The changing faces of the suburbs
Forever a city in motion, as Josephine Franks and Jackson Thomas consider Auckland’s direction, they look back at what it used to be.
How Hobsonville Point went from airbase to suburb
When Chub Roberts did his time at Hobsonville Point as an air traffic controller in the 70s, the whole area was ‘‘just a great big paddock’’. Today, you’re hard pressed to find parking, let alone land a Hercules.
It’s ‘‘wall-to-wall houses’’, Roberts says. Where open spaces remain they’re earmarked for the development, which is past the half-way mark of 4500 homes due by 2024, built on the former Hobsonville air force base.
Hobsonville Point is a posterchild for medium-density housing, its walkable and cyclable narrow streets and mix of apartments, terraced and standalone houses designed with social connection in mind.
On the weekends, the coastal walkway is ‘‘like Queen Street’’, Roberts says, packed with ‘‘ people on bikes, skateboards, mums with babies in prams, young couples’’. Weekdays are quieter: the area is popular with young families, and each morning sees a mass exodus to the city.
‘‘Hobsonville’s just a big dormitory. They hop on the ferry or the bus or in their cars and go to work and come back at night.’’
A collection of ex-air force personnel has taken up residence at one of the Point’s retirement homes.
Annette Clarke’s links to Hobsonville Point go back to her early adult life, when she lived in married quarters while her husband George served in the air force. He racked up 45 years’ service before dying from a heart attack on the day of his retirement. He was the last man employed on the base, and now a bus stop – Junk’s Stop – pays tribute to his life and service.
The area couldn’t be more different now, she says – for starters, everyone in Hobsonville Point used to be in uniform.
It’s a ‘‘different kind of busy’’ now: ‘‘With us the guys were all working, even the ladies were working too.’’ Now it’s the bars, cafes, markets and walkways that are bustling.
John Powley moved to the area for the first time in 1968 to work on the helicopters and shifted back here again about four years ago. ‘‘I don’t mind the changes. Everything that’s gone needed to go – the barracks were full of asbestos, the hangar didn’t look very good and they’ve turned it into a brewery, market, cafes.’’
The locals love it, but the boxfresh developments can put outsiders off, he says. ‘‘Visitors come here and they don’t like it because they don’t really know the place, they just [drive] down the main street with tall buildings. That’s not the true Hobsonville Point, you’ve got to go round the perimeter: walking, cycling, it’s brilliant.’’
It’s not for everyone, Lindsey Dawson says. She moved to Hobsonville Point in 2017. Part of the attraction was that her husband had been in the air force, although he was stationed over the water at Whenuapai. Still, moving here was ‘‘ like coming full circle’’.
‘‘It’s a bit too Coronation Street for me’’, is one Dawson has heard before, but for others the prospect of never mowing the lawn again is a dream come true. ‘‘For some people it’s really crowded, for others it’s loaded with potential.’’
It’s different from the way suburbia used to be – ‘‘a long way from your quarter-acre single house on a chunk of land’’ – and it’s a diverse mix of people who are attracted to this type of living. There’s no ‘‘typical Hobsonville Point resident’’, she says.
What residents seem to share is a hankering for a sense of community and an appreciation for the spirit of the area.
They were the main drivers behind Naveed Ahsan moving to the area in early 2019. With three children aged 8, 12 and 14, he was on the lookout for an area with good schools and the kind of house he could ‘‘lock and leave’’, with no arduous upkeep. ‘‘For me to bring up kids as a single father I needed to have a social circle.’’
Originally from Pakistan, he was living in the Middle East before moving to New Zealand in 2017. Hobsonville Point is a mixed community of different cultures. ‘‘Everyone’s open’’, he says.
‘‘In other parts of Auckland people are living in fancy areas, but they’re not connected together.’’
Grey Lynn goes from migrant hub to vegan enclave
There’s barely any halt in the traffic as the lights at the corner of Karangahape and Ponsonby roads flick from green to red, cars skating round the corner on the tail end of an orange.
But in the mid-70s, at the time of the dawn raids, this intersection was brought to a standstill by police searching out alleged overstayers from the Pacific Islands.
They timed it for kicking out time at the nearby pubs, Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua says.
‘‘You would see long lines of brown people having to show identification and the other thing you would notice is palangis just walking straight through.’’
The crossroads is just past Studio One Toi Tu¯, the old Newton Police Station – another spot where Ma¯ori and Pasifika men used to be rounded up at closing time, Strickson-Pua says. It shut its doors as a cop shop in 1969, reopening as an arts centre a decade later. The reverend would be there every Tuesday in his days as a youth worker with the King Cobras.
A block further down is Western Park where Ponsonby workers sprawl in the shade of sculptures offering commentary on the destruction of Auckland’s architectural heritage.
‘‘ This used to be a rundown area.
It was amazing when the gentrification came in, you knew straight away because all of a sudden these parks were being upgraded. Then you move all of the population over to South Auckland and yet no infrastructure had been done.’’ Strickson-Pua now lives on Waiheke Island, but Grey Lynn and Ponsonby are his old stomping grounds. His parents moved from Samoa into 15 Williamson Ave and the family shifted around the corner to Scanlan St when he was eight. It was the ‘‘working class ethnic ghetto entry point for new migrants’’, he says – ‘‘a most fascinating diverse neighbourhood’’.
Not that he thought of it as diverse at the time: ‘‘We thought everyone had a Chinese, an Indian, a Yugoslavian, a Pa¯keha¯ aunty and that was normal’’.
All of these aunties, his mum’s friends from her factory, were summoned to the house in 1963 for the Queen’s visit. Williamson Ave was a main thoroughfare for the procession, and so his mum hosted her own version of high tea overlooking the road. ‘‘We all had to wave Union Jacks.’’
Up on Karangahape Rd, we trace his walk to church, past the Tesla showroom and old Pink Pussycat strip club, swinging a right at adult store Peaches and Cream. Edinburgh St is home to the Pacific Island Presbyterian Church, founded as the Pacific Islanders Congregational Church in 1947.
It was the community hub, Strickson-Pua remembers, with Sunday school so full they would put chairs on the street and have lessons outside: ‘‘We thought that was absolutely neat’’.
It was a different place back then, Rose Greaves agrees. She first moved to Grey Lynn in the early 1980s, when kids played out on the street and neighbours left their doors unlocked: ‘‘You could go over and visit and they might not be home but you could still make yourself a cup of tea’’.
But the open door policy started to change as families shifted out south and west and community connections were lost. As the area started to fragment, racism became more obvious, she says.
‘‘ There became a lot of skinheads, they were terrible. You couldn’t feel safe at night if you were brown-skinned.’’
After a decade, she moved south to be closer to her job at Middlemore Hospital, but she never planned to stay away permanently. In 2012 she returned, moving into a Housing New Zealand enclave on Vermont St.
It was there she had a letter delivered earlier this year telling her she was an ‘‘embarrassment to Ponsonby’’.
The area had changed in the years she’d been away: the vegetables had got more expensive, flash houses had popped up in subdivided sections where driveways used to be, flash cars crowded the narrow streets and people didn’t look you in the eye and say good morning like they used to.
‘‘ I felt ignored walking along the street.’’
At the Grey Lynn shops, the shop fronts reflect the march of gentrification: vegan bakery, vegan deli, boutique florist, vegetarian cafe, vegan burger joint.
The latter – Wise Boys – was founded by Luke Burrows and his brother Tim. They took over the lease of the old fish and chip shop 18 months ago. Next door to them, a couple of high-end clothing stores have opened recently, and at the other end, an op shop is about to close.
It seems like a conscious effort to make the area more upmarket, Burrows says.
So is Wise Boys part of Grey Lynn’s gentrification?
‘‘It is probably true. Our clientele are quite different to people who went to the old fish and chip shop.’’
But shops and restaurants don’t cause gentrification, he says: when house prices are as unaffordable as they are locally, it’s only natural that businesses start to mirror that.
Still, Wise Boys has tried to become a part of the neighbourhood rather than impose themselves, he says. They’ll give out food to the local homeless, ‘‘ but there are fewer and fewer of those people around’’.
Greaves suspects the march of gentrification means it’s a matter of time before Ka¯inga Ora comes knocking, wanting to move her and her neighbours on and sell to developers. But they should expect a fight on their hands if that happens, she says.
‘‘ I’d occupy to stop that happening and to fight it to the end.
‘‘I’m here till I die.’’