state housing

The State steps in (and out)

'I never feel sorry for myself. When you are on the breadline, you just get on and do it.'

Val Wilson, 58-year old state tenant, Dixon Street Flats, Wellington, 1992

Val Wilson's words, to an Evening Post reporter, reveal both resignation and dogged resilience following news that the government's introduction of full market rents would see her pay nearly 300 percent more for her tiny, one-bedroom state flat. Even after a new accommodation supplement, Val was left with precious little to live on. But if strength of character was able to help people like Val come to terms with their new situation, it was not enough, as the rent rises came into effect, to prevent hundreds of others falling below the breadline into poverty.

Building community

Community has many different meanings. People might live in a particular community, but have little contact with their neighbours, preferring instead to pursue their social life elsewhere. Others in the same street might be best friends and spend hours 'chewing the fat' over a back fence. Planners of state housing communities encouraged the second model, in which neighbours would become friends and where locals would look out for one another.

Happy families

'We had a marvellous life for the kids.'

Glad Carrick, Naenae resident, 1940

Glad's heartfelt comment captures an essential aim of state housing: 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. The houses built under Premier Richard Seddon's workers' dwellings scheme from 1905 were targeted at working families, invariably nuclear families: two parents with children. Successive governments continued the practice, believing the nuclear family to be the 'foundation of the nation', a foundation that required the buttressing of the state to remain grounded and true.