Pining for the fjords

My friend and fellow Cashmere Sweater Barnaby Bennett posted this on his Facebook page, and I asked him whether I could re-post it here, for those that don’t have the good fortune of being his friend (or those that haven’t taken a principled stand against the evils of Zuckerberg). Barnaby is working on his PhD, in temporary structures and architecture or something, I can never really pin it down. But he had a look at the CCDU blueprint, in relation to author Jane Jacobs’ four rules. Jacobs wrote “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” in 1961; seems like more than 50 years later, we’re still making the same mistakes. [Barnaby's comments in brackets afterwards]

I think the Christchurch Blueprint breaks all four of Jane Jacobs’ rules!

“To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:

1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two…
[they are zoning the city into precincts]

2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.
[minimum development size is 7000m2]

3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.
[CERA has overseen the demolition of 80% of the city and seen no heritage plan developed 2 years later]

4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there…”

[Um, yeah. Housing and residential is only dealt with in a superficial fashion in the blueprint - JD]

― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

As seen with his behaviour around transport in Auckland, Gerry Brownlee seems to view “evidence” with an arrogant disregard, as nothing more than a nuisance.

The only thing worse than an asset sale is an asset giveaway

So the fight over Hagley Oval is now being played out in the environment court. I’ve discussed the pros and cons, but mainly the cons, of this at length on the blog. I won’t stop, but I’ll try and add something different to debate. 

Another thing I have also argued against at length is the threat of council asset sales. There are many reasons against, but one of the strongest is why sell an asset that has a guaranteed return to pay for one that doesn’t even have a business plan? This same question can be asked of the Hagley Oval proposal. 

The difference being we (the people of Christchurch, as owners of Hagley Park) are being asked to GIVE part of this asset to Canterbury Cricket, so they can put up a stadium and charge entry. They are going to monetize an asset of all Christchurch people, for the benefit of the few. On top of that, they haven’t even provided a costed plan.

If I put it to council that I should be given the fourth floor of the Council Building, to run for my own commercial gain, preventing the rest of the staff from using it, I’d be laughed out of town, possibly locked up. So how is this idea even being entertained? Because it’s being done under the mask of SPORTS. Sports will make us happy. Sports will rebuild our resilience. Sports will bring in lots of money even though no-one can cite any evidence that suggests it’s true. Sports will tap into some basic, primal urge that somehow both makes us “uniquely New Zealand” whilst simultaneously hollows out our grass-roots sports organisations until they are completely modelled on the American franchise system.

Don’t get me wrong – I fucking love sports. I play football, I love the Warriors despite their inconsistent results, and I think cricket is the greatest sport of them all, test matches especially. But I am not so blind as to think that just because Richard Hadlee and Ian Botham could skittle a team at will, they are somehow qualified to make massive decisions on infrastructure. In the law-free zone of the Christchurch rebuild, there are heaps of decisions which reek of poor process. This one is the turd at the top of the pile. 

More on the office block stadium thing

There is a letter in the press from Geoff Saunders this morning, who came up with the bright idea for the office block stadium thing. He’s a lawyer, not an architect, but he thinks its a good idea. He explains in the letter that he doesn’t want to put his law firm in Victoria St or Lincoln Rd, he wants to be in the city. But he also doesn’t want to pay $400 a square metre, though he “admires those” that have committed to do so. He then says:

The rationale behind the multi-use stadium proposal is to create four wonderful office towers with associated facilities, such as a gym and pool, and to lure us back. The land under the four office towers comes at very little cost to the developer/owner.

Hang on? The land comes at very little cost to the developer/owner? Mr Saunders might want to elaborate on that a bit. He has said that he wants a high spec office block, but that he doesn’t want to pay the market rate for it. So he’s proposing that someone build an office for him, and figures that this will be cheaper because “the land comes as very little cost”. We know that there is no such thing as a free lunch, so if the land comes at very little cost to the developers, it’s costing someone else. That someone else would be the taxpayer and the ratepayer, the ones who are funding the government acquisition of this land. In Saunders’ plan, not only would the average Christchurch resident be subsidising an uneconomic stadium, but we’d be subsidising office space for some of the city’s most high-profile, high-priced law firms, and that is simply unacceptable.

“Minister’s office have okayed, and intention will be to put this in your name Roger”

As No Right Turn reports, the OIAs for CERAs arbitrary declaration that the Red Zone is a “politics free zone” are back, and the bits that haven’t been redacted are pretty damning. While the juiciest bits have been withheld, there are still some interesting things, such as when they email round one of my tweets, or that “Mojo and Eugenie are Facebooking!” They were obviously doing their very best to stifle first, justify second. 

May favourite bit, however, is this line which somehow escaped the black highlighter: ”Minister’s office have okayed, and intention will be to put this in your name Roger”. This makes it clear that they’ve gone up to Gerry, got the go ahead, and then the press release has come back down for poor Roger Sutton to front. You have to feel sorry for the guy. We had so much hope for him when he came into the job. I doubt that when he left Orion, and took a pay cut to help out Christchurch he could dreamt that 18 months later, he wouldn’t even have any control over the things coming out of his mouth. Such a shame. He should get out now whilst people can still vaguely remember his pre-CERA career.

It also goes to show what a complete farce the Press Power List is. I don’t really think the thing is worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s part of the paper’s endless march to being a bunch of opinion pieces with ads tacked on the sides (the new “Mainland Live” section is meant to be light news, but was really just an excuse to convert a whole page of the front section of the paper to opinion pieces, and bad ones at that. Jane Bowron, take a bow.) Anyway, back to the Power List. It has Sutton in at number 6. This OIA shows just how much “power” he has. Any of the other rankings should be taken with an unhealthy amount of salt, especially the one which has John Key at the top of the list. The man in charge is clearly Gerry, his brutish fingers are said to be all over the CCDU plan; Key’s interest in Christchurch seems to be strictly limited to photoshoots at the openings of buildings, and even the rate of those seems to have slowed down. Maybe he’s finally realised that all these pictures of him on empty building sites might not be the best look when he goes into an election campaign trying to boast of the rebuild.

The thing is, no-one knows who’s in running Christchurch, apart maybe a few of those guys in the Beehive. CERA, CCDU, the council, ECAN – these are all less than transparent organisations, with silent, un-OIA-able actors who are making decisions about the city without fear of scrutiny. The Press Power List suggests that there is an easy to read list of the 50 people running the shop, and that’s the most worrying thing about it. 

There and back again: travel diary of my trip to the red zone

Yesterday, a group of us tried to get into Cathedral Square to lay a wreath at the stone cairn. Just a quick précis – way back in the times BE (Before Earthquake), water was a big issue in Canterbury. The biggest. Nick Smith and friends used the Creech Report as an excuse to do what they always wanted and scrap our regional council ECan. This led to a bunch of protests about the removal of democracy, under the umbrella of the Our Water, Our Vote (OWOV) group, which culminated in the building of the cairn. For this, around 3000 people gathered in Cathedral Square, and worked together to build the stone cairn. There’s a great 5 minute clip of that here. 

Last week, the bill which extended the ECan “temporary commissioners” bill was made law by the National-ACT-United Future-Maori government. We aren’t happy about that, and wanted to express our disapproval. However, OWOV has always tried to do things respectfully. We arranged a group to go in to the square, and requested permission from the relevant people at CERA. This request was for 8 people from OWOV, including Eugenie Sage, Sam Mahon, Edward Snowdon, Ruth Dyson and myself. This request was approved.

It was only when someone at CERA got wind of the media coming along that they revoked the access. As the stories in the Press and at RNZ have reported, this was due to a ban on “political events”. At this point, it is worth noting that the access had been approved for a list which included the names Sage, Mahon, Dyson and Dann – but this didn’t seem to bother them. It was the media which got the powers that be worried, and led them to revoke access.

Eventually, they let one person – Edward Snowdon, who engineered the cairn with Sam Mahon – go in with the wreath. In this photo, you can see the farcical nature of the situation: Edward is about to get a vest and a hard hat so he can go in, whilst the Red Zone disaster-porn tourism bus comes out after having done a lap of the square. 

Here is another shot which highlight the idiocy. On the right, you have a food truck which operates every day in the square. You can see that there are cars going in and out of the square, using it as a parking lot. The cairn is still there, just above the tradie’s head. It’s not about safety, or about “protecting” us; it was simply, as Roger said, political. That’s very dangerous ground to tread on.

Here is a story from August last year, from the last time I went into the Red Zone.

That’s me in the highlighter orange. Roger, cycling advocate, led a tour of the CBD for cycling advocates which I was involved in. At one point, we went beyond the cordon and into the square. I’m a strong supporter of cycling in Christchurch, but lobbying for it is a political activity. A cycling lobby group going into the red zone is a political event. One that Roger organised, so CERA approved. He doesn’t have the right to approve and decline political activities solely based on whether he likes them or not. As others have pointed out, political expression is entrenched in our right to freedom of expression. I doubt Roger got into this job to do the dirty work of a dictator.

p.s. if you were conspiracy minded, you might see something sinister in their desire to ban political events from the red zone, and their promise to keep the cordon up if it helps developers 

Beyond the cordon: should we be let back in?

If you subscribe to the CERA “Invest Christchurch” newsletter – and you should, it’s  free and informative – you may have seen this from the CCDU director Warwick Isaacs. I’m going to quote it at length, because it’s quite extraordinary:

The Rebuild Zone cordon should not be seen as a barrier to development. Quite the opposite. Though our goal is to scale back the area inside the cordon, we’re not in a rush to remove it altogether. This isn’t just about providing a safe and efficient work environment for the demolition process; it’s because we want to provide the right environment for development as well. So to be completely clear on this point: if you’re a land owner, tenant or developer with a genuine need to be inside the cordon, we will endeavour to get you there.

So, the central city cordon isn’t there to keep us safe, it’s there because it’s convenient for developers. They could remove it faster, but they aren’t in a rush. I mean, what’s the hurry? The longer they keep the fences up, the longer it is before nosey citizens can get their prying eyes in their. The longer it is until former residents – like myself – will be able to go in and see the sites where they used to live.

This statement makes it absolutely clear: the cordon isn’t about safety, it’s about development. It’s about ensuring that that development can proceed without scrutiny, without any checks except for the minimal provisions of the emergency legislation. The CCDU and the government could not prostrate themselves any further to developers – and that’s the “right environment” for the rebuild; by developers, for developers. 

Crisis? What Crisis?

After what seems like half a year of trying, the pressure on Gerry Brownlee has finally seen him do something about the housing problem in the city. I say problem, because while critics call it a “crisis”, Brownlee still maintains that what we have are “difficulties”. He says housing difficulties, in the face of overwhelming evidence from the news media that has shown people living in what are frankly third-world conditions across the city, especially in the east. Many of those who are fortunate enough to have houses are paying exorbitant increases in rents, as the market tightens.

However, I’ve talked about the housing crisis before, and I don’t intend to go into it again here. What both interests and frightens me is the way Brownlee seems to be only selectively listening to the people on the ground. The CERA legislation created a powerful organisation, with a strong hierarchical command structure. This top-down approach is key to getting important decisions made quickly, and then executed in an appropriate time-frame. There are also downsides to taking such an approach. Because of the powers concentrated at the top of this hierarchy – powers which are the most over-arching ever given outside of wartime in this country – there isn’t a problem unless Gerry says there is a problem. Forget the reality – a crisis isn’t a crisis unless Gerry says it’s a crisis.

What this approach lacks is the flexibility to respond to a rapidly changing situation, the transparency to properly explain difficult decisions, and the compassion to appeal to the delicate states which so many people living in the city find themselves in. Brownlee has been portrayed as a bulldozer, a bully, a wrecking ball – and doesn’t seem to mind such analogies. There were times when that approach might have been appropriate – but right now, our city needs a softer touch.

C Newman from Strowan can suck a big one

There are two far-right people writing letters to the this morning’s Press, claiming the Government package is too generous, and that they have no obligation to buy land (the letters editor has given them the titles “Government Generous” and “Too Generous”). The two letter writers listed their suburbs as “Upper Riccarton” (the unaffected west) and “Strowan” (the word prats from Merivale use to make themselves feel even more elitist). C Newman of Strowan said:

“The Government has been over generous with taxpayers’ money towards the householders of Christchurch, maintaining the myth that the state is there to protect the citizen from nature.”

He goes on to spout some deplorable neoliberal drivel that only someone who had undergone a complete empathy lobotomy could think. If C Newman of Strowan weren’t so clearly prejudiced, he might like to do some research before he puts his bucolic pen to paper. Confident that he* wont bother to do so, I’ll refute some of that crap here.

The second part of his statement above – “maintaining the myth that the state is there to protect the citizen from nature” – has he heard of EQC? It was not set up to literally protect the individual from the effects of nature, but it can do the next best thing. From the Earthquake Commission Act of 1993:

The functions of the Commission are—

(a) to administer the insurance against natural disaster damage provided under this Act

EQC, which is a body that is set up and run soley by the Government of New Zealand, for the people of New Zealand, lists it’s primary function as providing insurance against natural disaster damage. That’s not a myth. It’s in legislation. Publicly available legislation that people like C Newman of Strowan could investigate, if they had the innate curiosity that bigots of the far-right clearly lack. Though I do wonder whether C Newman of Strowan might not qualify as far-right - even those on the hard right would generally agree that if the state is to have any role in the lives of it’s citizens, it is to try and protect them.

David Weusten, of Upper Riccarton writes:

“I applaud the Government on its offer to purchase red-zoned preoperties, as it was under no obligation to do so and has helped minimise the equity destruction that those in the zone face.”

This letter, and that of C Newman of Strowan, imply that the Government has been overly generous, that they are just handing out money willy nilly, bundles of notes to all these undeserving, unhoused people. Again, this is about as far from reality as C Newman of Strowan is. I hate to be a bore, and keep citing the same source, but in this case, the legislation does seem like an appropriate thing to take the time to read. Clause 19, Residential Land:

Subject to any regulations made under this Act and to Schedule 3, where a residential building is deemed to be insured under this Act against natural disaster damage, the residential land on which that building is situated shall, while that insurance of the residential building is in force, be deemed to be insured under this Act against natural disaster damage to the amount (exclusive of goods and services tax) which is the sum of, in the case of any particular damage,—

(a) the value, at the site of the damage, of—

(i) if there is a district plan operative in respect of the residential land, an area of land equal to the minimum area allowable under the district plan for land used for the same purpose that the residential land was being used at the time of the damage; or

(ii) an area of land of 4 000 square metres; or

(iii) the area of land that is actually lost or damaged—

whichever is the smallest; and

(b) the indemnity value of any property referred to in paragraphs (d) and (e) of the definition of the term residential land in section 2(1) that is lost or damaged.

Now, I know there are quite a few words there, and that C Newman of Strowan and others of that persuasion might have trouble getting through them all, so I will summarise it: EQC covers the land under a house. You say “generous”, I say “obligation as defined by law”**. So all this shit about the government being generous, or too generous, is some of the most offensive crap I have ever heard. Ever since the 4th of September, we have been waiting for a land package. We knew that the EQC would pay for land. That’s why we were waiting for a land package. Then, somewhere around the time of the June 13th aftershocks, people seem to have forgotten about this. Then, Generous John Key strolls in to town, offers to buy people’s land, doesn’t bother to remind people that the government was always going to buy the land, and people think he’s the most charitable guy since Allan Hubbard. The Government – whether intentionally or not – has used the word “generous” with regards to their clearly flawed land package offer so frequently that it has now become attached. It’s either very smart, or very cynical, to successfully rebrand your obligations as generosity.

I’m not going to go into all the ways that the package is anything but generous right here – I’m getting angry enough to write another blog about that soon. Suffice it to say that contrary to what C Newman of Strowan thinks, this package will see a large number of people – people from some of our poorest and most vulnerable areas – struggling to re-house themselves in Christchurch. The sad fact of the government response is that the good, hardworking people of the East may end up having to move out of Christchurch, leaving us with a city over-represented by detestable cunts like C Newman of Strowan.

* Halfway through writing this, I realised that C Newman could actually be a woman. I guess I just assumed that someone with such misguided, hateful thoughts could only be an aging, spite-filled man who has little to look forward to in life but the thrill he gets from yelling at his neighbour’s yappy novelty dog. I guess that I have encountered fewer female hard-right nutters in my times. I could be wrong on this.

** I guess you could argue that the legislation doesn’t explicitly state that the EQC will “buy” the land, but it clearly states that the EQC will pay for the cost of it.