Can this Pacific housing development turn the tide for poor health and education outcomes in Porirua?

Sunday, 3 November 2024

Fa’amatua’inu Tino Pereira has lived in Porirua all his life. He married, raised a family and today cares for his grandchildren among 44,000 Pasifika people living north of Wellington, from the Hutt Valley to Wairarapa.

And he’s watched as conditions and outcomes for his people have worsened. Poorer education, health and wealth than others in Wellington; than others nationwide.

A new report from the Salvation Army on the State of Pacific Peoples outlines how a third of Pasifika children live in material hardship – three times more than Pākehā kids. Just 35% of Pasifika families own their home, compared to a national rate of 66%.

But Pereira was never one to just watch. As chief executive of the Central Pacific Collective (CPC), a Wellington-based organisation, he’s been banging down the door of leaders and bureaucrats to do something about it.

“The poorest children between five and 12 live in Porirua. We have the highest rate of admissions for cardiovascular disease, the highest rate of admissions for skin disease, respiratory disease, dental disease. The evidence is overwhelming, this is a place you need to help,” he would tell them.

“The Government needs to provide some intervention.”

Many of the discussions happened during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Pereira remembers. It was stressful and at times felt impossible.

“I don't care who's in front of me, whether it's the prime minister, or the minister of finance or bureaucrats. I thought of the 70-year-old grandmother being released from hospital to her home in Porirua with no ablution facilities, so her kids have to go to the dump to find her a bath. Those are the things that motivated me.”

Meanwhile, down the road, Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Toa Rangatira, the iwi authority for Ngāti Toa Rangatira, was buying their land back from Kāinga Ora, following an agreement between the parties for the state to offer the iwi parcels of land for affordable housing at market value.

By October 2022, 70 lots in Cannons Creek were handed over, worth some $8 million but sold for $3m, and Ngāti Toa took those parcels over to CPC with an idea.

Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Toa chief executive Helmut Modlik says after nearly five years of strategic decisions to uplift their community from the housing crisis, his iwi has enough land for their own to build on, and that it was important to support their island iwi too.

“Our whakapapa linkages are ancient. Our coexistence in this land has been over our lifetimes,” Modlik says.

“We wanted to invite [CPC] to come under the korowai of Ngāti Toa and to explore together how we might ‘tighten our scrum’, as it were. I feel confident that we're doing what our old people would have wanted us to do.”

Once CPC and Ngāti Toa had their agreement in place, it was time to find money. Pereira and his team spent months negotiating and working with anyone who would help him to make a compelling pitch for government funds, and succeeded.

The October 2022 budget had a $115m appropriation under the Ministry of Pacific Peoples for Our Whare Our Fale, the project that on November 1 began being built in Porirua’s Cannons Creek.

By Christmas 2025, it is hoped 18 homes will be built with families living in them. In another nine years close to 300 more homes will be built in the area, along with community meeting-houses for neighbours to share.

“We're going to have our own village in the 21st century,” says Lealamanu’a Aiga Caroline Mareko.

Also a Porirua local, Mareko was on the CPC’s Community Advisory Group for the project, alongside her work as the community services senior lead for Whānau Manaaki Kindergartens.

Living together on the same street in large homes with enough bedrooms for multiple generations to live together doesn’t make a village, she explains.

Instead, Our Whare Our Fale developments will face each other, homes where connection comes first – requiring a rethink of the mailbox system, Pereira added – and where accessibility is a priority.

It will be the norm, not the exception, for each home to be accessible for the elderly, injured or disabled, with a bedroom and kitchen facilities downstairs and open-plan living that will hark back to island life.

“There's also a meeting space that families could use to gather in or if they have lots of family visiting, it’s another space they could spill out into,” she says.

“It’s a way to operate as either a collective or in separate groups, but also a place of safety where you can keep an eye on each other's homes.”

The village-style design isn’t limited to the layout, or the access to a shared community garden. The houses are a mix of four, three and two-bedroom homes with high roofs with skylights, where the roof becomes the walls on the upper floors, giving privacy to the bedrooms upstairs while looking like a traditional fale on the outside.

The first 18 homes are going up on Castor Crescent and Esk Place, within the larger Kāinga Ora development of about 150 new homes for state housing as well as private sales.

It’s also essential the 300 homes are affordable for Pasifika families in Porirua, Mareko says. CPC’s jobs and skills hub has been running a workshop preparing families to be financially ready for home ownership, which has become a natural first step for whānau looking to buy into the Our Whare Our Fale development.

CPC will also run a shared equity scheme to allow families to part-buy the homes when they move in, and buy the rest later.

Another key element keeping the costs down: the land isn’t part of the house sale. Held by Ngāti Toa and leased in perpetuity to the CPC and the housing development, the organisations can crack into getting housing available without the major price burden.

“We're not just building houses,” Pereira says.

“We are making sure we address health, education, through housing. If you build significantly well-designed warm, dry, efficient homes that are comfortable, that would address the number of our kids who are getting sick and going to the hospital.

“If they are sick, the parents stay home and the kids don't go to school. So what we are providing here is an antidote, addressing all of those disparities in a real significant way.”