New Zealanders have called many structures home. Some have been solid and permanent: kauri villas set in lawns and gardens, row houses on cramped Dunedin sections, sprawling state house communities in Otara, mock-Tudor mansions with three-car garages in Remuera, penthouse apartments in inner-city Wellington
An essential aim of state housing was to provide suburban homes for families, a place where children could grow up in safe and spacious surroundings, away from the dangers of the inner city. This guided state housing policy from the beginning.
Many of us associate the beginning of state housing with the hipped-roof cottages built by the first Labour government of the 1930s and 40s. But the origin of state housing has much earlier roots.
In this plan for the Maori housing settlement at Waiwhetu, Lower Hutt (c. 1947), houses are clustered around a marae, with the Waiwhetu Stream in the foreground. The complex subsequently built closely resembled this plan.
