: "It's a place of belonging, for people who have often been told that they don't."
It's what we all want, really.
NICK STEVENS and his partner Gary Lawson, from Stevens Lawson Architects, designed the building to have the feel of an apartment block with a welcoming city street running through it at ground level.
"A laneway. Yes, we know," says Stevens. "Everyone says it now. In our defence, we did start calling it that 15 years ago."
The laneway is wide and runs from Hobson St right through to a generous staircase that takes you down to Federal St, which the council is busy converting to an elegant shared space.
On Hobson St, there's going to be a streetfront "social initiative cafe", with barista training and the like. Just now, though, the space has been commandeered for a Covid triage area.
Walk into the laneway and you come to a pharmacy. Off to the side there are showers and toilets for itinerant visitors. There's a long reception desk and beyond it a walk-in medical centre that will, they hope, soon include a dental service.
The mission has offered meals for those who want them for 36 uninterrupted years. That continues in the community cafe called Haeata, which has internal courtyards and can cater for 150 people.
And beyond that are workshop rooms that can be converted into a 100-seat theatre and are bookable by anyone who might want, say, to run an art class or do yoga.
HomeGround is a block away from the apartment monoliths of Nelson St. It's easy to think of this as "the CBD", but it's also in the heart of the largest and densest residential precinct, by far, in the country.
So it's a place for all its residential neighbours and the inner-city workers too: HomeGround offers the city a major expansion of amenities. That medical centre has been set up to cater for 3000 people.
It's also, on two of the upper floors, the new home for the city's principal detox centre, officially known as Managed Withdrawal Services.
One floor has the "medical" unit, with 10 hospital beds and a communal lounge, run by the Waitematā District Health Board on behalf of the city's three DHBs. This facility replaces Pitman House in Pt Chevalier.
The other floor handles "social" detox, with 15 beds: five more than in the Social Detoxification Centre in Avondale, which it replaces. There's a lounge here too, and a dining room where the clients are encouraged to help cook. Detox means therapy, medical help, counselling, social relationship work, life skills. Rehab.
POLITICAL SUPPORT for Housing First and HomeGround is long-standing and wide. They enjoy the support of all the parties now in Parliament and, as Robinson stresses, both National and Labour have been instrumental in raising the level of funding. Auckland Council has also provided valuable funding for HomeGround.
But it's not a New Zealand idea. The concept of intensely applying Housing First principles in a single location originated in New York under the name Breaking Ground and has since spread to several other cities in America and elsewhere.
Robinson says there are "six or seven" centres in Australia as well, under the name Common Ground. The mission here has worked closely with the Brisbane centre to develop HomeGround.
You can think of this project in terms of scale, beauty and potential.
The scale is perhaps most obvious in the basement garage, which has hydraulic car stackers, a large bike rack and a fast one-way in-and-out system for ambulances, food delivery and rubbish.
The beauty of the place, meanwhile, is in a ground-floor room called Te Manawa Ora, its exterior lined with kauri reclaimed from the old site and the interior featuring reclaimed totara. The ceiling is gently pitched and the walls will in time be covered in tukutuku panels. At one end, if you look closely, a brass cross, with long thin arms, has been set discreetly into the wood.
The mission is linked to the Anglican Church and Te Manawa Ora is a chapel of sorts, although it's not consecrated. But it does feel filled with spirituality. It's a wharenui in miniature, a quiet, beautiful room, near the Federal St entrance, accessible by anyone.
As for the potential of HomeGround, that's embodied on the top floor, which has an open courtyard with barbecue and raised gardening beds, just waiting to be transformed into a large urban vegetable garden. Those beds are climate controlled and they could probably grow tropical fruit.
There's also a fully appointed seminar room, which can be hired out, and a common room with computers and a large TV.
This floor belongs to the residents: it's for them and their guests. This is where they learn to live together.
"Part of the role of the mission is to model," says Dillon. "How to resolve conflicts, how to stay in relationships." They'll do a lot of that up here.
"Imagine carving workshops in this courtyard," says the mission's fundraising manager, Deb Ward. "Drama classes? It's a place to enable people to find their best lives."
There are balconies on the north wall of the building, strung with wires, waiting for tecomanthe to grow. That lovely native vine, with its white flowerheads and big shiny leaves: a green facade, looking across to the beautiful old stonework of St Matthew's.
HOMEGROUND HAS been a long time coming. An architectural competition was launched in 2006 and received 43 entries. They chose four finalists, including big local names, but the job eventually went to the small firm of Stevens Lawson in collaboration with the renowned Rewi Thompson.
Nicholas Stevens said at the time the proposal was "an inspired idea that really caught our imagination. It was bold in its vision and fresh in its thinking, an urban project with a strong ethical foundation."
It was, he said, exciting to be able to do much more than is usually asked of architecture. "Our team comprised architects, property developers, a vicar and a community worker, an uncommon collective with a common objective. The dialogue was fascinating and the dynamic proved very productive, having a theological, cultural and sociological reading of architectural ideas on hand."
It was also, at 12,500sq m, their biggest building, then and now. "By some measure," says Lawson.
He calls it a "once-in-a-career project". Stevens says "once in a hundred years".
But then came the global financial crisis of 2008 and everything ground to a halt. It's been a long, slow climb back, sadly marked in 2017 by the death of Rewi Thompson.
The only upside to the delay was that the architectural concept could evolve: the building is mostly framed with cross-laminated timber (CLT), making it the tallest wooden structure in the country.
CLT is planks of wood, glued together at right angles to form extremely strong sheets and beams. It's similar to plywood, except each piece is much thicker.
Although the base levels are concrete and steel, eight storeys are held up with wood. You can see the CLT throughout: in the structural pillars on the exterior walls and forming corners around the lift shaft. For each flight of the central staircase, the steps have been cut from a single sheet of CLT.
This building is a pathfinder: CLT will radically reduce the carbon emissions footprint of the construction industry.
The project also included the restoration of the old Prince of Wales pub, erected in 1882 and owned by John Logan Campbell. It now contains crisis care rooms, offices and meeting rooms. It's beautiful inside and out, all in gleaming white, with some original kauri features restored and a pressed tin ceiling recreated from a mould of the original.
A LOT of people have played vital roles in making HomeGround happen. Among them, especially, campaign chairman Richard Didsbury and his colleague Celia Caughey pushed the vision and led the fundraising. Dame Diane Robertson and then Sir Chris Farrelly, the previous city missioners, both championed the project throughout.
But it was Jim White who kicked it all off and inspired them to keep going. White was bishop of Auckland, chairman of the mission's board and "a serious progressive in the Anglican church", says Stevens.
He died last year and he alone has his name on the wall, in the form of a sign for the Bishop Jim White Room. "Everything else," says Stevens, "is named after a healing plant or something like that."
Behind those leaders, there's been an army. "The mission," says Helen Robinson, "is steeped in generosity. We see it every day. This place has been enabled by Aucklanders."
Stevens says he's been amazed by that generosity, all the furniture and equipment and services that have been either donated or provided at discounted rates.
"It never took any arm twisting with anything," he says. "Well, not much."
Just one example. The residential floors all have Māori names, which together make up the world: rangi, moana, whenua and so on. The painter John Reynolds donated a large mural for each floor, themed to those names, and then went round to every apartment and hand-painted the floor's name on each door.
Stevens: "You realise how warmly regarded the mission is in Auckland. Everyone loves these guys."
And now it's all on. The dining room Haeata opens today and the other services begin on Monday. Residents will be settled in over the next 10 weeks or so, in stages, and an official opening will follow soon after.
It was going to be last October and November, but Covid has meant delay upon delay. That's the story of everything right now. The story of our lives.
For some lives, though, the disruption has hit harder. The City Mission can't close up shop and ride it out.
Robinson: "Doing this is hard enough. Doing it in the context of Omicron is extremely tricky. A whole heap of extraordinarily hard work is going on and we're doing contingency planning for every part of it, all the time."
Still, they're all up on their toes with excitement now. This is architecture and healthcare, community service and crisis management, so many disciplines coming together to make a difference to homelessness. Crisis doesn't have to be neverending, lives can improve, when you do the job properly.
"Places like the mission," says Robinson, "say it doesn't have to be this way and here's an alternative."
Jacqui Dillon: "The building is such a statement of equity. We like to think we've kept the same generosity of spirit others have shown us, and the same commitment to our work we've always had. But this building brings a real chance for equitable access to housing, to health, to nutritional food, to all sorts of things."
"Chris Farrelly," says Robinson, "calls this an act of leadership."
