When educators turn property developers

It is hard to escape the conclusion that Science Alive! greatly over-reached before it tipped over into layoffs and delays on its new National Science Centre in the old Durham St law courts buildings. The beloved science education centre was much missed after its former home in the old railway station was destroyed by the earthquakes. The trust behind Science Alive! searched for replacement premises but had deals fall through before it bought the court buildings from Nga¯ i Tahu for $25 million.

The plan was for 5500 square metres of exhibition space, double what it had had at its former Moorhouse Ave base, which would still take up less than half of the space of the court buildings.

The trust planned to rent out the remainder but that plan hit a snag when the Christchurch City Council informed the trust it would have to strengthen the foundations of the tower building before it could proceed with work to convert former court rooms into offices.

In some ways the delays faced by the trust mirror those of other property developers in our rebuilding city, and the side effects were not all bad. Fletcher Constructions’s delay on completing the Justice Precinct meant the trust got more rent as courts could not move as scheduled but it also complicated the process of trying to lease out its spare office space.

It also flags the essential point of Science Alive!’s over-reaching: Why on Earth was a science education trust reinventing itself as a property developer? That was far beyond its core mission and skills.

In early 2016 we welcomed the news of Science Alive!’s Durham St plans but cautioned that ‘‘the law courts site will present some challenges for the development, being a mish-mash of buildings, ranging from 19th century Gothic to 1970s-1990s structures’’.

Those challenges turned out to include plans to convert windowless court rooms into offices. This proved ambitious when, at the time of the announcement, the central city was filling up with new office towers waiting to be filled.

Surely any property developer would not have needed a crystal ball to see that the market for offices in converted court rooms in an ugly building isolated from most of the new development in the central city would be a hard sell.

We called the proposed development ‘‘good news’’ for the central city north of Cathedral Square, given that most of the development has been south of the Square, and have been supportive of ambition in the rebuild but there is a fine line between ambition and folly.

Science Alive! said it aimed to become a top 10 tourist attraction in Christchurch and projected visitor numbers of 113,000 in its first year at an average of about $18 a head, according to a draft May 2015 report prepared for the trust.

For context, the number one visitor tourist in Christchurch, the Canterbury Museum, drew a record 698,000 visitors in 2017. And its admission is free.

In trying to combine a child-focused educational facility and a major tourist attraction, Science Alive! has strayed into risky waters. And it should not have taken a telescope to spot that coming.