Today’s new buildings are a ticking time bomb

High-rise and multi-unit chicken coops are being designed and constructed in Auckland that will soon be viewed as slums. Within the next 10-15 years, I predict, the leaky building fiasco will seem like a school picnic compared with what’s going to happen to the high-rise slums we’re building right now in your neighbourhood.

My concern with these buildings is the substandard design and construction and the low quality of materials being used. New Zealanders are in for a harsh wakeup when these buildings start to disintegrate, exposing non-compliant electrical wiring, shonky plumbing, cladding or roofing products and walls out of plumb. The steel mesh in concrete foundation slabs and driveways won’t last. Nor will some of the steel beams and girders.

Thanks to the poor planning and lack of leadership from the Auckland Council, we’re not creating Auckland the most liveable city, we’re creating the slums of the future.

We have landed in a perfect storm — an unprecedented building boom created by the Christchurch rebuild, the Auckland housing shortage, concurrent major Auckland CBD projects and the development of the light rail network, together with high immigration. This has led to an extreme shortage of qualified and experienced tradespeople (particularly builders) and a dire scarcity of quality building materials.

This shortage has unleashed a deluge of inferior materials into the market and they’re being used in many of the new buildings under construction in Auckland today. Large-scale construction projects in the CBD are sucking up the labour and the materials. If you visit any big site you’ll find numerous cheap, unskilled and inexperienced workers. Corners are being cut to meet tight margins and resolve cashflow issues.

The Government has reportedly estimated the number of extra construction workers required over the next five years to be as high as 49,000. We’re also told that 40 percent of council inspections fail.

My fear is that the raft of charges filed by the Commerce Commission against suppliers for making false and misleading claims about their steel mesh are just the tip of the iceberg.

The Government has been too slow to address the fact that poor-quality construction materials have been and continue to flood into New Zealand by the container loads from China and elsewhere. All products used on our building sites should comply with the New Zealand Building Code. Instead we’ve got tonnes of rubbish being imported here and dumped on the market — substandard plumbing materials, for starters.

We’re getting dodgy plastic piping, shower glass that’s not safety glass, and it’s not illegal to import this junk.

The Government isn’t stopping these products from entering our harbours and into our construction sites. Why not? Why aren’t our standards being more rigorously enforced?

Desperate or careless builders are often not bothering to check their imported materials are compliant before installing them. If a council inspection uncovers this, the unwitting property owners will likely have to bear the cost of installing replacement compliant products. Where’s the sense of pride that builders used to have in providing good workmanship — and standing by it?

The extra intensification that’s taking place reflects too much focus on quantity and not enough on quality. There’s nowhere in the high-rise blocks or mean little terrace chicken coops for anyone to sit on the grass, for kids to play or for people to hold a barbeque. There’s a miserly amount of carparking, certainly none for visitors or tradespeople, and you can forget storage for your suitcases or your sports equipment. The bigger developments are often located on the outskirts of Auckland and lack basic amenities and places for people to meet.

There will be a cost. Such developments will lead to social isolation for residents. We’re not solving the problem, we’re just creating another one. Without a sense of community you get stress, mental illness, juvenile delinquents, and an increase in crime. Just look at what’s happened to the dilapidated tower block estates in the UK that have become hotbeds of crime.

Yes, we’re 40,000 dwellings short in Auckland and we have a shameful homelessness issue — but let’s get it right. We need to think long term and build quality homes and units, not slums.