Damian Spittal spends his days fixing and selling computers, camera systems and retro video games from his 120 sq m shop on Dannevirke’s High St. Foot traffic is low – on a good day he might have a dozen customers, he says. But the old Sega and Nintendo games bring in plenty of out-of-towners passing through.
He bought the building and opened his business in 2014. It’s his life and his livelihood. He has been in the IT industry for 30 years and he thought “Damian’s Computers and Security” would take him through to retirement.
But under legislation passed by the National government in 2016, five years after the Christchurch earthquakes, Spittal’s shop has been designated earthquake-prone by the Tararua District Council. He has until June 2031 to do the necessary seismic work to get it up to compliance with the amended Building Act.
He says this isn’t going to happen. “I bought it for about $50,000. But the experts reckon it’ll take $200,000 to fix. So the figures just don’t stack up.”
The building has been a feature of Dannevirke’s retail main street since 1909. Wedged between a Salvation Army op shop on one side and an outdoors retailer on the other, he has ensured it keeps its old school charm. The front windows are framed with wood with the original leadlight detailing. On the top of the building, “Damian’s” stands out against a black corrugated iron panel in a gold, cursive font.
He’s considered all of his options, including demolition. But that’s another big cost. “I’m self-employed. If I pull my shop down, how will I pay the $60,000 it costs back?”
Now Spittal has accepted that he will lose his business and his building in seven years. “I figure I’ll be off to buy a ‘93 Hiace and set up shop from a van somewhere,” he scoffs.
He exudes the signs of a man who has accepted his fate, so it’s hard to tell if he’s joking. But the laughter is forced – Spittal recognises the issue is bigger than he is. Tararua District Council has identified 138 potentially earthquake-prone buildings under the new regulations, and that’s just one local body. Thousands of building owners throughout much of New Zealand are commissioning reports and crunching the numbers, trying to work out how they can get their buildings up to the new building code standards.
A lot of them – building owners and council members alike – say the new law has gone too far. Passed after the devastation of Christchurch, it established a streamlined national system for managing earthquake-prone buildings.
But many of the nearly 3000 buildings identified in Aotearoa so far are in small towns. And with tight deadlines and next to no funding support from central government, councils and communities are worried they will end up with towns peppered with empty buildings.
It’s something the current government is aware of. In a statement, the new Minister of Building and Construction, Chris Penk, said the issue was front of mind. “Building owners and councils have told me that they have concerns about their ability to meet the approaching remediation deadlines,” he wrote. “I’m working with officials to understand what options are available to relieve the pressure.”
This will be music to Spittal’s ears if it comes to fruition. “If you take a town the size of Dannevirke and delete 30 earthquake-prone buildings off the high street, you’re not exactly going to struggle to find a park any more.”
The clock is ticking
Taking effect in July 2017, the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Act tasked local councils with identifying potentially earthquake-prone structures and notifying owners. Districts in areas deemed to have “high seismic risk”, which runs down the east coast and southern parts of the North Island to the upper half and west coast of the South Island, had until July 2022.
Owners then had one year to obtain an engineering assessment and undergo a final determination. Buildings designated earthquake-prone could continue to be used, as long as a notice was publicly displayed to warn visitors and work was undertaken in the required time frame. It’s this time frame that’s causing trouble.
Building owners in the high-risk areas have 15 years from the date they received their final earthquake-prone notice to ensure their buildings meet at least 34% of the “New Building Standard” (the standard required of a new construction) to meet the building code. Anything below that is considered earthquake-prone.
Councils could also identify “priority buildings” – unreinforced masonry buildings that sit on busy pedestrian or traffic thoroughfares. These were built with materials such as brick, stone or concrete without any reinforcing elements – which was common in older, heritage buildings. Owners of these structures in high-risk areas were given just 71/2 years to complete the work. Spittal falls into this category, and he says there are plenty more like him. “We just can’t do it within that timeframe. So I imagine buildings will just get marked as unsafe, and you’ll have towns with empty shops everywhere while the councils try to find the money to demolish them.”
However, it was up to councils to determine whether a thoroughfare was busy enough to warrant prioritisation. Some recognised the burden the timeframes would put on building owners and chose not to designate priority areas.
“We’re characterised by a number of small towns, so we said we’re not part of that deal,” says Rangitīkei District Mayor Andy Watson. “Our business owners breathed a sigh of relief, because it would have halved the amount of time they had to do the work.”
But just down the road, Manawatū District Council voted the other way. Deputy mayor Michael Ford was on the losing side of the five-all vote, which was settled by the chair casting a deciding vote in favour of establishing priority zones. “In my opinion, they’re more appropriate for cities like Wellington and Christchurch, but not so much for the Dannevirkes, Feildings and Martons of the country,” he says. “But the legislation [said] each community had to decide for themselves, so now our people have half the time the people in Rangitīkei have.”
Ford is worried about the impact this will have on his district. “We don’t want abandoned buildings and vacant sites in our towns, and that’s now a real prospect.”
That economic pressure is particularly strong on owners of heritage buildings. The legislation does allow for an extension of time for those listed in category 1 on the New Zealand Heritage List – Rārangi Kōrero. But this applies only to those deemed to have special or outstanding historical or cultural significance. The quaint old buildings that pepper small-town high streets – like Damian Spittal’s computer repair shop – are not eligible.
Jamie Jacobs, central region director for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, says the consenting process for these buildings can be more burdensome than for newer ones. Most would be scheduled as heritage by their local council, so almost any work would require resource consent on top of the consenting process for design work.
He says if they are well maintained, the engineering work shouldn’t be any more onerous than for other buildings. But that’s a big “if”, he says. New Zealand doesn’t have a strong legacy of maintaining heritage buildings, so plenty of owners will find they have other work to do to get them up to code once the strengthening work starts.
That’s something Tararua District Council had to grapple with recently when it strengthened its Pahiatua council chambers. “There were all these unintended consequences of doing the work – it wasn’t just earthquake strengthening,” council CEO Bryan Nicholson says. “These are old buildings – 100 years old plus, some of them – and you also need to bring them up to today’s standards.”
The additional work, which included adding a fire escape, modifying ramps for accessibility and replacing deteriorated materials, drove the cost to about $200,000 over the original budget.
For a private building owner, those “unknown” costs can be insurmountable.
“How long is a piece of string?” That was Steve Quinn’s response to being asked about the cost of completing seismic work on a heritage building he owned in Marton. With his wife, Christine, Quinn bought the old BNZ building in the town’s main street in 2019. He was taken with the architecture and, knowing it was earthquake-prone, motivated to save the Italianate palazzo building designed by English architect Joshua Charlesworth and completed in 1906. He knew it would need seismic upgrades but that was a challenge he was willing to take on. “It’s such a beautiful building, and we saw it going cheap,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m a pretty belligerent guy.’ When people say no I just take it as a suggestion to look at the issue another way.”
But after three years and some renovations, Quinn and his wife sold the building. “At the end of the day, I can’t fight the central government. They’re unmovable.”
Quinn says there was just no way to make the work economically viable, even taking a staged approach.
Lacking nuance
Wellington-based Chessa Stevens is a principal conservation architect at built environment consultancy WSP. Stevens says the New Building Standard lacks nuance and disproportionately affects heritage buildings. Rather than taking historical construction techniques into account, and looking at how well the buildings have performed in recent earthquakes, they are widely deemed incompatible with modern standards.
“The idea that unreinforced masonry is a problem is not true,” Stevens says. “There is no prompting in the regulations to consider things like timber-frame buildings, and we will potentially lose a lot of heritage buildings on the basis of preliminary structural assessments that show huge costs associated with picking them up.”
However, she says it is possible to approach the issue slowly under the current framework. A building’s rating against the New Building Standard is taken from its lowest aspect, not the average. “So a problematic chimney or parapet could pull the whole score below 34% – at which point it’s considered earthquake-prone – but if those were secured, the rest of the building would actually be fine.”
But Quinn says getting the building just over the 34% threshold isn’t necessarily enough, which is where the piece of string comes in. Higher-paying tenants will go only for highly rated buildings, he says. “Getting the bank building up to the minimum rating would have cost us $200,000 or $300,000, and we were willing to sink that money in. But getting the building to a standard that we’d be able to find a stable commercial tenant for – a bank or an insurance company – that could have cost more than a million dollars.”
Does Quinn regret buying the bank? “I regret failing,” he says. “We felt we were an advocate for the building; we didn’t have any profit motive at all. But we just couldn’t beat it.”
More time, please
Building owners, councillors and public servants from far and wide are calling on the government to reconsider these regulations. Heritage NZ’s Jacobs says he hopes the government will delay the compliance deadlines. “It’s something they’re going to have to face pretty soon,” he says. “More time would be the easiest way to take the heat off building owners in the short term, without ending the project.”
Some frustrated owners question the level of risk that has been deemed acceptable, pointing out that it’s more dangerous to drive down the road than shop in an earthquake-prone building.
Ken Elwood, chief engineer at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), says it’s important to remember that a building’s performance in earthquakes to date is not necessarily an indicator of its strength going forward. A building that has been undamaged by earthquakes for 100 years will not necessarily be safe in the next earthquake, he says.
“Different types of shaking can affect different types of buildings. Sometimes, these impacts may seem unpredictable, but they can be explained by earthquake engineering principles,” he said in a statement. “Each earthquake and each building has its own ‘signature’ or frequency, and when these match, the building is more likely to experience damage.”
Michael Ford at Manawatū council doesn’t dispute the need to ensure buildings are safe. He is involved in a Local Government New Zealand investigation into ways to make the work more manageable. “We’re not looking to kick the can down the road,” he says. He’s investigating options that would substantially reduce the risk to human life in the short term – such as reinforcing verandas – in exchange for a longer period of time to complete the remainder of the work.
Otherwise, he says, there’s a real risk that towns like Feilding, Marton and Dannevirke will be destroyed through legislation, not an earthquake.
It’s something councils all over the country are grappling with. When it comes to heritage buildings, most provincial authorities are not equipped to help out.
Initially, a scheme offered by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage – Manatū Taonga gave grants up to $400,000 to help owners strengthen heritage structures. Called Heritage EQUIP, it was widely heralded as a success, but funding was discontinued in 2021. Several building owners and councils are calling for it to be re-established but the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Paul Goldsmith, says no decisions will be made until the Budget.
Ford says the Manawatū district is still feeling the loss. “We just don’t have the funds for a heritage grant. All we’ve been able to do is discount consenting fees, but that’s more a token to say, ‘Yes, we are trying to help.’”
Economic benefits
Some councils have been able to do more. Thanks to the foresight of councillors at the time, Whanganui has a heritage grant fund for private building owners needing to do seismic strengthening work. The council’s heritage adviser, Scott Flutey, says this came about because the elected members recognised the economic benefits heritage buildings can offer.
“In Whanganui, we’re becoming more of a tourist destination and a lot of the appeal is around our history and heritage,” he says.
But the fund is limited, with only $150,000 allocated this financial year. “It covers the professional advice stage – gathering assessments of the situation and designs for getting the building up to scratch. We cannot fund actual physical strengthening work. We just don’t have enough money for that.”
Other councils haven’t even been able to discount fees. “That’s a cost that would have to be spread across all ratepayers,” says Tararua Mayor Tracey Collis. “But we’re suffering under the impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle. Our roads are damaged and people are struggling to put food on the table.”
So, owners like Damian Spittal are on their own. Unable to pay for the upgrades themselves, it’s a waiting game to see what happens when the strengthening deadline passes.
Ken Elwood says a building won’t automatically become unsafe to occupy at that stage. The owner can be prosecuted, with an individual fined up to $300,000. But that won’t fix the building. On that issue, it appears councils are waiting and watching each other.
At a meeting of Masterton District Council’s infrastructure and services committee in January, Mayor Gary Caffell noted that “things could get quite messy”.
Any action taken will likely be at councils’ expense. While they can obtain court orders to complete the necessary works – or demolish buildings and go after the owners for the costs – most owners, like Spittal, simply won’t have the money.
And if they do nothing, they’ll be left with a high street dotted with empty buildings. That’s not helpful, either.
“Councils need to retain the GDP of their district,” Rangitīkei’s Andy Watson warns. “There’s a few ways to do that – you either entice new businesses or you retain your existing ones. Either way, empty buildings don’t help.”
Tararua council’s Bryan Nicholson feels the scale of the issue has flown under the radar. “It needs government attention to highlight it as a significant risk across the country,” he says.
“These old buildings are what our towns are made up of, and what everyone sees as they’re driving through.”