Tamihere: No to ‘social engineering'

Council urged to step aside and let large blocks of state housing be built quickly

Should Auckland’s public houses be lumped together in big housing estates or should they be blended into the community? That was the debate former Labour politician John Tamihere tried to ignite yesterday when he spoke to an Auckland Council meeting and accused its development arm, Panuku, of “corruption”.

As chief executive of the non-profit Te Wha¯nau o Waipareira Trust, Tamihere wants to buy council land in Papatoetoe in South Auckland and turn it into an almost exclusive state housing development that would be sold to Housing NZ.

Panuku instead wants a future developer to create a mix of housing on the land.

This would limit the number of public homes to about one-third of the total of new properties built on the land, with the rest likely to be a mix of so-called affordable homes and houses sold at market prices.

Dominic Foote from non-profit group NZ Housing Foundation, who spoke after Tamihere, said mixed housing developments had been shown by numerous international studies to help create healthy and happy communities.

But Tamihere called it “social engineering” and discriminatory to restrict the amount of public houses in a development.

His lawyers even believed it violated the Human Rights Act. He said with Auckland in desperate need of homes, council should get out of the way and let developers quickly build large blocks of state housing.

Tamihere also claimed Panuku was corrupt because its lawyers had not sent a reply to him about whether their policy was a breach of the Human Rights Act.

Mayor Phil Goff warned his accusation was defamatory.

Councillor Chris Darby then asked Tamihere what studies or “empirical evidence” he had to back his claims.

“Don’t worry about empirical evidence,” Tamihere replied.

He instead claimed it was impossible to create an ideal mix of

Don’t worry about empirical evidence.

John Tamihere

people living at the Papatoetoe site because investors would quickly buy any home that wasn’t a state house and rent it to locals at market rates rather than as a Government subsidised rental.

However, Housing Foundation’s Foote later said almost 200,000 families probably were not wealthy enough to buy a KiwiBuild home and were earning too much to be given access to state housing. Thus it was important for new developments to also give them the chance to buy an “affordable” home rather than just building state housing.

Foote also said many in state housing needed help from “wrap-around” support services offered by community groups. However, if the Government built large blocks of state homes, he questioned whether they would then be able to continue providing this support as funding priorities changed with each election.