Auckland’s economic numbers tell a bleak story: homelessness is surging, unemployment is well over the national average and the real estate market is in a persistent slump. But on a recent sunny Saturday in Westmere, you might not have noticed.
The shopping village’s famous butcher recently doubled its floor area, expanding into the space next door, which had been vacated by a cafe that has moved into larger premises across the road. In the wake of streetscaping (including the dreaded bike lanes) that critics insisted would destroy all the businesses, the place was going off. Perhaps everyone was taking solace in their council valuations having fallen so far that the rates aren’t going up much.
The vibe was different when I shared a modest lunch and an absorbing conversation with a group of Auckland business owners. One, the director of an architecture firm, said business conditions were the worst he had experienced in 40 years – and he’d started his first company in the wake of the 1987 sharemarket crash. His company had shed two-thirds of its employees in the past year and the remaining staff had all taken a 20% pay cut. In particular, work with Kāinga Ora and the Ministry of Education had simply dried up during the wait for a new policy direction.
The architect’s characterisation of the business environment was endorsed by the founders of an urban design consultancy. The uncertainty, said one, had been crippling: councils, iwi, community organisations, private and philanthropic capital had all opted to do nothing until they had a clearer idea of what was actually happening. It’s been a bad time to be designing or building anything but billion-dollar roads.
The coalition government’s determination to take the slasher to established systems before it has devised an alternative has been playing out a stone’s throw away from our lunch venue, at the Maungawhau City Rail Link station. Kāinga Ora had taken one of 10 tranches of the 3.2ha of land to be freed up by the completion of the new station, enough for 50 homes. It was to be an anchor tenant and other developers would progressively come aboard.
Now, it won’t be involved at all. In an interview with the New Zealand Herald, Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown scorned Eke Panuku, the placemaking agency he disestablished in July, and its plans for parklets and laneways. Instead, he talked up the prospect of a single developer taking over the whole thing, and declared Chris Bishop (responsible for the site via his role as Minister of Transport, rather than Housing) was on board.
Work would be underway within two months, Brown said in the interview two months ago. Realistically, the whole place will be, as the mayor has it, “Gaza lite” for the foreseeable future.
A couple of weeks after the lunch, another nearby business did its best to lift the mood. Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios turned out a series of shows, live-streamed to the world. Dave Dobbyn, Tom Scott, Bic Runga and others gathered under the banner of MUFGAL (Make Us Feel Good About Life), in an act of cultural reassurance that not everything is unfixably awful. It felt genuinely comforting, much as Marlon Williams’s show at Spark Arena had been earlier in the year.
Perhaps some of the businesspeople who’d been at the lunch derived cheer from it, too. They weren’t the “merchants of misery and doomsayers” lamented last month by Finance Minister Nicola Willis. Indeed, most of the conversation was about leadership, finding new ways to work and gamely looking ahead to an eventual recovery. What they needed, I thought, was not a lecture from the country’s leaders, but some recognition that merrily wiping away all that has been comes with consequences.
