Same street, quakes and muck - but different decision

Margaret Hayward's house is in the red zone so will be demolished. Photo / Natalie Slade

A Christchurch street which has been lifted and twisted relentlessly by earthquake after earthquake has now been sliced in half - this time by the Government.

Niven St, which is tucked within a curve of the Avon River in the eastern suburbs, was divided in two by the rezoning of the city into salvageable and unsalvageable.

Neighbours metres apart were placed in green and red zones. The street was one of the worst hit by liquefaction after the September, February and June quakes and remains flooded in mucky water in parts with sinkholes and twisted earth.

Most residents had come to live by the Avon River. But it was Avon's water which bubbled up through their gardens and floorboards. At the red end of the street, an elderly minority wanted to stay, pained by the thought of leaving their riverside homes.

Resident Margaret Hayward's family built one of the first houses of Niven St 47 years ago. Exasperated, she pointed across the fence to the green zone and said: "Those houses can stay. It brasses me off. My husband's ashes are buried in my lawn ... I can't leave here. I just can't."

But a Herald survey of the street found zone colour barely mattered - everyone wanted to get out, or had left already. Those in the green zone said life had become intolerable.

"Why would you want to live here?" said Craig Rosengrave, whose green-zoned house is on the cusp of the condemned part of the street. "We're going to be living next to a construction site, maybe a ghost town. It might be parkland in 10 years, but we have two children, and they have nothing here."

Carol Smith, 59, said: "The dairy is gone, the malls are gone, the pub has gone, and we have no bridge over the river."

"We can't go on like this," said Pushpa Sanders. "My kids have nowhere to play, the water [on the street] has been up to my knees since February."

Many had prayed their house would end up in the red zone, and that a Government cheque would give them a ticket to a new life. They felt the Government's announcement had trapped them in a place they wanted to abandon.

Albert and Maureen Hoera said the value of their home, in which their savings were tied up, would drop markedly if the red zone became a wasteland.

"We're better off than many, so you have to look at the positives.

"But it's about resale too. We had hoped to retire soon."

The Earthquake Commission had told all homeowners in the red part of the street that their houses would have to be repiled and reclad, and the ground remediated - an expensive exercise which would take three to five years. Fixing every house was prohibitively difficult and expensive.

Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee said yesterday that the boundaries had been drawn with very careful consideration and that life would be uncomfortable for anyone who remained in the red zones.