280-apartment social housing complex for central Auckland, 80 units to go on open market

Tuesday, 10 July 2018

Tenants told low-income housing apartments will be demolished and replaced

Hundreds of social housing units will go up in a new apartment development in Auckland, with 80 of those to be rented on the open market.

Minister of Housing and Urban development Phil Twyford announced on Tuesday that an 87-unit social housing block on Greys Avenue in the central city, dating back to the 1950s, will be replaced with three buildings containing a total of 280 units, with 1000 sq m of social services onsite and 2000 sq m of communal space.

Eighty units in the new complex would be rented on the open market, Twyford said.

Scott Foley, left, says the current Greys Avenue apartments were built for a very different New Zealand.

Residents of 139 Greys Avenue, the existing building which has housed low-income Aucklanders since 1957, were told on Monday that a decision had been made to demolish their apartment block and replace it with a new complex, Scott Foley of the Greys Ave project team, said.

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Tenants would start leaving the current building this month, with the last out by February 2019.

The building would be demolished next year and the first new tenants would arrive in 2021.

Security would be a a top priority at the new facility, Foley said.

A new 280-unit social housing apartment complex will be built on Greys Ave in central Auckland.

Residents at the new complex would be greeted by a concierge as they entered the building, partially to prevent unwanted 'tailgating' of residents, Foley said.

Social and health services on-site at the new complex would mean less time in a jail cell for some residents and less strain on public medical services.

The current 139 Greys Avenue apartment block.

Foley, who was a past building manager at the site, said the presence of mental health services would mean fewer call-outs for police.

Currently neighbours would often call police in the middle of the night for issues that would be better dealt with by mental health services.

Twyford entering the current Greys Ave apartment building.

'Suddenly five police cars are here taking someone into a remand prison.'

Twyford said renting 80 units from the new complex on the open market would avoid a situation where people of 'high needs' were secluded from the rest of society.

Twyford says 80 units from the building will be put out on the open market.

When it was first opened in the 1950s the current site at 139 Greys Avenue had no CCTV or fence around the ground floor, Foley said.

Foley said during the 1950s the building housed a lot of blue-collar families many of whom would be ineligible for social housing today.

Most of the rooms at the current Greys Ave apartments were built in a two-bedroom townhouse style, some with with two floors and around 80 sq m of floor space.

The new building would mostly have one-bedroom studio apartments, Foley said.

Foley said the current Greys Ave building was built for a New Zealand that didn't have the complex social problems or drug dependence issues the country had today.

'In the fifties you might have had the odd alcoholic, and people who were really unwell were institutionalised.

'Those people now live in our communities and it's really important that we look after them in our communities.'