Rudman's city: Savage's state housing dream takes a hiding

By BRIAN RUDMAN

The photo of first Labour Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage lugging furniture into the first state house in 1937 is one of the classic political images of our history.

It encapsulates one of the cornerstones of Labour's welfare programme, the provision of affordable, quality housing for "working New Zealand families."

Sixty years on, poor old Savage must be twirling around in his Bastion Pt grave at the antics of his successors.

Over in Mt Eden, current Prime Minister Helen Clark has joined in the community clamour against a big new boarding house for itinerants, while out west her colleagues, Justice Minister Phil Goff and Titirangi MP David Cunliffe are leading the fight against new state housing developments in their electorates.

For the inheritors of Savage's dream, it is not a good look.

In the case of the Mt Eden development one has to sympathise with Helen Clark and the 99 other objectors. The private developer claimed to be building a 61 bedroom, non-permanent accommodation block for upmarket clientele. This was to go alongside an existing boarding house holding 27.

The reality was somewhat different. There were not even en suite toilet facilities - something even prisons now provide. Cooking, toileting and lounging is all communal. What was proposed was a huge halfway house with little or no supervision.

I'm as wet and soft-centred as they come, but I would have objected too.

Long-time Labour Party activist Jill Amos summed up the opposition in her objection. "Years ago planners realised that many state houses lumped together is not the way to develop housing sites. This development makes the same error - too much of the same thing on one site."

But, how much is too much?

Out in the Lynfield uplands of Mr Goff's Roskill electorate, the answer is 40 terraced houses. Further West in Glen Eden, they are leaping up and down over just 29.

In Lynfield, more than 500 angry locals turned out to a public meeting. In Glen Eden last Sunday, 400 came to shout and yell. The resolutions from both, as announced in statements from the MPs, were suitably high-minded, full of concern for the effect on low-income families with young children, of living in new terraced housing.

Given the horror stories we have read about overcrowding and the poor, my guess is that the effect of such an imposition would bring grins of delight to the new tenants.

In Glen Eden, the issue has been obscured by the issue of the vanishing supermarket. The new state houses will occupy the site of the existing Three Guys supermarket. Shoppers will have to go to Three Guys' sister supermarket, Foodtown, in nearby Kelston. The protester claim that they have been kept in the dark. The fact is, the property has been on the market - informally at least - for at least two years.

As Waitakere mayor and Labour Party president Bob Harvey observed sagely at Sunday's fiery meeting, if his Glen Eden neighbours had shopped more diligently at Three Guys in the past, then it would not be closing and there would be no state housing to fret over.

Of course, losing a local supermarket, even one as rundown as Glen Eden's, is a worry for the less mobile. But my spies suggest the mood was less pro-supermarket and more anti-state housing.

One articulate chap alluded to the 29 new houses by declaring, "I don't want 29 piles of s*** on my driveway." Another held up a sign reading "Glen Eden" with the Eden crossed out and replaced with "Innes."

For most of us, the difference between the two Glens is purely geographic. But I guess even Westies have the need to look down on someone.

Mr Goff and Mr Cunliffe have both fired off letters to their colleague, Housing Minister Mark Gosche, calling for the cancellation of the contracts between Housing NZ and the developers, Morning Star Enterprises.

One thing Mr Gosche says he will not be doing is complaining to himself. He has two new state terrace housing projects in his Maungakiekie electorate and they are not an issue.

"People see brand new housing going in which is a vast improvement on the stuff we've had there in the past."

Thank goodness, some common sense at last.