That’s a capital idea
We asked movers and shakers in the Wellington region what the big issue in their community was and how we might fix it. Rob Mitchell reports.
Wellington has plenty to celebrate but also plenty of challenges, from infrastructure problems to housing woes.
Throughout this year, we’ve reported extensively on astronomical increases in house prices – the median in the capital is expected to have breached $1 million in 2020 – and severe housing shortages.
We’ve told you about sewage pipes bursting and spilling their contents into the harbour.
And we’ve covered transportation issues, including the long-awaited completion of Transmission Gully and the question of what to do about Courtenay Place.
As 2021 dawns, we asked a number of movers and shakers in the Wellington region two questions: What’s the biggest issue facing your community? And if you could do one thing in your community, what would it be and what would be needed to make it happen?
These are their answers.
THOMASNASH
Greater Wellington regional councillor.
What’s the biggest issue facing your community?
It is the dominance of a type of economic thinking based on financial speculation, commodification of housing and unjust extraction of wealth from workers, renters and the natural environment.
With a pandemic raging beyond these shores and a climate crisis on our hands, the greatest danger is that government and business carry on more or less as usual.
When we change the basic settings of economic thinking we will be able to fix our most pressing problems in the Wellington region or beyond.
If you could do one thing in your community, what would it be and what would be needed to make it happen?
It would be to help design a new economic model. Wellington is an imaginative city, so it’s a good place for some system reprogramming.
This new model would build collective and community wealth rather than wildly unequal individual wealth.
To make this happen, we need a courageous public conversation about the changes required: new laws and regulations matched with new funding; strengthened public education; and amore diverse media featuring voices generally excluded from the national debate.
We need bold decisions from ministers and a large-scale rebalancing of public finances from central to local government so that national direction actually translates into local action.
LAURA O’CONNELL RAPIRA
Director of Action Station, an independent community action group in Porirua that works for a thriving and Tiriti-honouring Aotearoa.
What’s the biggest issue facing your community?
Everyone deserves awarm, safe home but for too long politicians have taken a hands-off approach to housing and the results have been disastrous.
Housing affordability is a joke and rents are through the roof.
With thousands of families now on the waiting list for public housing and skyrocketing rents displacing low-income, Ma¯ori, Pasifika and migrant communities, it’s time for the Government to build new state houses and drastically increase the supply of affordable homes.
If you could do one thing in your community, what would it be and what would be needed to make it happen?
In the Greater Wellington region, I’d love to see central government and councils work together to achieve free public transport for all. We had a taste of this during lockdown so we know it can work.
Free public transport for all would reduce carbon emissions, save people money in petrol, support folks getting to work, volunteering or study, and improve air quality.
Luxembourg recently became the first country in the world to make all public transport free. Luxembourg’s population is around the same size as the Greater Wellington region and it shows that universal public transport can be a reality when politicians decide to make it so.
PHILIPPAHOWDEN-CHAPMAN
Professor at the department of public health, University of Otago, Wellington; co-director of He Ka¯inga Oranga/Housing and
Health Research Programme; and director of the New Zealand Centre for Sustainable Cities.
What’s the biggest issue facing your community?
The shortage of warm, dry, safe, affordable housing. People need secure housing to thrive.
Children need to know they’ll be going to the same school next year, where they can see friends again and favourite teachers will make them welcome and support their strengths.
Parents need to know that their household income is enough to pay the rent without having to make choices between heating their house, feeding their family healthy food, buying growing children shoes and clothes, and having enough left over to take a holiday, or deal with emergencies.
Students should be able to go flatting without getting serious respiratory infections.
Older people who do not own a house should not live in fear of being evicted from their flats and their local community.
If you could do one thing in your community, whatwould it be and what would be needed to make it happen?
We need to urgently prioritise the supply of zero-carbon public and affordable housing. The construction industry is responsible for about 20 per cent of carbon emissions. Making buildings carbon neutral by 2035 is possible, with maximum use of timber to store carbon.
As part of long-overdue upgrades of our inadequate building code, the proposed new requirements for energy standards for effective and efficient heating and cooling in houses should be implemented in existing and new houses.
All houses should have inbuilt heaters so the indoor environments can be heated to the minimum effective and healthy 18 degrees Celsius standard.
JASMINE TAANKINK
Taranaki iwi/Nga¯ti Porou, mother, student, unionist and Housing Action Porirua activist. What’s the biggest issue facing your community?
Housing stress. Successive governments have sold off and
neglected state housing in our area, leading towha¯nau living in cold, damp, overcrowded conditions. More recently, we’ve seen a rise in people needing emergency housing, and our hotels and motels are full of people on the social housing waiting list.
Landlords and property investors have been able to get rich through buying the previously cheap housing here and then renting it out at exorbitant amounts. Rapidly escalating prices have pushed long-term residents out and locked first-home buyers out of the housing market.
If you could do one thing in your community, what would it be and what would be needed to make it happen?
This isn’t something any individual, group or charity can tackle. The responsibility lies with the Government; they’ve caused this situation by leaving it to the market to regulate itself.
We need significant investment into eco-friendly, beautiful, accessible state homes that are built with meaningful engagement with mana whenua and the existing community.
DRSAMKEBBELL
Architect at KebbellDaish, and director of the architecture programme at the Wellington School of Architecture.
What’s the biggest issue facing your community?
The environment. Every building is one part of a complex bigger picture. Debates around density, character, creative cultures, Te Tiriti, ecologies, and accessibility are all important to the city and the environment beyond it. The density of our housing stock is key to both economic and environmental sustainability. The value of our heritage character is matched only by the value of new character that is worth preserving in the future.
Making space for a creative ecosystem, with painters and musicians, is just as important as making space for our nonhuman ecosystems, with birds and bugs, as we relearn to share our planet with each other and with other species.
If you could do one thing in your community, what would it be and what would be needed to make it happen?
Empower it. We can both support local communities more and demand more of them. We can support them by expanding the funding available for local facilities, especially where we need densities to rise, and we can stimulate local debate by funding more dissemination of ideas in local venues: exhibitions, talks, and performances that expand the public imagination of the places we live.
These events will continue to enrich the discussion about our city, foster creative connections, and, ultimately, enrich the city itself as expectations rise alongside our knowledge of the possibilities. At the same time, we can demand that local communities measure themselves against the highest international benchmarks and report publicly on the results.
IOANA GORDON-SMITH
Arts writer, curator Ma¯ori Pacific at Pa¯taka Art + Museum, Porirua.
What’s the biggest issue facing your community?
Our Ma¯ori and Moana art communities need easier access to spaces and funding to create art. There is no lack of Ma¯ori and
Moana creatives but spaces that could function like a studio are usually only available for a fee, and then only for hourly or daily rates, which means artists need to pack up after every use.
If you could do one thing in your community, what would it be and what would be needed to make it happen?
If I strive for just one thing for Ma¯ori and Moana art communities, it is to be more responsive to their needs.
At the most basic level, this means valuing relationships as key to knowing who our community is and refusing predetermined (often imposed, Western) definitions of art or, alternatively, [practices] fetishising Ma¯ori and Pacific art.
It alsomeans being flexible to support different art needs, whether it be a space for exhibition, a space to make, a higher profile, funding support, or connecting artists with each other. Our artists have range and our programming should reflect that.
MICHELLE STRONACH-MARSH
Business owner, co-president of
Petone Rotary Club, trustee of Keep Hutt Valley Beautiful.
What’s the biggest issue facing your community?
The issues facing Petone are multi-faceted due to exponential growth in the retail sector and lack of housing in general in the Wellington region. It has a huge flow-on effect to infrastructure, transport, existing businesses and residents, roading, social issues and something extremely close to my heart: the environment.
If you could do one thing in your community, whatwould it be and what would be needed to make it happen?
Iwould bring leaders and experts from all the sectors of our community together so that we could plan and find solutions together. My goal would be that all sectors would lead by example and collaborate instead of operating in silos, and ensure that our community is inclusive and has a space for all.
It is imperative that we all operate together with the end goal/big picture in sight, rather than just thinking of what is immediately in front of us and what matters most to us as individuals.
We are all part of something bigger: our community. Every action we make has an outcome that impacts on others – leaders need towalk the talk, not just talk the talk. We owe it to future generations.
ISABELLACAWTHORN
Convener, Talk Wellington forum of discussion and ideas.
What’s the biggest issue facing your community?
There’s a potent popular myth that the status quo of our built environment is somehow sacred. We shape our streets and our buildings, and thereafter they shape us.
Good change to our built environment is bothwell within our grasp, and completely essential. Because the ‘‘normal’’ ways most of us live, get around, shop, moulded at every turn by our built environment, are holding us back.
If you could do one thing in your community, what would it be and what would be needed to make it happen?
I’d like to see people awakening to the immense influence our built environment has on us, and acknowledging that our free choice about how to get around, live and shop is a faint whisper of what we think it is.
Exercising our power on government actors, through markets and through civic organising, we demand – and get – built environments where everyone has all the things one needs to have a rich and full life 15 minutes from home.
Exercising our power, we demand – and get – built environments where big investments like pipes, roads, streets and pump stations are serving communities with both hands, rather than shaping us for ill.