Paul Thomas: No place like home, whatever the price

From the harbour and downtown to Ponsonby, the city is spectacular. Photo / NZ Herald

Look past the continuing saga of Auckland's housing boom ... and see a great place to live

Anyone who owns a house, or has high hopes or wild fantasies of one day owning a house, is fixated with the residential property market.

Anyone who lives in Auckland, that is. For those of us who don't, house prices are like turkey - something we take an interest in once a year. The difference is that, for most of us, Christmas comes but once a year, and it's certainly not in the envelope containing the council's valuation.

But we've heard the stories about people who bought a tatty old cottage in Ponsonby for a song, gave it a once over lightly do-up, and banked a million when they sold it a few years later. Or the people who bought a fabulous villa in Epsom at the top of the market 20 years ago, sold it on a whim for much the same price, and now morbidly keep track of the unimaginable and accumulating capital gain they let slip through their fingers.

The residential property market provides a snapshot of Auckland's evolution. This week the Herald reported that there are now 17 suburbs in which the average house value exceeds $1 million. And whereas the term "eastern suburbs" used to be synonymous with gracious living, it's on the other side of the city centre that prices are really going through the roof.

Economists believe it's only a matter of months before Herne Bay becomes the first $2 million suburb. St Mary's Bay isn't far behind, and Ponsonby, Grey Lynn and Westmere, where values have risen 31.2 per cent in the past two years, are also among the salubrious 17.

In the 1960s, I was a dayboy in my first year at King's College. As King's is in Otahuhu and people who could afford to send their sons there didn't live in Otahuhu or anywhere bordering or resembling it, dayboys got to and from school by train.

I remember my sense of desolation on the first day of school as I stood on the Newmarket railway station platform waiting for the train and coming to the realisation that I was on my own: there wasn't another King's boy - or anyone remotely resembling a King's boy - to be seen.

(Back then Newmarket was a drab suburban strip of precarious retail, bearing scant resemblance to the slice of consumer heaven it is today.)

Imagine my relief when I got on the train and discovered that there was one King's boy who lived further west than I did.

Our feeling of being fish out of water intensified when the train pulled into Remuera station and the carriages filled with King's boys exuding confidence and, in some cases, a palpable sense of entitlement.

The poor bugger who lived further west than I did came from Herne Bay. It would be fair to say that many of our schoolmates had only the sketchiest notion of where Herne Bay was. They got the picture when he told them it was next to Ponsonby. In those days Ponsonby wasn't where the other half lived; it was where people who aspired to join the other half lived.

Not surprisingly the boy from Herne Bay and I became mates. I spent some time at his place in Bella Vista Rd, where a 1910s weatherboard house sold recently for $7.2 million. For all I know they are one and the same.

It could be argued that I have the best of both worlds, in that I live in Wellington but get up to Auckland fairly frequently.

I can therefore enjoy what Auckland has to offer without having to put up with the stuff - house prices, for instance - that supposedly makes it a nice place to visit but not somewhere you'd want to live.

I don't see it that way. Auckland is and always will be my home town. Rudyard Kipling might have overegged the pudding when he described Auckland as "last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart", but it is an undeniably spectacular and, to my eyes, very liveable city.

I've heard it said, usually with a sneer, that Auckland is a lesser version of Sydney, or words to that effect. Having spent a decade in Sydney, I think there's a lot of truth in that. The difference is I don't see it as a negative: Sydney is one of the world's great cities so for a country of 4.5 million people to boast a mini-version of it is pretty good going.

Incidentally, when I was in Auckland last weekend I had lunch with the boy from Bella Vista Rd (who now lives on Waiheke Island.) Who says Aucklanders are fickle?