State housing is a system of public housing in New Zealand, offering low-cost rental housing to residents on low to moderate incomes. Some 69,000 state houses are managed by Kāinga Ora – Homes and Communities, most of which are owned by the Crown. In excess of 31,000 former state houses exist, which are now privately owned after large-scale sell-offs during recent decades. Since 2014, state housing has been part of a wider social housing system, which also includes privately owned low-cost housing.
An archetypal 1930s and 1940s state house is a detached two- or three-bedroom cottage-style house, with weatherboard or brick veneer cladding, a steep hipped tile roof, and multi-paned timber casement windows. Thousands of these houses were built across New Zealand as state housing, and as private housing after World War II, when the Government started selling their drawings and plans in an attempt to hasten housing construction. These houses, also known as "ex-state houses" to distinguish them from modern state housing, have a reputation of being well-built and are very sought after by real estate buyers, especially after the leaky homes crisis of the 1990s and 2000s hit buyer confidence in newer stock.
History
The Liberal Government Urban working-class housing in New Zealand in the 19th century was of poor quality, with overcrowding, flimsy construction, little public space, often-polluted water, and lack of facilities for disposal of rubbish or effluent. Local bodies were not interested in enforcing existing regulations, such as minimum street widths, which might have improved housing, or in prosecuting slum landlords.
The Liberal Government, first elected in 1890, believed that the slums would cease to be a problem as workers moved to the country to become farmers or small town merchants. Instead, the cities continued to grow. A parallel idea of making Government-owned land on the outskirts of cities available for workers to create smallholdings failed to gain traction because the cheap commuter trains which might have transported them to their workplaces were not established, and the Government did not provide loans for building or allow the purchase of freehold land in the areas.
Prime Minister Richard Seddon introduced the Workers' Dwelling Act in 1905 to provide well-built suburban houses for workers who earned less than £156 per annum. He argued that these houses would prevent the decline of living standards in New Zealand and increase the money available to workers without increasing the costs to employers. By breaking private landlords' control over rental housing, housing costs for everyone would decline. The bill passed by 64 votes to 2, despite criticism over the cost of the scheme, the distance the houses would be from workplaces, particularly ports, and the lack of provision for Māori. Seddon estimated that 5,000 houses would be built under the scheme.
The Act allowed for workers to rent weekly, lease for 50 years with a right of renewal, or lease with the right to buy over a period ranging between 25 and 41 years. In practice, the Government did not initially advertise the weekly rental but emphasised the lease with the right to buy. The Act specified that workers could be male or female, but women were discouraged from applying for the houses because the Government was concerned that "houses of ill-repute" might be established.
The standard of materials and construction was high because the Government was determined that the houses would not become slums. The Act specified that the rent was to be 5% per annum of the capital cost of the house and land, together with insurance and rates. The initial specification was that houses should cost no more than £300, but this was raised to £350–400, depending on construction materials, by the 1905 Amendment Act. This resulted in weekly rents ranging between 10s 6d and 12s 7d. All the houses had five rooms—a living room, a kitchen/dining room, and three bedrooms—as well as a bathroom. This allowed boys and girls to be given separate bedrooms from each other. Some houses were built of wood, some of concrete, and some of brick.
Twenty-five houses were built in the Heretaunga Settlement at Petone in 1906, with another nine built later. Seven different designs by New Zealand architects were used to avoid the feeling of a "workers' barrarcks". Some were single-storeyed and some were two-storeyed. Initially only four applications were received to lease them. Workers could reach Wellington with a 20-minute walk followed by a 30-minute train ride, but the train cost another two shillings a week. This left a family no better off than continuing to rent in Wellington. The Government was forced to allow weekly tenancies and to raise the maximum income level to attract families to the houses. Other settlements such as the one in Belleknowes, Dunedin, also had trouble finding renters. Houses built in the central suburbs, such as the eight in Newtown and twelve in Sydenham, attracted tenants much more readily.
After Seddon's death in 1906, the Government Advances to Workers Act allowed urban landowners to borrow up to £450 from the Government at low interest rates to build their own houses. This proved much more popular than the state housing system. A total of only 126 houses were built under the Workers' Dwellings Act by 1910. A replacement Workers' Dwelling Act in that year allowed landless urban workers to build a house on a deposit of just £10. While it still allowed for workers to rent or lease their homes from the Government, applicants who were willing to buy were favoured. The state houses were sold by the Reform Government from 1912 onwards.
The First Labour Government At the time it was elected in 1935, the First Labour Government had no plans to introduce state housing. It nationalised the Mortgage Corporation set up in 1935 by the Coalition Government to provide low-interest housing loans.
Following a campaign against slums by the newspaper New Zealand Truth, and the realisation that lending for mortgages was not effective to provide housing to replace them, the Finance Minister Walter Nash announced in the 1936 Budget that 5000 state houses would be built. The houses would be provided by private enterprise, with a Department of Housing Construction set up to oversee the building and the State Advances Corporation to manage the houses. The Government intended not only to provide housing, but to stimulate jobs and manufacturing with the construction of the houses, which were to be built from New Zealand materials as far as possible.
MP John A. Lee was responsible for the programme (and for the use of cheap Reserve Bank 1% credit), but as he was an undersecretary rather than a minister he had limited authority. Sir James Fletcher of Fletcher Construction was a major participant.
The houses were built in the suburbs, not in the inner cities where the slums were. This was in part because the cost of building in the inner cities was higher, and in part, because the Government believed that children were better raised in suburban sections rather than on the streets. The urban poor also were largely unable to afford the rents for the new state houses. The Government favoured married couples with at least one child as tenants to encourage an increase in the birth rate. Māori were excluded, in part because they could not afford the rentals, but also because Government ministers believed the races should be kept apart.
Almost all of the state houses built by the Labour Government were detached, with some land on which vegetables could be grown and perhaps a few animals kept. A few were semi-detached, with two or four houses sharing a section. Only about 1.5% of the 30,000 houses constructed by 31 March 1949 were in blocks of flats, all of them in Auckland or the greater Wellington area. The first to be built were the low rise family flats in the Wellington suburb of Berhampore and the largest block was the ten-storey Dixon Street Flats in central Wellington containing 115 one-bedroomed flats for couples and single people.
The first of the new state houses was completed at 12 Fife Lane in Miramar, Wellington, in 1937. The Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage and several cabinet ministers carried furniture into the house and handed the keys to the tenants. For the opening of the first state house in each major city, a group of cabinet ministers repeated this ceremony. The first tenants, David and Mary McGregor, paid £1 10s 3d ($3.03) rent for 12 Fife Lane, about one-third of their £4 7s 9d ($8.78) weekly income.
The waiting list for state houses was 10,000 in February 1939. House building could not keep up with the demand and almost stopped in 1942 as resources were reallocated to meet the needs of the war effort. Although construction resumed in 1944, by the time the war ended in August 1945 the waiting list had grown to 30,000. The Government set up transit camps to provide interim accommodation for families waiting for state houses. Priority went to returned soldiers.
In 1944, the Department of Native Affairs produced a report on the poor housing conditions of Māori in the Auckland suburb of Panmure. This and similar reports caused a change of policy; the Government would now build state houses for Māori, to be jointly managed by the State Advances Corporation and the Department of Maori Affairs, which had been renamed in the interim. The new policy was to intersperse Māori and Pākehā (New Zealanders of European ancestry) households ("pepper-potting"), so that Māori could "adjust themselves ... to the pakeha way of living". A rare exception to the interspersal policy was in Waiwhetu in Lower Hutt, where state houses were built around a central marae.
Although the National Party had opposed state housing in the 1938 election campaign, suggesting that it was a step towards the nationalisation of private property, in 1949 it promised to continue building state houses but also to allow tenants to buy them. Most people wanted to own their own homes, and this policy helped National win the election.
1930s and 1940s state house design
The state houses were constructed using over 400 designs so that no two houses in a given area were identical. They were small by today's standards – the typical floor area was for a two-bedroom house and for a three-bedroom house. The houses had timber frames and floors supported by piles and a perimeter wall. Exterior cladding was typically timber weatherboard, brick veneer, or asbestos-cement sheets or shingles. Roofs were typically hip or gable with a steep pitch (30 degrees), and were clad with concrete or clay tiles, or asbestos-cement sheets. Windows on state houses were of the timber casement type, with three panes vertically in larger windows and two panes in smaller windows.
The living room was considered the social and recreational hub of the house; it was the largest room and faced north to catch the most possible sun. The kitchen faced east to catch the morning sun, while bedrooms faced either east, north or west to catch sun for part of the day. Where possible, the private zones of the bedrooms, bathroom and laundry were on a different side of the house from the public zones of the kitchen and living room. Often the kitchen, laundry, bathroom and toilet were grouped together to reduce plumbing costs. The first state houses had the dining area in the living room; after initial feedback from tenants, the dining area was moved to the kitchen. Although the original plans included space for a garage, this was not included in the houses that were built, but a tool shed was provided to encourage tenants to grow a vegetable garden. On sloping sites, the tool shed and the laundry were typically placed underneath the house.