Porirua Pasifika housing project welcomes first homeowners
Thursday, 11 December 2025
Viena Paongo was stressed but excited at the same time.
The hospital nurse is picking up the keys to their newly built four-bedroom house in Cannons Creek before moving in with her husband Manu, 3-year-old son and mother-in-law from the state house in Waitangirua they were living in.
“The insulation is not as great as a new build,” she said of the three-bedroom house her family is vacating. “It’s mouldy, it’s damp, it’s cold.”
Throughout this week, 17 other families joined the Paongos in packing up their lives and moving into their new homes at a contemporary re-imagination of a Pasifika village in Porirua’s eastern suburbs.
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The houses, with solar panels and skylights on their high roofs, are designed to accommodate multi-generational living, circling and orientating inwards to a centrally placed fale and malae (community green space). Mirroring a village back at the Pacific Islands, a council of chiefs settle village matters.
Before Pacific Peoples Minister Dr Shane Reti officially opened the houses on Tuesday, the new residents already began organising how to run things in the village: some volunteered to mow the communal lawns at a dinner to get to know each other; Paongo wanted to use her professional knowledge to give children a healthier future.
Armed with $115 million from the Ministry of Pacific Peoples in the 2022 Budget, the Central Pacific Collective (CPC) set out last year to build what will be 300 affordable homes to sell to Porirua’s Pasifika families under the Our Whare Our Fale umbrella, on land leased from iwi Ngāti Toa Rangatira where 55 now-demolished state houses once stood.
It wanted to push back the tide of sobering housing statistics in Cannons Creek, where 70% of residents don’t own their own home, and create a ripple of improved health, education and employment for Pacific peoples, who make up 60% of the suburb.
The two-to-four bedroom houses could have fetched from $620,000 to almost $900,000 on the open market. The CPC priced them from $498,000 to $750,000, even offering an equity scheme where it would own 40% of the house, meaning some families could own a brand new, four-bedroom home for as little as $450,000.
More than 500 families expressed interest in buying one of the homes. Of the 100 that signed agreements that officially fired the starting gun, the CPC assesses the likeliness of them getting a mortgage. They devise a tailored ‘capability plan’ for those unlikely to get a mortgage in the following 12 months to get their finances into shape and push the chances of getting pre-approval.
If there are more mortgage-ready families than available houses, those with needs or stronger local connections get offered one first, depending on how long they have been with the project.
Like other Pacific families, Paongo and her husband wanted to have more children but they couldn’t afford a house big enough to make it happen on one income.
“We already know how it’s like to go alone to the market and buy your own house. For a Pacific family, you can’t have it all.”
Erin Millar’s family has moved four times in the last eight years and owning a home was a “life-changing” moment, she said. She had never believed buying a home was possible.
These were people who would not have been able to buy a home in their lifetime, said the CPC’s chief executive Fa’amatua’inu Tino Pereira, Our Whare Our Fale’s mastermind. “That's what we're going after, because if those people can, then it lifts their situation, both socially, culturally and economically.”
And in another triumph for the project, the first stage finished three months ahead of schedule and under-budget.
The secret, said Pereira, was scrutinising the costs and going directly to the suppliers. “We are very good managers of taxpayers’ money. We use every amenity to make sure our costs are done.”
As Paongo, Millar and their new neighbours move in, accompanied with music on full blast from a loudspeaker, workers from a Pasifika-owned construction company broke out the shovels again to build 32 new houses in two nearby stages by the end of next year.
The village was more than building houses, Pereira said. “This is creating a living environment where people will flourish because of the designs that are driven by the values and the culture that we have created.
“We have created a space where we’re re-imagining a village.”