Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
A community vegetable garden in Mt Roskill. Photo / Jason Dorday
Meanwhile, there’s a community garden in Mt Roskill with row-upon-row of astonishingly large, healthy, luscious-looking vegetables.
A local church made it happen, supported by the council, and it’s tempting to say the spirit moves in that soil. Certainly, it speaks volumes about the strength of the local community.
Right opposite, though, there’s an empty overgrown field, closed off from the public by high wire fences.
There used to be a few state houses there, but Kāinga Ora cleared them away so it could build anew. Nearby, there are other empty patches of land and clusters of empty houses, one of them burned out, most of them graffitied, all of them boarded up.
Under Government instruction, last month Kāinga Ora stopped the development of 212 housing projects that would have delivered 3479 new homes.
It will sell the land and “write down” up to $220 million, that being the amount already spent on new infrastructure and other project development work.
Of those 3479 cancelled homes, 1527 would have been in Auckland. They include the abandoned sites near the vege garden in Mt Roskill, where attractive town housing was planned.
Elsewhere in the suburb there are some substantial Kāinga Ora developments that were already finished or too far advanced to be stopped. But big projects in earlier stages weren’t so lucky.
And in the streets near that vege garden, there are no new apartment blocks, no Kāinga Ora two or three-storey townhouse walk-ups, no new anything.
No plans for anything. Just empty lots, broken homes and what’s left of the state housing from the old days.
This is land that’s been abandoned. Right in the middle of a housing crisis and right in the middle of a suburb that desperately needs more housing.
An abandoned houses on Wainwright Ave, Mt Roskill. Photograph / Jason Dorday
When the Government talks about bringing rigour and fiscal responsibility and good planning to Kāinga Ora and other parts of the urban development ecosystem, this is what it means.
And when, or if, it does, those Rotorua homes reveal there’s a real risk they’ll build cheap and ugly.
Remember Sir Bill English in 2014? To build affordable housing, he said, “we have to get a bit ugly”.
It isn’t true, as many social housing projects have proved in the years since. Kāinga Ora has created designs that homeowners can be proud of, with Homestar 6 standards of heating, insulation and design, and these things have raised the bar for the entire industry.
Caroline McDowall, general manager of the housing delivery group at Kāinga Ora, says the agency is still committed to “warm, dry and quality homes”, but delivered in “the most cost-effective and efficient way”. If only that’s all it was. These new homes appear to abandon so much of what made the earlier homes appealing.
English has become the eminence grise behind the Government’s approach to social housing.
In my view, his mission - since first proposing to Bishop in late 2023 that he review Kāinga Ora - has been to get the Government out of social housing construction and to make ugly okay.
The cornerstone of that has been to insist that Kāinga Ora was wasting money and too deeply in debt to be functional. The agency contested that, arguing it showed a misunderstanding of how it managed its balance sheet, but to no avail.
“These reviews were essential to ensuring we only progress new housing projects that make commercial sense and that we sell land which is surplus to our requirements so we can get on a more financially sustainable footing,” said Matt Crockett, the agency’s new chief executive.
Commercial sense? How’s that measured? And what about all the other things that make sense?
When Kāinga Ora began to redevelop these streets, it moved the existing tenants out of their homes and rehoused them in other parts of town, with a promise they would be able to return to new homes that were warm and dry.
A vacant lot fenced off on O'Donnell St, Mt Roskill. Photo / Jason Dorday
At a community meeting in the suburb one rainy night last week, I heard speaker after speaker, including local high school kids, talking about what this meant.
The tenants kept their kids in their local Mt Roskill schools, despite the inconveniences this created.
The schools themselves have had to cope with the uncertainty. At one of them, Wesley Intermediate, 80% of the roll now lives out-of-zone.
But because the new houses won’t be built, the school’s entire future is threatened.
Builders and everyone else in the construction industry have lost big parts of their livelihood.
The local Bunnings might have made a bit of money selling plywood for the old houses to be boarded up with, but that hardly makes up for the lost opportunity of abandoned new builds.
Sports clubs lose players, all the other local services and clubs and facilities lose some of their customers, some of their volunteers, some of their members, some of their glue.
Empty sections and boarded-up houses invite crime and makes the streets less safe.
In so many ways, gaps in the street where there should be homes with people living in them leave gaps in the community too.
Bishop likes to say Kāinga Ora’s main role is to be a landlord. But that’s trivial.
The housing agency wasn’t just building houses and collecting rents, it was helping to build communities.
Bishop and his associate minister, Tama Potaka, also like to say the Housing Register waiting lists are down and so are the lists of those needing emergency accommodation.
But they don’t know where many of the people who used to be on those lists have gone. Potaka says that’s “not our responsibility”.
They do know that while 1527 Auckland new builds have been abandoned, there are 795 individuals and families in Auckland on the Ministry of Social Development’s Housing Register, all of them waiting desperately for a home.
They do know, because community groups keep telling them, that many more people want to get on those lists but are being turned away. They do know the number of people living in cars is growing again.
Why is this happening? To save money, of course, but it’s not just that.
Those abandoned sites will be sold, as Crockett says. They’ll be an attractive proposition for the private sector, especially where the new pipes and cabling and other infrastructure have already been installed.
And double-especially now the Government is removing some of the quality standards for new builds that Kāinga Ora helped pioneer. Will those Rotorua prototypes become the new normal?
A new social housing model in Rotorua, July 2025.
And when the Government decides to buy some new builds, to maintain some semblance of credibility in the social-housing sector, the developers will be well placed to sell. How’s that for an unvirtuous circle.
Why does this still need saying?
Warm, dry, safe homes are the foundation of a functioning society.
They allow people to be healthier, attend school more, get jobs and keep them, and become part of a community-minded neighbourhood.
And to not give in to rage or despair or constant exclusion, but instead to grow their own self-respect and have dreams for themselves and their kids.
To plant vegetables.
A community vegetable garden in Mt Roskill. Photo / Jason Dorday
Good social housing is a far better investment than prisons.
But the Government has consistently refused to link crime to its causes and bluntly says it isn’t worried about the cost of locking more people up.
Bishop is doing some good things with housing density in middle-class areas and with transport-focused development. But when it comes to the working class and poorer parts of town, it’s as if he’s never heard about the industrial revolution.
Cities grew fast in the 19th century and they needed more housing.
No one cared what it was like. No one thought about the values of community. The private sector built slums.
We’re staring at that again. Why don’t we call this criminal? It should be.
