Editor’s letter
The last time we faced a housing crisis of this magnitude was after World War II, when thousands of returned servicemen wanted to settle down all at once, and when my grandparents finally found somewhere to rent in 1949, not long after they got married. The half villa on Gillies Avenue in Epsom, Auckland, was cold and draughty, but it was home. Over the past few months, I’ve often wondered what they’d make of the mess we’ve made, again, of housing – only this time, we don’t even have a war to blame. We’ve failed to think about land supply or density. We’ve failed to think about financing. And we’ve failed to think about how and where new homes should be built. Moreover, we’ve made our houses too big and too expensive. The average size of a new New Zealand house is now 240 square metres, which costs many hundreds of thousands to build. Something has to give and in April this year, for the first time in decades, the average size of a new Auckland home dipped. Hurrah! Cost aside, small houses often offer the chance to live in something better – as you’ll see in our cover home on the banks of the Waikato River by Dan Smith. It’s small but pure: standing in his high-ceilinged living room looking at the river, you wonder why on earth you could ever need more space than this. There’s an irony here. Two of the other houses in this issue were built in the 1950s. In Wellington, Ernst Plischke designed a small flat above a garage for art collector Lyn Corner’s mother; in Hawke’s Bay, the home of Ben Daly started as a standard Ministry of Works railway cottage. Together, they offer solutions for a particularly thorny crisis. Let’s just hope we don’t repeat the same mistakes in another few decades.