Home, sweet home

October 2, 2010
A Nelson charity trying to help those who are struggling to find affordable homes is finding that its efforts aren't always appreciated. Geoff Collett reports.
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It's mid-morning on a radiant spring day, and in the tidy living room of a brick and tile unit on the edge of a new and peaceful Richmond subdivision, three women are chatting over a cup of tea about how much they enjoy living here: the quiet, the warmth, the sun, the neighbours.
So far, so normal - but this isn't quite the suburban stereotype that might be assumed.
The most obvious clue can be found just outside. The unit is sparkling new but is also small, one of nine that have been shoehorned into the sort of space three homes would usually occupy.
It has to be said that the sight of these little places crammed into a corner of a still mostly empty subdivision - the sort of development where you might usually expect the more palatial suburban palaces favoured by the upwardly mobile middle class - is incongruous.
A small plaque on a wall helps to explain. The complex has just been built for the Nelson-Tasman Housing Trust, a community-based charity which has set out to help ease the region's notorious home affordability problems by building its own houses, using a mixture of grants and loan finance, then renting them at a discounted rate to people struggling to get a secure footing in the housing market.
It sounds worthy. It has also proved to be, in some neighbourhoods at least, highly controversial.
Yes, says Melva Welch, a superannuitant whose living room today's chat is taking place in - she has encountered suspicion and snobbery from the odd passerby; people who pass her when she's out walking and ask in a clearly disapproving tone, "Do you live in there?".
Her response, she says, is always to invite them in for a look and a cuppa to see that there's nothing to fear.
But far outweighing that sort of unpleasantness is what the women really want to talk about: how good life is here.
They only moved in during July, and as Mrs Welch says, "I can't remember when I felt so at peace and so settled".
Her next-door neighbour, Kirstie Crombie, more than once likens it to a dream. The third member of the trio, Raewyn Cornish, echoes the sentiment, tearing up just briefly as she says: "I still pinch myself that actually, this is mine. It brings up some emotion for me [to think] that no-one is going to tell me that I have to move on."
All three are single - Ms Crombie and Mrs Welch were left without their own homes after marriage breakups, and Ms Cornish suffers from long- term chronic health problems. All three survive on benefits - Ms Crombie receives the domestic purposes benefit (she has a four- year-old son, Alexander, with high health needs), Mrs Welch national super, and Ms Cornish an invalid's benefit.
There are other similarities to their stories, such as Ms Cornish's and Mrs Welch's prolonged and depressing efforts to find somewhere they could settle without fear of being thrown out when the landlord's situation changed; the often cold, damp or poky places they have spent time living in; their shared need for somewhere warm and dry to help manage health problems.
And then there is their very ordinariness, their glaring contrast with the easy stereotypes attached to beneficiaries and social housing tenants. As Ms Cornish puts it with appropriate irony, "we're hardly gang affiliates".
The trust has asked them to talk about themselves in the hope that it might allay some of the fears that have emerged about its operations - to demonstrate that it is not catering to society's dregs.
The six other households didn't want to take part in the interview, so whether these three are truly representative of the wider group in the Richmond units remains unclear. Trust co-ordinator Patrick Steer, who has organised the gathering, says they are, and that the trust went to some lengths to ensure a broad mix of tenants, across ages and gender, including a few children, single people and couples.
The three women speak highly of their neighbours, and about everything else about being here. If a sceptical outsider sees only houses that are small and cheek-by-jowl, the yards tiny, the driveways and turning areas tight, these residents see modern, warm, comfortable, well-built homes which they could never hope to call their own if it wasn't for the trust's efforts.
And, it should be added, the Canterbury Community Trust's help. It gave $2.2 million to help build the houses, and that contribution has been immortalised in the name given to the complex, Canterbury Court.
In Nelson's Brook Valley, though, three women's dream come true is the embodiment of someone else's nightmare. The reaction to the housing trust's plans for its next project, at the OK Corral site, leaves little doubt of that.
The proposal is for nine houses, although the trust has been keen to make it clear that they will be on a bigger site and not so shoehorned in. They will, in keeping with the trust's philosophies, be "eco-friendly" - designed for maximum sun, with solar water heating, greywater reticulation, extra insulation and double glazing. They will be buffered from the road and neighbours by a streetfront park. They will, Mr Steer suggests, give the whole neighbourhood a lift, not drag it down, as some nearby residents have claimed.
Brook resident Andrew Rose, the first to turn to The Nelson Mail with concerns about the project, went to Richmond to check out the Canterbury Court development. He wasn't impressed. "A suburban stalag, " he subsequently told the paper. Awful. A ghetto.
He and his neighbours organised themselves to campaign against the trust's plan for the Brook, fearful of what would happen to their property values and the harmony of their neighbourhood, and the loss of the open space provided by the OK Corral.
One hundred and fifty people signed a petition objecting to the Nelson City Council's plan to gift the land to the trust as its contribution to the project. Street meetings were organised. Thirty-seven of 43 submissions to the council from residents objected. The council has stood by its support for the trust.
The trust is partly resigned to such a response, partly riled by it. Mr Rose's comments in the Mail especially fired Mr Steer up. "It's rabble-rousing stuff of the worst sort, " he says.
Then again, "I guess it's the nature of what [we] do. You expect there to be some negative response".
Back in Richmond, the trust's Canterbury Court units were among the first houses built on the Bramley Estates subdivision, so had few, if any, established neighbours to upset. But their presence wasn't exactly embraced there, either.
Trust chairman Keith Preston says the developers lost sales when news broke about the trust's plans.
The trust kept the Canterbury Court opening in July deliberately low-key - a response, Mr Steer says, to the developers' anxiety about further publicity causing them a fresh spell of grief in trying to market their sections.
Bramley is an attractive, rolling bit of countryside between Richmond and Hope, which a large sign announces has 61 sections along with "greenways" and "meandering watercourses". A few more houses are sprinkled about or under construction, but it remains early days.
A spokesman for the developers - who doesn't want to be named, and doesn't want to comment on many questions about the housing trust's presence in the subdivision - will say only that "with the standards and rules that are in place, [the trust] is fitting into the environment of a mixed subdivision".
A one-page information sheet prepared for would-be buyers in Bramley Estates reinforces that point, spelling out how the trust, along with the developers, has come up with rules for its tenants, to ensure that the trust's housing "exists in harmony with surrounding properties and future owners of properties" in Bramley.
Those rules include a cap on the number of children allowed in Canterbury Court (no more than 10 across the nine units), no caravans or housetrucks, no dogs and only one cat per unit, a mix of age groups, and "all tenants must have valid, satisfactory references and be subject to a credit check".
The leaflet notes that in the trust's six other established houses in Nelson and Richmond, "no problems have been encountered, and tenants have lived in harmony with their neighbours and have contributed to the rich and diverse community of the Nelson and Richmond district".
Mr Preston says that while the rules seem strict, the trust decided to accept them at the developers' request because it sympathised with the backlash they had suffered from the market.
It has long since come to terms with the reality - that "everybody's incredibly supportive [of the trust's work] as long as it's not in their backyards"; that at times, the trust is cast as the "villain" of the piece, "which is weird" given its good intentions and the lack of recompense for its efforts.
It gets bagged by private-sector landlords, too, who accuse it of distorting and undercutting the rental market with the benefit of grants and cheap government finance.
The trust can respond to such complaints with its own arguments about who's helping who, and the failings of the private sector to meet the demand for affordable, good-quality rental accommodation.
It likes to be upfront with its plans, to talk through neighbours' concerns, as Mr Preston says it is still trying to do in the Brook, and to prove the merits of its approach through the way it develops and runs its houses.
But there comes a point where it just gets on and does what it can.
And it could hardly hope for three more committed cheerleaders than the women gathered in the compact but comfortable living room out in the still-green paddocks of a Richmond subdivision on this sunny morning.
"It's like a dream, " says Kirstie Crombie.
"I couldn't have come to a better place, " says Raewyn Cornish.
"There hasn't been one day since I came here that I haven't got up and rejoiced, " says Melva Welch.
"If we had more places like this, our community would be much more understanding."