Escaping demolition
Hundreds of homes were relocated from the Christchurch residential red zone. Charlie Gates tracks some of them down.
They are the ones that got away.
The Christchurch homes that escaped demolition and found new lives across the South Island.
There is one on a hill above Picton, another made it as far as Franz Josef on the West Coast, while another made it to the shores of Lake Manapouri in Fiordland.
About 700 homes escaped the wave of demolition that took about 8000 homes in the Canterbury residential red zone after the February 2011 earthquakes.
They escaped destruction to become offices, baches, family homes and retirement nest eggs for people in the South Island from Golden Bay in the north to Invercargill in the south.
In Golden Bay, the MacHardy family relocated two Christchurch red zone houses to a beachfront property just a few kilometres short of Farewell Spit. They flat packed another red zoned home to use as parts to extend the other two.
Jean MacHardy said the relocated houses could provide homes for their daughter, Rachael, who has a neurological condition, and perhaps a carer.
‘‘She has had brain surgery and a lot of challenges in her life. We thought she could live in the house and have a caregiver,’’ she said. ‘‘It would mean another option for her when I am too old to care for her.’’
When Jean and her husband Bruce first visited the Christchurch homes they planned to relocate in 2013, they had to hack away bulrushes to inspect the walls. The homes had been sitting empty for two years and were already being reclaimed by the neighbouring wetlands.
‘‘It was heartbreaking to see so many beautiful houses demolished when people were living in cars,’’ Jean MacHardy said.
‘‘They were just sitting there empty. They bulldozed hundreds of them.’’
Bruce MacHardy made about six trips to Christchurch to ready the houses for the move to Golden Bay. He stripped out the buildings and removed the brick cladding.
The homes were taken on a truck by Smith Cranes for the
508-kilometre trip to Golden Bay. The serpentine and steep road over Takaka Hill and into Golden Bay had to be closed for the night so the truck could make it safely over. A problem with hydraulics on the truck meant a corner of two of the homes got caught on a tree. But there was no major damage.
Bruce MacHardy runs a
50-hectare dairy farm in Golden Bay, but also has building skills. He used farm machinery to sink the piles for the relocated house.
‘‘It was a lot of work. We were farming at the same time so I could only do a little bit every now and then.’’
Jean MacHardy said the relocated homes were being given a ‘‘new life’’ after the Canterbury earthquakes.
‘‘It’s a nice positive outcome from something that was tragic.
‘‘It has given us an option that we wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise.’’
Most of the approximately 700 homes relocated from the residential red zone were moved by two Christchurch companies: Smith Cranes and King House Removals.
King House Removals coowner Grant Willis said the company shifted about 350 homes. He said one house moved just a single block, while another went to Franz Josef on the West Coast.
‘‘That is a long way to take a house,’’ he said.
‘‘We had to take a lot of
detours to avoid the high-sided bridges they have on the West Coast.’’
Smith Cranes building relocations manager A J Pearson said the company relocated about 350 homes.
‘‘At the height of it, we had two crews of six guys and another crew preparing the houses. We took 45 houses out of Brooklands alone.’’
A sample of 181 relocated homes shows most remained in Christchurch, while 95 were relocated within Canterbury.
Two went to the West Coast, 17 went to Southland and 12 to Otago.
Kevin Naish’s home did not travel very far. It was moved about a kilometre down the road. His Kaiapoi house was red zoned in 2011, but his settlement was not enough to cover a new house of the same quality. So he bought a nearby empty piece of land and moved his old house to the new plot.
He had to live in a caravan with his wife, Girl Naish, and their dog Piki for a ‘‘horrible’’ year on the empty plot before his house could be moved.
‘‘It was pretty horrible,’’ he said. ‘‘It was cold in winter. It’s not how you should be living when you are old.’’
The house was moved to the new plot in 2013. A cleared section of the Kaiapoi red zone is across the road from his new abode.
‘‘I can go over there and hit a few golf balls when I want to and walk through to the river. It’s no trouble.’’
But he believes his riverside neighbourhood should not have been red zoned.
His former property, along with a few other blocks of land, was recently earmarked for new commercial and residential development.
‘‘No-one needed to be kicked out in the first place. A lot of people weren’t strong enough to get over it or get through it.’’
A spokesman for Land Information New Zealand (Linz), which took over many of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority’s functions when it was disestablished in 2016, said there were no definite figures on exactly how many homes had been relocated.
‘‘Approximately 600 houses were relocated or flat-packed to various locations across New Zealand.
‘‘The exact number is hard to confirm as private insurers completed a number of the relocations as part of their clearance programme.’’
Housing New Zealand relocated 69 red zoned homes, which were refurbished by prisoners as part of a training programme at Rolleston Prison.
The now-disestablished Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (Cera) sold some of the red-zoned homes for relocation once it settled with property owners. Linz land and property manager Matt Bradley said sales records were incomplete.
The incomplete Cera figures show that 291 properties were sold by the Government for a total of about $1.2 million. The most expensive home went for $38,100, while 72 were given away and 24 were sold for $1. The average home sold for $4521.
‘‘Selling a home for $0 or $1, where the new owners were responsible for the removal, was a very cost-effective way for the Crown to clear the property because every demolition would generally cost the Crown around $30,000 each,’’ Bradley said.
Invercargill man Aven Erskine bought one of those homes for $20,000 because he saw an opportunity to make some money for his retirement.
It cost $130,000 to buy the house, relocate it and prepare the site just outside Invercargill. He said the house was now valued at $575,000.
‘‘So, I ask you the question, was it worth doing?’’ he said.
He planned to sell the house in five years.
‘‘I haven’t got a KiwiSaver, so this helps. I knew that houses were going cheap in Christchurch. I couldn’t see the sense in knocking them down when someone could make good use of it.
‘‘If I can relocate a house, why didn’t the Government relocate all those houses for those people. It would have been a lot cheaper.’’
Erskine was proud of his money-making venture.
‘‘A lot of people made a lot of money after the earthquakes and a lot of people are crying about it.
‘‘I saw an opportunity and I took it.’’