Neighbourhood’s nightmare is owner’s ‘happy memory’
Gail Clydesdale looks out her kitchen window at the piles of rubbish bags that accumulate daily at the abandoned house next door.
Rats run across her fence, she sees them on the road when she goes outside, and the stench from the waste burns her nostrils when there’s an easterly wind.
“It just makes us feel really disgusted. We try to look after our property, and to see that next door, it's quite depressing,” she said.
It’s been this way for 13 years. But for the absentee owner, Rachel Dawson, the property holds so many memories that she cannot let it go.
The Farnborough St, Aranui home has sat derelict since it was condemned after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Dawson was forced to move, and went to Australia.
Since then, the property has become a local dumping ground, with rubbish attracting vermin that have gone into neighbouring homes.
John Calder, who lives over the fence on the other side, has to lay rat traps every fortnight. He has lived there for 28 years, and has seen the home deteriorate since it was abandoned.
“The rats have taken all my bait,” he said. “You hear them scutter up into the garage roof. Tey leave all their droppings behind. It’s disgusting, it really is.”
Kelly Barber, city councillor for the Burwood ward, visited the home recently and was “flabbergasted,” at the state of the property.
He said it was “intolerable” to have big amounts of rubbish to that extent, and passed the complaint on to the council.
Clydesdale and Calder, along with a group of other nearby residents, have contacted the council several times. “So many times that you wouldn’t be able to count on your two feet and hands,” according to Chris Astle, who lives over the road from the home.
The council’s head of regulatory compliance, Tracey Weston, confirmed that a complaint had been made, and said an environmental health officer had inspected the property.
Bait stations had been placed on site as a short-term solution, and the council had engaged the owner, but there was not much it could do, she said.
“As a general rule, the responsibility to maintain the condition of a property is that of the property owner; and there is no duty on an owner to maintain a building or property to a specific standard.”
Dawson said the ongoing problems with the property were not her doing.
Once the house was condemned, she moved overseas and received a settlement from EQC, she said. She’d had “quite a few” offers to buy the house, but was reluctant to let it go.
Dawson said the house held important memories for her. Her mother died there in 1981, then her dad in 1998. She grew up there, and played outside on the street with other neighbourhood children.
The overgrown shrubs at the front of the property were once bushes planted by her late mother, and peach, pear and walnut trees used to line the backyard, she said.
“It’s a happy memory that lives in the back of my mind. When I think of the house, I think of how it used to be.”
Dawson said it wasn’t her fault that rubbish was dumped on the property, and she often didn’t know it was happening.
Her nephew, who lives in Christchurch, boarded the home up and tidied the rubbish when she received a complaint over a year ago.
The only other complaint she had received was on April 26, she said.
“If [residents] see somebody dumping rubbish, they should talk to that person or take a number plate down – that's where I’m coming from. They’re seeing it happen, I’m not.”
Dawson said that once she got the money, she planned to rebuild or demolish the home. In the meantime, she planned to get her nephew to clean up the property again.
But she knew that piles of rubbish would continue to be dumped.
“I’m not going to sell the house – I can’t afford to put another house on there. The bottom line is once [her nephew] clears it out, the same thing is going to happen again.”
Astle and several other residents have put up with the derelict home for over a decade. They are running out of rat bait – and patience.
Calder said he just wanted the place tidied up, while Astle said he no longer wanted to open his curtains and see rubbish every morning.
“I just think the owner’s had long enough to sort it out. The action’s got to go on them first,” Clydesdale said.
“After 13 years, you would think something would be done.”