 Tenants in the Dixon Street flats deserve better Kāinga Ora hasn’t been called “Housing New Zealand” in a while now. It’s maybe evidence of the years and years of neglect and underfunding of maintenance, then, that the sign outside the Dixon Street flats still calls it that under the lichen and graffiti that cover it. 134 Dixon Street has seen better days. The balconies that used to run up the front of the building are boarded up on the inside and chopped off on the outside. Broken windows are replaced with plywood, hallways reek of piss, copper pipes are ripped out of abandoned rooms. Per Heritage New Zealand’s listing of the building, the last time the flats were retrofitted was in 1982. It needs a renovation badly. It needs that renovation because its tenants deserve at the very least some basic dignity in their lives and in their homes. Hold onto that “because”. It’s important. In 2022, Kāinga Ora announced that it would be kicking every single resident of the building’s 117 flats out by the 30th of April 2024. That’s this Tuesday. All of these flats are below-market-rate social housing. At the time, tenants in the building were described to Stuff as “typically middle-aged, single, older, formerly homeless individuals.” Now, 25 people are still in the building, and none of them are able to find a suitable home. Promises were made that all the residents would be temporarily put up in a nearby emergency housing complex. The property developer who owns it described particularly ghoulishly the way that these desperate, evicted people just made transient by an uncaring state would be charged what he called a “competitive market price” in order to not go homeless. That these promises ignored that the emergency building had only 100 rooms, didn’t allow pets and wouldn’t be suitable for many of Dixon’s residents with disabilities underlines something. Promises that some would be housed in a then-uncompleted new development on Rolleston street were also made. That that development is still under construction and no real solution has been offered as to where, exactly, the 25 people still in the building years after planning started on this farce are supposed to live underlines something, too. It underlines that virtually no care whatsoever has been given to the people hurt by this. Kāinga Ora, and the government as a whole, are treating the 117 people they’re throwing out of their homes as numbers on a spreadsheet and counters on a board. Kāinga Ora appears to view the fact that the decision being made here must interact with the human beings it’s supposed to house as a nuisance and, perhaps, something to be reacted to with spite. Residents report that maintenance concerns have gone completely ignored as yet more problems pile up. It’s not hard to read this as Kāinga Ora allowing life to become more and more miserable for tenants as a way of wearing them down. It’s worth noting that this is coinciding with the removal of the “sustaining tenancies” framework, which helps tenants stay in their homes, something a source close to the building tells me many residents have noted privately. When we factor all of this into a look at the forebodingly vague way Kāinga Ora has talked–or, rather, barely talked at all–about the future of the flats, that future does not look bright. Already, we’re looking at a situation where 25 people are effectively about to become homeless or at best thrown into unstable emergency housing and transience (worthy of note is that the Wellington region’s waiting list for social housing is estimated at around 2000 people long). Consider, now, that Kāinga Ora has also refused to promise tenants the right of return to their homes and claimed in a press release in 2022 they are “still working through a decision regarding the building’s future.” It all looks an awful lot like what was then Housing New Zealand’s treatment of the residents of the nearby Gordon Wilson flats in 2012, where 131 vulnerable people were given just a week to move out of their homes (and many failed to find new ones in time) due to earthquake strengthening that needed to be done. After vaguely hand-waving away questions from MPs and advocacy groups about when repairs would be carried out and what would happen to the people affected, HNZ sold the building a few years down the line, and it’ll now likely be demolished rather than ever serve the purpose of social housing again. You can’t look at—or live in—the Dixon Street flats and deny that serious maintenance needs to be carried out. That renovations need to be made and the building needs to be brought back to a decent condition. You can’t deny that because you also can’t deny that people deserve some basic fucking dignity. Dignity they haven’t been shown because Kāinga Ora isn’t out to renovate anything. They’re not out to house people, either. You couldn’t deny in 2012 that the Gordon Wilson flats needed earthquake strengthening, or that the George Porter towers needed maintenance. But that’s not what happened to either of those buildings and it won’t be what happens on Dixon street. When Kāinga Ora announced the plans for eviction, they said not that they would be renovating the flats, but that the flats were “old and not fit for purpose.” When they hand-wave away questions of right of return and the future of the place, an implied but not openly announced future becomes apparent. What is happening here–besides the eviction of a whole lot of disproportionately vulnerable people from their homes–is one outcome of the same social force and political project that saw to Gordon Wilson and George Porter. For that matter, the same one that’s seen thousands upon thousands of individual state houses privatised. While we’re at it, the same one that’s turned our healthcare into a bizarre corporatised hellscape and our welfare system into a horde of screeching vindictive banshees who seem to actively want you to starve to death. The role of any post-cold-war, post-Rogernomics Neoliberal government is to govern as little as possible. To distance the state as much as possible from any role it once had in supporting people, to subject us in every way it possibly can to the inappropriately groping fingers of the market’s invisible hand. For a state housing organisation–something which exists in more or less complete conflict with this process–that means complete destruction. That means systematic underfunding of public housing so that it can be done away with in favour of market solutions and so-called “affordable housing” measures. It means buildings being deliberately left to rot where they stand for decades upon decades in order to manufacture consent for the complete abolition of even the possibility of high-density public housing. It means the same people who let this destruction happen under their watch will turn to cameras and reporters, look the public dead in the eye, and say that the flats ‘just aren’t worth the money it would take to save them’ because that money now includes the cost of decades of un-carried-out maintenance and refurbishment. It means a move away from state housing towards transience and charity providers (and, frankly, all-out homelessness) for the worst-off right as winter starts, and exploitative market landlordism for everyone else. It means hundreds kicked out of their homes by a social force that wants social housing destroyed and its residents made homeless. It means that, once those residents are finally dragged to the curb by the shambling Neoliberal corpse of the Welfare State, that building will never be occupied again. Kāigna Ora’s next step will either be to sell the flats or to demolish them itself. As the building’s heritage listed, we’re looking at another long slog towards eventual demolition-by-neglect like Gordon Wilson has been. After that, they’ll either be central city property in the hands of Wellington’s developer-landlord elite and miles out of the realm of “affordability” regardless of what they end up being, or Kāinga Ora will construct something with far fewer units in a place that once housed 117 people. The outcome any way you look at it will be much, much less housing–especially for people who need it the most–and another step away from any chance of an alternative model of living besides complete subjection to market forces in every element of life. The downfall of the Dixon Street Flats will, like Gordon Wilson before it, be one more episode in the long saga of the erosion of anything resembling socialism and anything resembling an alternative to total market subjugation. An alternative to the model that every single person in this country who goes hungry, who goes sick, who goes homeless without any support from the state is a victim of. We need social housing to be expanded massively. We need more high density social housing buildings like Dixon, not less. The answer to concerns of “Ghettoisation” isn’t to build less social housing or to spread ever-fewer public units in amongst “affordable” private units, it’s to make social housing so abundant and so well funded and so widely accessible that a vast swathe of the population can live in it and to actually fund the maintenance. We need to grab onto that “Alternative” we keep being told doesn’t exist and refuse to accept anything else. The people in Dixon Street about to lose their homes deserve any support they can be given. The actions and forces that have put them in this situation deserve utter outrage. The people who live in this country deserve decent, public housing and a campaign needs to be built for this. I’ll have a proper update in a few days and some further information on what can be done for the people affected and against the austerity that has done this to them. |