I love Europe. Maybe it’s my Eastern European roots, but having clocked up a huge number of air miles over the past 20 or so years, my favourite trips were always the ones where I winged my way to Europe.
There’s something truly lovely about getting up in the morning, going for a run along centuries-old cobbled streets, then returning to a café au lait, a pain au chocolat, and some serious people watching. Europe has it all: culture, history, art, architecture and a vibrancy I don’t find elsewhere.
Chief among those things is inner city living. My father grew up in a lovely old apartment building in Budapest, and I’ve twice visited his old home, sat on the step outside, and wondered how fate had me growing up halfway across the world in a very different setting.
That difference is how we live. New Zealand’s history has been typified, for at least a century, by suburban living well outside the CBD. In the early days of our business, when we leased a fairly dodgy floor of a medium-rise Wellington building, from noon Saturday until Monday morning those city streets were deathly quiet. Everyone was at church, mowing lawns, or washing cars out in Tawa, Trentham or Titahi Bay.
So when the Christchurch earthquake struck 15 years ago and flattened large swathes of the CBD, people who genuinely understood urban planning, most notably the late, great Ian Athfield, argued that intensification and inner city living were exactly what would make Christchurch a vibrant, modern city.
The planning followed, with parts of the CBD held back from development for a decade or more to force an “up” rather than an “out” approach.
But at the same time, Airbnb arrived. That platform made it possible for me to skip the faceless hotels and instead find quirky rentals from Brussels to Budapest, Bastogne to Bucharest. Its flip side, though, was a wall of one- and two-bedroom apartments, generally parking-free, built not for people who wanted to live in them but for investors chasing short-term rental yield.
The result is streets with no kids on bikes and no couples strolling on a summer evening. In the narrow streets of St Albans, lovely old villas were bulldozed to make way for it, replaced by apartments jammed onto the section as tightly as the district plan allowed, built for a spreadsheet rather than a street. The few people who do live there permanently spend their evenings hunting a park among the tourists’ rental cars.
To be fair, some of it has worked. Wander through the Terraces on the Avon of an evening, and you’ll find people spilling out of bars and a buzz that never existed in the old CBD, which by 5 pm on a weekday was as lively as a Sunday morning in Tawa. The SALT district, Riverside Market and the laneways are real, tangible wins. Athfield’s vision, in patches, has become bricks and mortar.
But the broader dream has curdled into something slower and messier than anyone hoped back in 2011. For years the “recovery” was mostly gravel car parks where grand renders once stood. Insurance and construction costs blew out, and banks, still nursing leaky building scars, remained deeply reluctant to fund multi-unit housing. Throw in a population raised on the quarter acre section as the Kiwi dream, and building the thing was only ever half the battle.
And here’s where my optimism runs out completely. Because alongside the Terraces and laneways, we’re also watching a wave of new terraces and townhouses hard-sold to first home buyers and investors on the promise of “own a home in the city for under $600,000.” On paper, that’s exactly what intensification should deliver. In practice, I think much of it is density dressed up as a solution when it’s actually just the next problem, wrapped in a nicer render.
Walk past these developments, and you’ll see units crammed in with barely a metre between them, minimal storage, postage stamp outdoor space and, thanks to the same investor and Airbnb pressures already at play, often no parking at all. Finishes are generic, floor plans rigid rather than adaptable, and build quality, in a sector under brutal cost and time pressure, is anyone’s guess until the maintenance bills, and the cracks, start showing.
Which raises the question nobody at the sales office wants to answer: what happened to good design? What happened to a quality build? What happened to any thought at all for a multigenerational lifespan? My father’s Budapest apartment building has stood for the better part of a century, survived a war and an uprising, and remains a genuinely lovely place to live. Nobody will be sitting fondly on the step of a $500,000 St Albans terrace in eighty years reminiscing about the family home. More likely it will have been re-clad twice, chopped into a rental, and quietly written off, the slum nobody meant to build, but everybody was happy to sell.
Athfield gave Christchurch a genuinely good idea. What’s actually been delivered, in far too many cases, is density for density’s sake, squeezed out at the cheapest possible price point, on streets Airbnb has already emptied of the very life the whole project was meant to create. Fifteen years on, we haven’t answered the question Athfield posed. We’ve built our way around it, taken the brochure photo, and moved straight on to the next site.
Sadly people want them, and IMHO the people buying them are either young families in their first home who just want to get their foot in a door, but know its only temporary, or migrants for whom those homes are probably much better than what they left behind. If only we were good at public transport. Christchurch is one of the better cities in NZ from that perspective. I am seeing some horrible developments on Auckland’s North Shore. Same thing, no land, and no car parks, barely any greenspace. And roads that were not designed to have cars parked on both sides of the road.