It’s not usually a good sign when your suburb turns up in the lead spot on a national newspaper website and stays there for the rest of the day. Yet there it was: the Auckland township that says it’s terrorised by alcoholics.
The report on Stuff was an account of a meeting at the Pt Chevalier Bowling Club, attended by about 200 residents, to talk about a problem with disorder in a small area often referred to as the “town square”. Until October 2022, it was essentially the forecourt of the beloved local library. Since the library – an unfixable leaky building – closed, the area has been in a state of flux.
A casual visitor might struggle to see anything amiss – there might be three or four people day-drinking in what is, admittedly, a liquor-ban area. In some ways, this is simply what Pt Chev is. The suburb has long been home to multiple communities, some rougher around the edges than others. Halfway houses sit near $2 million homes. Taika Waititi spent more than $10 million last year on a house near the beach, but we’re never going to be Herne Bay. We’re a little bit Kāinga Ora and a little bit Rita Ora.
But at the meeting, three local business owners – from the pharmacy and two family-owned restaurants – described clearly frightening encounters, including a threatened stabbing. Whether those responsible live locally isn’t clear, and they’re not necessarily representative of everyone who hangs out in the square. The thugs who have lately been loading up trolleys with booze and walking out of the tiny Woolworths look more like visiting gang members than the homeless.
If the shuttering of the library brought things to a head, the closure of the nearby community police kiosk in 2015 – one of more than 30 community stations shut when the National government froze the police budget for five years – was probably the start of it. When Senior Sergeant Alan Rowland addressed the public meeting, his first words were to dispel “the elephant in the room”: there would be no daily police presence in Pt Chevalier town centre, so don’t ask.
The local board has done well to find a yet-to-be-announced temporary home for the library, but there’s no sign of who might pay for a new building on the library site, or the community centre many residents think should be part of it.
Auckland Council has no town centre plan for Pt Chevalier, even though the population has begun to grow rapidly with more intensive development rules and there will eventually be another 10,000 residents as the former Unitec campus is developed.
Kāinga Ora has been doing an impressive job of intensifying its local holdings, most notably with a forthcoming 61-apartment block for older tenants across the road from the troubled square. Yet there was no one from Kāinga Ora at the meeting. There are many voices absent from the place-making kōrero.
Our suburb’s history is entwined with mental illness and social need – the shopping centre’s prosperity was founded on business from what was originally the Auckland Lunatic Asylum (long before it was Unitec), and there are still alcohol and other drug facilities operating across the road from the former psychiatric hospital. Some of the lost souls on our streets come from those, and others are squatting in the empty buildings next to what will be a fancy New World supermarket, and probably in “Building One”, the old hospital itself. Everywhere is in flux.
Last Saturday night, the police did come. The young man who had been darting silently between the tables outside our scruffy little rock ’n’ roll bar, grabbing cigarette butts from the ashtrays, had collapsed on the footpath a few doors down. Before he could be loaded into an ambulance, a car pulled up and an older man helped him in. I felt glad he wasn’t alone.
