PORIRUA EAST A CAUTIONARY TALE
A shift towards multi-unit state housing saw Porirua East become a cautionary tale for future government developments.
The acclaimed housing scheme in Porirua East not only failed to deliver high-quality homes, but also created social stigma for the mainly Māori and Pacific families who eventually lived there.
The first state homes in the 1900s were supposed to be built to the highest standards that budgets would allow for. No two houses were to be exactly alike – to prevent people from being identified as state tenants and to ensure England’s working-class suburbs weren’t replicated.
But falling budgets, increased building costs and urban sprawl concerns in the 1960s saw Porirua East become one of the first places to see large-scale multi-unit development.
The backlash was swift. The uniformity of design, the dominance of poorer households, and the lack of services and amenities, including libraries and community halls, effectively saw Porirua East characterised as a ghetto.
Despite growing numbers of Māori and Pasifika people moving into state homes, they weren’t designed with their prospective tenants in mind.
One Māori tenant, accustomed to separating food preparation areas from washing areas, was horrified to find the only place she could wash her family’s clothes was in the kitchen.
‘‘These houses were designed by English people who are happy to wash their pants in the sink. Well, I wasn’t going to be happy washing my babies’ nappies in there,’’ the woman said.
When Queen Elizabeth II visited one of the homes with Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in 1963, she asked developer John Dunlop: ‘‘Where do you put the prams?’’
A 1963 Anglican Church report accused the government of forgetting the social needs of the community when it formulated plans for Porirua East.
Urban historian Ben Schrader says there was a perception the shift away from standalone homes was ‘‘un-New Zealand’’ and an affront to the traditional Kiwi way of life.
‘‘From the 1960s, Eastern Porirua was widely criticised as an undesirable place to live – a ‘failed experiment’ . . . Popular prejudice is grounded in the fact that it has always been a lowincome community and the poor are severely judged in New Zealand,’’ Schrader says.
In the late 1970s, an image of the suburb’s state homes was included in Housing Corporation publicity material as an example of what to avoid in future housing schemes.